Abbé Pierre: Everyone to the shelters!

The priest Abbé Pierre, “French Maria Theresa”, has definitely fallen out of favor, and for good reason. Danny Trom, however, was keen to drive the point home, reminding us that the sexual impulse is not the only one that the Abbé’s well-ordered charity proved unable to control.

The numerous complaints of sexual assault knocked Abbé Pierre, “France’s favorite personality”, off his pedestal. His prestige lay in having made housing a matter of urgent humanitarian law. This apolitical militancy was able to win everyone’s support. Through him, the word of the church came to the fore, right and left alike. Vows of poverty and abstinence were the expression of genuine selflessness, the translation of a concern for the suffering of humanity here on earth. In practice, however, Abbé Pierre sometimes bartered his support for homeless women by orchestrating sexual blackmail. In his mind, the right to housing was not as unconditional as he would have us believe. Behind the “charity” lay sexual assault and rape. The public’s disappointment is understandable. The fact that he broke his vows and secretly had children prevented him from being canonized, all while keeping the French public’s adoration. Since the sexual impulse is irrepressible, all that’s needed is for it to be properly channeled, and forgiveness will follow. But with the recent revelations of violent acts, the knife of public opinion has wisely fallen. Is the same true of the antisemitic impulse, which Vatican II assured us was now repressible? Apparently not.

The cocktail of Christian anti-Judaism, Shoah denial and anti-Zionism that the Abbé distilled in the early 1990s was admissible. Of course, the two impulses and their effects are not of the same nature here, since the Abbé perpetrated his sexual crimes on people who were, moreover, vulnerable, whereas his indiscriminate antisemitic words were, as we say, “verbal”. And the antisemitic impulse, it was said, was conditional on senility. Above all, Abbé Pierre shamelessly concealed his opportunistic exploitation of the very misery he had declared his vocation to fight – here, vice still pays a vague tribute to virtue – while he publicly and candidly proclaimed his antisemitism. The scandal that erupted in 1996 when he publicly endorsed Roger Garaudy’s^[1] The Founding Myths of Modern Israel – an essay that set the standard for antisemitism in its most contemporary form – momentarily shook the Abbé’s prestige, but was powerless in toppling him from his pedestal. Of all the antisemitic versions of Garaudy’s long career – Christian, Communist, Muslim – Abbé Pierre’s preference was spontaneously for the first. Isn’t he a simple man whose only fuel is the Gospels and the sight of human suffering? Standing firm on these two pillars, Abbé Pierre, though little given to political analysis, denied the State of Israel’s right to exist in an interview with La Vie in 1991. Why was this? Conversations in preparation for a joint book with Bernard Kouchner reveal the details^[2], before the Abbé confessed them to us in bits and pieces on TV: this land was by no means promised to Moses; the Shoah is highly exaggerated, and if it was, it wasn’t that bad; and besides, wasn’t it Joshua who attacked the promised land and committed the first genocide in history? Whatever way you look at it, ancient or modern, Israel is condemned to opprobrium: refuting the link between the Jews and the promised land; refuting the need for a shelter, all the more so since the Jews are, he adds, doomed to dispersion as a means of atonement; criminalizing the existing shelter-state. Since the Gayssot Act^[3] is not designed to punish those who forgive Jews for having dramatized the Shoah, still less to censor an interpretation of the Gospels, the license granted by France’s most popular man to repeat his message raised protests that pushed him into a corner: he declared himself the victim of the “international Zionist lobby”. But the man in the beret has one thing in common: housing has always been at the heart of his concerns. Here too, the right to housing is not as unconditional as he would have us believe. To women desperate for shelter, Abbé Pierre sometimes imposed a criminal sexual barter. To Jews, he proposed emergency eviction. For them, the right to housing was unconditionally refused. On this point, France is divided. On this point, the Abbé’s legacy remains assured. Conclusion: the order of charity remains an unfathomable mystery.

Danny Trom