A state asks for forgiveness
Forty years of persecution, a late apology: France's parliament voted unanimously for compensation.
On 6 March 2024, French Justice Minister Éric Dupond-Moretti stepped up to the lectern in the National Assembly and did something many had been waiting for for decades. On behalf of the state, he asked forgiveness from the homosexuals who had suffered forty years of deeply unjust persecution.
Yet France had once been a pioneer. As early as 1791, the Revolution had abolished the criminalisation of same-sex love. It was the Vichy regime, which collaborated with the German occupiers, that in 1942 reintroduced a discriminatory age of consent for homosexual contact. After the liberation, the rule stayed in place. The last special provisions were only abolished in 1982 under François Mitterrand. Around ten thousand people, most of them men, were convicted during this period.
One of them is Michel Chomarat. He was arrested in a police raid on the Paris bar "Le Manhattan" in 1977 and later convicted. For almost fifty years he never accepted what had been done to him. When the news came from parliament, he was deeply moved.
The result surprised even activists. The members voted unanimously late in the evening. The bill, originally introduced by Socialist senator Hussein Bourgi, provided for a lump sum of ten thousand euros, plus one hundred and fifty euros for each day in custody. An independent commission was to examine the applications. The justice minister acknowledged, however, that after so much time many would hardly be able to prove their conviction. In any case, only a few hundred of those affected are likely to still be alive.
That was not the end of the matter. The Senate had agreed to recognise the injustice but balked at the money. A tough back and forth between the chambers followed. The gesture of March 2024 nevertheless remains remarkable: a state stated publicly that for decades it had punished people solely for their love.