French media and some political opponents have cast aspersions on the appointment of new French Prime Minister Michel Barnier who, while serving in parliament in 1981, was among 155 lawmakers who voted against a law decriminalising homosexuality.
Back in 1981, the 30-year-old lawmaker, who took over from Gabriel Attal, France’s first openly gay prime minister. joined more than 150 conservatives in the National Assembly to vote against a law decriminalising young homosexuals.
Far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon was among the first to point out the new prime minister’s past stance on gay rights. “What is the meaning of such a message?” he asked.
In National Assembly archives, it was found that Barnier also voted in April 1980 against a step forward for gay rights after lawmakers were moving toward abolishing the laws that targeted homosexuals.
Régis Schlagdenhauffen, a researcher at Paris’s School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, said: “Perhaps Mr. Barnier has become wise.”
A key test, he says, will be whether Barnier facilitates the progress of a draft law, introduced in 2022, that aims to indemnify people punished for homosexuality from 1942 to 1982 and recognise the persecution they suffered.
“If he wants to show that things can be done differently, he’ll move ahead with this law,” the researcher said. “Otherwise, he’ll bury it
Although French Revolutionaries of 1789 abolished the crime of sodomy, French judges subsequently used public indecency laws to broadly punish tens of thousands of people for homosexuality in the 19th and 20th centuries, researchers say.
After France’s 1940 defeat by Germany in World War II, the Vichy government that collaborated with the country’s Nazi occupiers also introduced a law that specifically targeted homosexuality. With some adjustments, that law stayed on the books long after France’s liberation in 1944, all the way until 1982.
