Vanessa Springora, Gabriel Matzneff and the Problem of Consent

The publication of Vanessa Springora’s Le Consentement in January 2020, which led to the public shaming of the paedophile writer Gabriel Matzneff, has been seen as a key #MeToo moment in French culture. In her account of her adolescent relationship with Matzneff, Springora stops short of condemning all sex with minors and does not call for any strengthening of French laws around sexual consent. Does this imply a misplaced confidence, arguably shared by some strains of postfeminist thought, in young girls’ sexual agency and resolve? And is this, in turn, complicit with Matzneff’s own romanticized account of adolescent sexuality? I suggest, instead, that Springora frames her account in terms of consent precisely in order to suggest – as a number of feminist critics have recently done – the inadequacy of consent discourse as a means of protecting young women and girls within a patriarchal culture. Rather, Le Consentement stands as a redressing of the discursive balance within a literary and extra-literary system of representation that, for some six decades, worked to legitimize Matzneff’s compulsive desire for young girls and boys while disregarding the damage inflicted by the subjective experience of those young people.