#MeTooInceste: has France’s code of silence finally been broken?

Accusations of child abuse against Olivier Duhamel, now 70, ex-vice-president of Sciences Po university and of the secretive Siècle (Century) club of Parisian movers and shakers, have cast a dark shadow on the legacy of the soixante-huitards, the baby boomers who occupied the Sorbonne in 1968 and went on to rule (and ruin) France.

Duhamel’s disgrace is long delayed. Only now has his stepdaughter, Camille Kouchner, published a book accusing him of sexually abusing her twin brother 30 years ago — and doing so within a culture in which his fashionable friends knew about the abuse but kept quiet. It’s an accusation Duhamel characterises as a ‘personal attack’ but has not denied. A criminal complaint has now been made by his stepson.

The central character is Duhamel, but the supporting cast is vast. La familia grande (the extended family) is a book recording vile abuse and elite omertà. In writing it, Ms Kouchner wanted to make clear the level of complicity. ‘The microcosm of people in power, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, was informed,’ she writes. ‘Many people knew and most of them pretended nothing had happened.’ They stayed silent, she says, out of a feeling of ‘belonging to a certain world’.

That world was the Paris gauche caviar, the champagne socialists of the 1960s who by the 1980s had traded barricades for influential sinecures in administration, media and academia. Ms Kouchner describes a life of immense privilege, surrounded by nannies, maids and ministers. But at night, she wrote, her stepfather would assault her twin — then 14. What separates this from normal stories of domestic abuse is how little effort was made to conceal it.

At the enormous Duhamel villa on the Riviera, her stepfather presided over annual bacchanalia for the good and the great.