The Minister of Culture Franck Riester considered that the annual public allowance enjoyed by the writer Gabriel Matzneff, who is the subject of an investigation for rape of minors, was not "justified" and should not therefore not be renewed by the National Book Council (CNL).
"All of the facts reported lead me to consider that this allowance is not justified and should not have lasted," said the minister in a letter addressed to the president of CNL Vincent Monadé.
A committee set up this year
The 83-year-old writer, awarded the Renaudot Prize in 2013 despite the fact that in his works he praised sexual relations with minors, was implicated in a book by Vanessa Springora where she tells how she was seduced by the almost fifty-something author, when she was not even 14 years old.
The Minister hoped that a commission would be set up “this year” which would decide on the annual renewal of the CNL's annual allocation, with a view to “tighter control”.
The help of the controversy
Franck Riester will speak Tuesday on this social assistance granted to aging authors with low incomes. Fifteen writers aged 72 to 96 benefit from it, according to the CNL. Gabriel Matzneff would have received between 130,000 and 160,000 euros since 2002, according to the press.
The director of the weekly Le Point , in which Matzneff has been keeping an irregular column since 2013, announced this Sunday that the writer had decided to stop his collaboration.
“He wrote to us on December 8 to say that he was stopping. He was the one who decided it, he probably knew that Vanessa Springora's book was going to come out, so he sent us this letter, "he said on France Culture radio.
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- Minister of Culture
- Culture
- Gabriel Matzneff
- pedophilia
- Franck riester