MICHEL FOUCAULT AND PEDOPHILIA: THE HOAX OF “TUNISIAN BOYS”

Translation of the article in French, entitled “Michel Foucault and pedophilia: investigation on a media hype”

Michel Foucault in May 1984 in Paris, shortly before his death.
M. BANCILHON/AFP

There is a “common knowledge” that one of the world’s greatest thinkers of the 20th Century Michel Foucault was a “pedophile” and “raped Tunisian boys” in 1969. The article in the French magazine L’Express investigates how this hoax was born and who is behind it.

L’EXPRESS, April 9, 2021

The essayist Guy Sorman accuses the philosopher of sexual abuse of young Tunisians. If the case has inflamed the international press, the elements are weak and inconsistent …
On March 28, the Sunday Times, a conservative British weekly, spoke of a “storm” in a calm Parisian intellectual milieu concerning the philosopher Michel Foucault. Three weeks earlier, on March 9, the liberal essayist Guy Sorman was invited to appear on the set of France 5 at the end of the evening. Promoting his book Mon dictionnaire du bullshit (Grasset), he evokes the figure of the “bastard” in literature: Céline, Paul Morand, and then goes on to talk about Michel Foucault: “What Foucault was doing with young children in Tunisia, which I saw […] does not lead me to reject Foucault’s work but to look at it in a different way. The journalist Karim Rissouli then rephrases what was said: “Foucault who was…