INTERVIEW
A forbidden love that ended in drama. For one of his summer series,TheMonde looks back in six episodes on the Gabrielle Russier affair, a French teacher in the northern districts of Marseille, in her thirties and condemned for her love affair with one of her students, Christian, aged 17 years old at the time. Imprisoned several times, the young woman will end up committing suicide on September 1, 1969. Co-written by Joseph Beauregard and Pascale Robert-Diard, legal specialist since 2002, the investigation "The Gabrielle Russier affair, love outside the law " retraces the course of this news item which has become an emblematic affair.
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A symptomatic affair of the time
“Gabrielle Russier is going to be both the one who will live through the era and the one that the era will totally swallow up and stifle”, analyzes the journalist on Europe 1. “She is 30 years old, it's late. She was married , she is divorced, mother of twins. She lived the generation before and suddenly there comes this explosion of freedom [ May 1968, editor's note ], the leaden layer that Gaullism puts on society will explode and it will go through this, but she's not 18, she's not the age of insanity. " Gabrielle Russier was imprisoned several times, in December 1968 and then in the spring of 1969. But it was after the tragic outcome of this news item, her suicide, that the affair aroused media enthusiasm.
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The articles are enriched with photographs and testimonies, the fruit of a long research work by Joseph Beauregard, and studied at length during the period of confinement. Thanks to the mutual trust gained, the former students of Gabrielle Russier's class agreed to discuss the events of the time. “As in all the news items that have hit the headlines, witnesses are burned,” says Pascale Robert-Diard. "They went through something very violent. They went through 1968, they come into life, their teacher commits suicide and once she commits suicide it becomes a business."
"She is not pursued for loving"
During her trial in July 1969, Gabrielle Russier was sentenced to 12 months in prison, thus beneficiary of the amnesty law for sentences of less than one year of imprisonment. Particularly severe, the public prosecutor appealed and asked for a heavier sentence. "She is not prosecuted for having a story with a young man, because he is over 15 years old. It is not criminally reprehensible", recalls the journalist. "She is being prosecuted for kidnapping and misappropriation of a minor, which is the idea that she took him away from his parents since Christian Rossi no longer goes to sleep with his parents, and that she diverts him from schooling ... She is not pursued for loving. "
Available for Le Monde subscribers, this survey should be published by January at the editions of the Iconoclast. "It is both very well known this story by people who are over 50-60 years old but was not at all by the youngest who discovered it", rejoices Pascale Robert-Diard.