Catherine Deneuve joined 99 other prominent French women in a letter last week accusing the Hollywood anti-abuse campaign of censorship and intolerance. Agnès Poirier explains how the debate is viewed in Paris

French women made headlines all over the world last week. And not because they never get fat or their children never throw food, as a series of American bestsellers put it, but because 100 of them signed an open letter published in Le Monde offering an alternative view of the #MeToo campaign and drawing attention to what they regard as rampant censorship in feminist ranks. In signing the letter, the French film star Catherine Deneuve set the feminist world ablaze.

They spoke their mind in a Gallic manner: straightforwardly, to the point of appearing blunt. The letter was also strikingly badly edited, with clumsy chunks unworthy of their authors. But, in short, they think the campaign by the #MeToo movement to tackle sexual harassment represents a “puritanical … wave of purification”; that “rape is a crime, but trying to seduce someone, even persistently or cackhandedly, is not, nor is being gentlemanly a macho attack”.

They went on to proclaim that “what began as freeing women up to speak has today turned into the opposite – we intimidate people into speaking ‘correctly’, shout down those who don’t fall into line, and those women who refused to bend [to the new realities] are regarded as complicit and traitors”.

In other words, these 100 French women, representing many more in France, argue that this new puritanism reeks of Stalinism and its “thought police”, not of true democracy. What they refuse to countenance is an image of women “as poor little things, this Victorian idea that women are mere children who have to be protected”, the same one extolled by religious fundamentalists and reactionaries.

“As women, we do not recognise ourselves in this feminism, which beyond denouncing the abuse of power takes on a hatred of men and of sexuality.”

This is an example of what has always distinguished French feminism from the American and British versions: the attitude towards sex and towards men.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Abnousse Shalman, A French-Iranian writer says she does not dismiss the courage of #MeToo campaigners, but wants to ‘add a different voice’. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Partly lost in translation, the letter was vilified on social networks, its authors accused by some of being “lobotomised” by their “internalised misogyny” (according to Asia Argento), and more generally for being “rape apologists”, “too old and decrepit to understand women’s issues today”, for being “over-privileged”, for being “stuck in the 1960s and 1970s”.

Deneuve and Catherine Millet, the art critic famous for The Sexual Life of Catherine M, suddenly became the faces of what was seen by many younger feminists in France and abroad as a retrograde bunch of over-privileged celebrities and intellectuals both totally unconcerned by the plight of all those anonymous victims of rape and sexual harassment and too preoccupied by their sexual freedom and defending the French way of gallivanting about.

The letter’s authors did not do themselves any favours by writing of men’s “right to pester” women. This clumsy and unacceptable line poured more oil on the fire and reinforced prejudices and cliches about French women. As Simone de Beauvoir wrote in 1947: “American women have only contempt for French women always too happy to please their men and too accepting of their whims.”

This is a real shame: the letter puts forward strong arguments. And it does so by being overtly French; in other words, by sounding authoritative – and rude. Heated debate is a passion, considered healthy in France. As the highly regarded 89-year-old French historian and feminist Michelle Perrot, partly critical of the Deneuve letter, wrote: “They are triumphant free women who show a certain lack of solidarity with the #MeToo victims … But they say what they think, and many people share their point of view. The debate is real and must be recognised.”

In France today, different feminist groups coexist: the main one is a feminism following the steps of De Beauvoir, one that is not at war with men but rather with machismo culture, gender inequality and the inherent misogyny of religions.

And there is a rather recent American import of feminism, one that often comes across as opportunistic and “man-hating”, one that turns a blind eye to religious misogyny, for instance defending the wearing of the hijab. They present themselves as the new vanguard of French feminism, the new blood, except they can sound to some like Stalinist commissars, or Robespierre in culottes, passing edicts about what is acceptable conduct. We would be wrong, however, to think that the current debate shows a generational fight. Many millennials have signed the Deneuve letter. The divide is political, ideological even.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Michele Perrot, professor emeritus of contemporary history at the Paris Diderot University, aged 89. She fears a ‘new moral order’. Photograph: Ulf Andersen

According to Perrot, “the authors of the letter fear that the #MeToo movement dents creative, artistic and sexual freedom, that a moralist backlash comes and destroys what libertarian thinking has fought hard to obtain, that women’s bodies and sex become again this forbidden territory and that a new moral order introduces a new censorship against the free movement of desire”, and concludes: “There is indeed reason to share their fear.”

This is probably the most interesting and sharpest argument made in the Deneuve letter. As Sarah Chiche, a 41- year-old psychoanalyst and author who signed the Deneuve letter, explained: “The #MeToo victims’ personal stories have proved a powerful magnet and very popular with the public. It has almost become a new norm in public discourse. Unfortunately, this is becoming insidious: now books need to be rewritten, films reshot.”

Last week an opera director in Florence decided to change the end of Bizet’s Carmen so that Carmen now kills her murderer. Ridley Scott edited out Kevin Spacey from his latest film and reshot his scenes with Christopher Plummer in All the Money in the World. Art critics questioned on the BBC whether to boycott the Gauguin exhibition in London because the painter slept with under-age Tahitians. Others want to rewrite Sleeping Beauty so that the final kiss is a consented one.

Since Deneuve signed the letter, Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour has suddenly been described as a rape apologist film, to be banned from cinemas. “This new feminism is now serving the interests of cultural revisionism and doesn’t know when or where to stop,” says Chiche.

It is a French tradition to disturb, to question, to critique, to set ablaze the conflict between two freedoms, that which protects and that which disturbs. Sexuality has become the new battlefield. “Today, in 2018, Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses and Nabokov’s Lolita would never see daylight because of both reactionaries and self-proclaimed progressives who invoke the fate of real victims to shut us all up,” says Chiche.

For all the talk about Deneuve, little has been said of the initiator of this public letter. Her name is Abnousse Shalmani. She is a 41-year-old French-Iranian, born in Tehran. She grew up under Ayatollah Khomeini until her parents fled to Paris in 1985. In a book she published in 2014, Khomeini, Sade et Moi, she revealed that she was the victim of a rape, but also said French authors such as Colette, Victor Hugo and Marquis de Sade taught her how to be free, as a woman and a sexual being, far from the Islamic veil she was forced to wear as a girl in Tehran.

Perhaps we should listen to her when, amid the furore, she tried to make herself heard on French radio: “We do not dismiss the many women who had the courage to speak up against [Harvey] Weinstein. We do not dismiss either the legitimacy of their fight. We do, however, add our voice, a different voice, to the debate.”

One should always listen to the French difference.

Agnès Poirier is a London-based French writer and political commentator. Her forthcoming book Left Bank, Arts, Passion and the Rebirth of Paris 1940-1950 (Bloomsbury) is to be published in March