• 05/06/2022
• By binternet
• 600 Views

Barbarin and France Télécom: the criminal court, the beating heart of society's debates<

In front of the Paris Criminal Court on Thursday 27 June, Noémie Louvradoux evokes his father, Rémy, an official of France Télécom who set himself on fire in front of his Mérignac (Gironde) agency on 26 April 2011. The young woman shares the name of each of the former directors of the company, sitting two metres from her: "they murdered my father. They killed our family life. And they said they didn't know. "

A few months earlier, in another criminal court, the same painful anger had been thrown in the face of the defendants. Alexandre, François, Laurent, Pierre-Emmanuel, Stéphane, Mathieu, Christian, Didier, aged 38 to 53, had come to deposit the long-buried secret that had destroyed their childhood. All had belonged to the Scout troop at Sainte-Foy-lès-Lyon (Rhône) and had been touched by chaplain Bernard Preynat. "I want the people of the Church to see me and see my suffering," said Christian to Cardinal Philippe Barbarin and to the representatives of the hierarchy of the Church who appeared before the Criminal Court of Lyon.

In both cases, there is a dizzying difference between the intensity of the suffering experienced and the offence of which the defendants are accused. Moral harassment set up as a management strategy at the France Télécom trial, non-denunciation of a crime or misdemeanour at the Barbarin trial. In both cases, those who are prosecuted in court are not the direct perpetrators of the harm inflicted on the victims. But from their hierarchical position-business leaders, ecclesial authority-they had the power to prevent this evil, at least to repair it.

The former CEO Didier Lombard and Cardinal Philippe Barbarin certainly did not wait to be referred before a court to appreciate the tragedies experienced for one, in his company, and for the other, in his Church. But the courtroom of the criminal court in Paris, like the one in Lyon, enabled something unique: their public confrontation. When the families or co-workers of France Télécom agents evoke on the stand the slow isolation, the loss of self-confidence, the distress, the fear of not achieving it, of those who have put an end to their lives, as when Bernard Preynat's victims tell about his invitations to the tent, his short breath, his breath that stinks of cigar, their shame and their distress, we do not only hear what they say, we watch the defendants listen to them. The scene of the trial is that: to see the words fall on those to whom they are addressed.

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