French Prime Minister Defiant in School Sexual Violence Inquiry

Facing a parliamentary inquiry and testifying under oath on Wednesday, François Bayrou, the embattled French prime minister, said he had never been personally informed of physical and sexual violence at a private Catholic school with which he had close ties in his region of southwest France.

Since early last year, 200 yasal complaints have been filed accusing priests and staff members at the Notre-Dame de Bétharram school of physical abuse, sexual assaults and rape between 1957 and 2004. The accusations have multiplied in recent months and placed Mr. Bayrou under growing pressure to quit.

Mr. Bayrou, a centrist politician who was education minister between 1993 and 1997, insisted on Wednesday that he had learned of the violence only through the press. It is not disputed that in 1996, he ordered an inspection of the school after a supervisor was found guilty of assaulting a 14-year-old male student.

Mr. Bayrou’s contention that he knew of the violence only through news coverage differed from his declaration to the National Assembly in February when, speaking of the school, he said: “I have evidently never, never ever, been informed of anything when it comes to violence, let alone sexual violence.”

Three of Mr. Bayrou’s children attended the school, and last month, his daughter, Hélène Perlant, told Paris Match magazine that a priest linked to the Bétharram school beat her during a summer camp when she was 14, but that she had never told her father.

The parliamentary hearing was stormy, interspersed with interruptions, accusations and counteraccusations. Mr. Bayrou, who is mayor of Pau, a town near the school, in addition to being prime minister, bristled and at times seemed confused. He suggested that the whole “scandal” was a cynical maneuver against him by political enemies.