AFP
François Beyloux told reporters that he can’t stand the fact that he is known to have been abused as a father.
French Prime Minister François Bailloux says he was revelation from his eldest daughter, saying that among the children abused at Roman Catholic schools, “I was stabbed in the heart as a father.”
Helen Perland, now 53, claims that the priest of Notre demem de Betalam beat her at summer camp when she was 14.
Details of the physical and sexual abuse that took place over decades in Besalam, the Pyrenees, have attracted attention to Bayrou, who was then a local MP and Minister of Education.
Bayrou, 73, denied the suggestion that he knew about abused students who allegedly suffered from the 1950s and 2010. He is expected to appear next month before a council investigation.
The boarding school is located at his base southwest, where he sent three children there.
Helene Perland was one of them, and in Saga’s latest twist she denounced the priest at the school that begged her at the age of 14.
However, she asserted that she had never spoken to her father about the incident that took place in the 1980s.
“I’ve been silent for 30 years. I’ve never mentioned anyone else,” she said in an interview with her weekly Paris match on Tuesday.
The priest told the magazine “grabbed me in the hair, dragged me across the floor in just a few meters, punching me and kicking me, especially in my stomach,” she told the magazine.
“I wet myself, stayed that way all night, rolled up wet in the bowls in my sleeping bag,” she added.
Explaining why she didn’t talk about the experience, she said:
Renamed Le Beau Rameau (The Beautiful Branch), Notre -Dame de Bétharram is an elementary and junior high school about 25km (15 miles) from Pau, which has been mayor since 2014.
The school is also located within Bayrou’s constituency, represented as MPs from the 1980s to the 2010s.
Many allegations of abuse committed by priests and staff that emerged in the 1990s.
However, a 1996 survey by the French Ministry of Education concluded that “Notre-Dame de Betalam is not a school where students are brutal.”
The former principal, who was accused of raping a 10-year-old student, was then released innocently.
The allegations continued to squeal until 2023, when a man attended school in the 1980s formed a Facebook group for alleged victims.
Around 200 complaints have been filed by the social media campaign. Almost half of them include allegations of sexual violence, including rape by two priests.
By February 2025, the scandal had reached a national proportion, and pressure on Bayrou’s already vulnerable prime minister was growing.
Three of his six children attended school, where his wife was a religious studies teacher. Additionally, Bayrou was the Minister of Education when the first reports of abuse emerged in the mid-1990s.
Gaizka Iroz/AFP
Alain Esquerre has set up a group for victims of abuse at school and has run a tireless campaign to reveal what happened
The judge who handled the rape case told Le Monde last year that he met with Belleux in 1998 and that politicians expressed concern about his son, a student at the school.
Bayrou disputes the account, claiming that he “didn’t hear of sexual violence at school at the time.”
In her interview, Helene Perland backs up her father’s version of events. “I put him on the same level as all my parents. The more you get involved, the less you see and the less you understand.”
On a visit to a prison in southeastern France on Wednesday, the prime minister said she had never told him about the incident.
“What we didn’t know, and the fact that such abuse happened, is hardly enough to bear to me,” he said.
However, he made it clear that “as a civil servant role that goes beyond my father’s role, it is the victim I consider.”
The centralist leader became prime minister from December. He leads a vulnerable minority government where left-wing parties and far-right unity can collapse in unconfident votes.
Hélène Perlant also gave her account to Alain Esquerre, who wrote a book about his tireless campaign to expose physical and sexual abuse at school.
Esquerre told AFP news agency it was a shame that her accounts became so prominent to the victims.
