Paris (AFP)

The former television host Bernard Pivot, accused of complacency with the writer Gabriel Matzneff, who never hid his sexual attraction for teenagers, spoke on Friday of another "era", drawing the wrath of many Internet users.

"In the 70s and 80s, literature came before morality; today, morality comes before literature. Morally, this is progress. We are more or less the intellectual and moral products of a country and, above all, of an era, "wrote the former president of the Goncourt Academy on Twitter, where he has more than a million subscribers.

The release next Thursday of "Consent", shocking testimony from the editor Vanessa Springora, one of the teenagers seduced by Matzneff, is shaking up the literary world.

On social networks, a video is widely shared where Bernard Pivot interrogates the writer in a playful tone in March 1990, in his program "Apostrophes". "Why did you specialize in high school girls and girls?" He asks the man who has never made a secret of his attraction and his romantic and sexual relationships with "under 16s".

The sequence, redacted by Ina and accused of being complacent, has been seen almost 400,000 times since it was posted. She left a lasting impression thanks to the intervention of the Canadian writer Denise Bombardier, the only one to react. She judges that Gabriel Matzneff would have "accounts to justice" if he did not have "a literary aura".

"I would not have been able to look at myself in the mirror if I had not said anything," she remembered on Friday at the microphone of Europe 1. This intervention earned her "2,000 letters from French to support me" but also "insulting letters," she said.

- No mea culpa -

Vanessa Springora says in her book that she started a relationship, under the influence, with the writer at the age of 14 in the mid-1980s. He was then almost fifty years old and multiplied relationships with young girls and boys, sometimes in the framework of sex tourism in Asia.

The response of Bernard Pivot invoking another "era" Friday sparked a torrent of indignant reactions.

"You have been complacent towards a pedophile criminal. You have expressed no disgust, no indignation, no empathy towards the victims. You have used the term" pups "to speak of them, to disparage them, ridicule them, disqualify them ", called out in a press release the feminist collective #NousToutes.

"No matter how hard I look, I still don't understand how the fact of no longer tolerating that a perverse dandy of 40 or 50 years old puts his cock in the mouth of a 13 year old child or exploits little boys in Asia of the Southeast is a threat to literary creation ... ", said the essayist and politician Raphaël Glucksman.

Speaking to Bernard Pivot, the director Andréa Bescond ("Les Chatouilles", a film about pedophile crime inspired by his childhood), judged that he should have done his "mea culpa". "Perhaps you wanted to say: + In the 70s and 80s, literature came before law and crime, it was time for that to change, we were passive accomplices, without any moral, we were the products of 'a sad time, we should have reacted, mea culpa + ".

Solicited Thursday through its editor, Gabriel Matzneff did not wish to respond to AFP about the book by Vanessa Springora. In a message to the Obs, he expressed his "sadness" about a "hostile, mean, disparaging work".

© 2019 AFP