Was Michel Foucault a pedophile?
A shocking accusation against the famed scholar
In 1984, Michel Foucault died, and over the next decades became the most cited scholar in history. His ideas on sexuality re-shaped the world.
His sex life has been a subject of great scholarly fascination, as one finds his admirers, for example, detailing his dabbling in S&M in the 1970s—discussed as a bold adventure in theory.
In 2021, Foucault’s sex life was again in focus, as he was recalled having sex with children. Fans had somehow lost interest.
Guy Sorman hadn’t told the story in a half-century.
In 2021, the prominent French intellectual mentioned it in passing in a book. The context was “cancel culture” and weighing the benefits of an intellectual’s life against his crimes or indiscretions.
Later the same year, Sorman again mentioned Foucault in an interview on France TV, also in the context of “cancel culture.” The facts were hazily presented and the accusation unclear. After name-checking a few other public figures well-known for bad behavior, he says:
“What Foucault was doing with young children in Tunisia, things I saw and I blame myself for not having denounced back then, does not lead me to reject Foucault’s work. I look at it differently. There is a lot of talk in the United States about ‘cancel culture’. No, culture must not be cancelled. It must be seen with a simultaneous double perspective. These are perfectly ignoble things…with young children. They were not white. They were not French. The question of consent did not even arise. These are things of extreme moral ugliness.” (trans. Mohamed-Dhia Hammami)
Not long after, French media was agonising over pedophilia in high places.
Amid charges against some prominent cultural figures, Sorman’s memory of Foucault was remembered by British right-wing media.
On March 28, 2021, the Sunday Times did a new interview with him, and pressed him to be more specific. So Sormon speaks of visiting Tunisia in 1969, at age 24. Foucault was then 43. Sorman narrates:
“The young children were running after Foucault to say what about me? Take me, take me. They were 8, 9, 10 years old. Foucault was throwing money at them and would say, ‘let’s meet at 10 p.m. at the usual place.’ He would make love there on the gravestones with young boys.”
Sorman clarified this was Arab boys, and adds:
“There were journalists present on that trip, there were many witnesses, but nobody did stories like that in those days. Foucault was the philosopher king. He’s like our god in France’.”
Why had he waited to discuss this matter? He says:
“France is still not a democracy. We had the Revolution, proclaimed a republic but there’s still an aristocracy. It’s the intelligentsia, and it has had a special status. Anything goes.”
But he thinks, now, “the world is suddenly changing.”
Foucault had no problem with sex between adults and juveniles as young as 13.
That was clear from his own public statements. In 1977, he signed a petition saying the age of consent should be lowered to 13.
But Foucault having sex with children much younger than that was another matter. Sorman’s account did seem to have problems.
The usual date given for Foucault having left Tunisia is September 1968, which was before Sorman’s visit. It seemed Sorman claimed to see Foucault when he wasn’t even there.
Foucault’s partner, Daniel Defert, had been with him in Tunisia at the time. Still living, he’d might’ve been expected to step forward and clarify the matter, but he remained silent.
I noticed a man on Twitter observing that per Defert’s published diary, Foucault had returned to Tunisia in July 1969.
Foucault was teaching at the University of Tunis.
That was his overt reason for being in the country. A 1967 interview finds him reflecting on his first visits:
“I met the Tunisian students, and it was love at first sight . . . What enchants me more than anything is their insatiable appetite for knowledge.”
One biography has Foucault exclaiming to a friend that he was fascinated by the homoeroticism of a Muslim culture. As Foucault put it: “They live among men. They are men and made for men, with the fleeting bedazzlement, the brief reward of women.”
He’d been scheduled to be at his post for three years. He left after two years. In a blog post in 2000, the well-known scholar Edward Said had mentioned that he had not understood the reason Foucault gave for leaving Tunisia — the anti-Israel riots.
Said added that a professor at the University of Tunis had told him a different account. He writes: “Foucault, she said, had been deported because of his homosexual activities with young students.”
Tunisia was a gay playground for Western gay men.
That might be important context when considering this matter. Tunisia had quite a reputation. In the early 20th century, the economist John Maynard Keynes encouraged friends to go there, as “bed and boy” were cheap.
Into the 1970s, travel agencies would advertise the “young, magnificent Tunisians” to Westerners.
In 1978, the Spartacus Gay Guide noted to potential sex tourists that boys of Tunisia only expected, in return, a T-shirt or socks. The guide urged men to “not to offer money . . . as this is one of the few areas in the world where money is not expected — let us try to keep it that way.”
Foucault biographies carefully avoid the subject.
That’s the impression I get as I look through them. A sexual problem is felt on the periphery of Foucault’s time in Tunisia, and left unexamined. A 1991 biography by Didier Eribon just has a few paragraphs on Foucault’s political activity in Tunisia, and notes:
“In the fall of 1968 Foucault was back in France. He kept his house in Sidi Bou Said, but he knew he was an undesirable in Tunisia.”
‘Undesirable’? More details seem warranted, but the matter is dropped.
James Miller’s 1993 biography, The Passion of Michel Foucault, had Foucault at the time smoking a lot of hashish and “indulging his appetite for pleasure.” Daniel Defert is quoted saying that Foucault at the time had:
“…an inner struggle, between a sharp temptation to sink into voluptuous delights and an apparent will to contain this temptation by converting it into a method of ascesis, or a conceptual exercise.”
That is, Foucault felt a sexual ‘temptation’ and wasn’t sure if he would do it, or just think about it.
The temptation is not identified. But there weren’t a lot of “vices” that Foucault and Defert didn’t discuss quite openly.
Scholars of Foucault have managed to avoid the subject of his sex life in Tunisia.
One should note that there are several focused studies of his time in the country (here or here), but his sex life doesn’t come up.
When Guy Sorman’s interview went viral, there wasn’t a lot of academic commentary. Rachel Hope Cleves, a historian of sex, did tweet that she found the charge credible.
“Go ahead and call out Foucault, but he wasn’t alone — this isn’t evidence of his unique monstrosity, but of a widespread culture of child prostitution that many admired folks once openly participated in.”
Western media was mostly ignoring it.
A writer for Al Jazeera notes that “none of the main newspapers in France, such as Le Monde and Libération, or even in Tunisia has reported on Sorman’s accusation.”
This writer finds it part of a “a long history of viewing the (neo)colonial subject as a disposable body…”
A French-language African news magazine, Jeune Afrique, sent a reporter around Sidi Bou Saïd, and came back with a report that seemed to dismiss the matter.
A local man was interviewed recalling that Foucault cruised for sex. The man said they’d be seen “in the thickets under the lighthouse next to the cemetery.” He recalled the Tunisian males involved as “age 17 or 18.”
Two months later, Daniel Defert issued a statement.
Or rather it was a statement with some other people, and not exactly a denial. The statement cites the Jeune Afrique article to suggest no proof had been found. The chronology of Sorman’s visit is questioned, as the accusation is dismissed as “implausible confabulations…”
I browse Twitter looking for commentary, and notice a young woman from Algiers posting about it.
Everyone knew, and denied it?
In Tunisia—and academia. 🔶
