French bill seeks to compensate thousands jailed for homosexuality

A proposed law to compensate thousands of men who were convicted and imprisoned for the offence of homosexuality in France between 1942 and 1982 is being debated in the Senate.

Same-sex couples in France risked prison between 1942 and 1982, with convictions including “moral indecency” and “leading a minor to debauchery”. AFP - CHRISTOPHE ARCHAMBAULT

The bill, tabled in the upper house on Wednesday, aims to “correct a social error” and recognise the responsibility of the French state in its homophobic repression.

“We have enough perspective to be able to look at this painful and inglorious past, and to admit the mistakes that were made,” Socialist senator Hussein Bourgi, who drafted the bill, told FranceInfo radio.

Although France was the first country in the world to decriminalise homosexuality – in 1791 during the French Revolution – the policy of discrimination was reintroduced under the Nazi-allied Vichy regime.

Under the guise of protecting young people, the Vichy government in 1942 introduced a distinction between the age of consent for heterosexual and homosexual sex.

That age was set at 13 for heterosexual couples (though raised to 15 a few years later), while it was set at 21 for homosexuals.

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Decades of persecution

Same-sex couples risked prison until 1982, with convictions including “moral indecency” and “leading a minor to debauchery”.

Sociologist and historian Antoine Idier told the French news agency AFP: “Judges used a much broader criminal arsenal and all kinds of articles to repress homosexuality, even though they were not explicitly intended to do so.”

It is estimated that between 1942 and 1982, some 50,000 people were convicted for homosexual offences.

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Of those, 10,000 were targeted under under Article 331 of the Penal Code. They were almost exclusively men from the working class. A third of were married, widowed or divorced, while a quarter had children.

Ninety-three percent of the convictions carried a prison sentence.

According to research by sociologists Régis Schlagdenhauffen and Jérémie Gauthier, a further 50,000 people were convicted under a separate “public indecency” law that was incorporated into the Penal Code in 1960.

Both offences were punishable by six months to three years of imprisonment and several thousand francs in fines.

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Parliamentary battle

Those who were convicted were granted amnesty in 1981, erasing their criminal records.

The Socialists’ bill hopes to go further by enshrining France's responsibility in its policy of homosexual persecution.

It also creation the new offence of “negationism” for those who deny that people in France were deported because of their homosexuality.

However the bill has little chance of being adopted in its existing form given that France’s Senate, the upper house, is dominated by the rightwing Républicains party, whose members rejected same-sex marriage a decade ago.