InvestigationThis Catholic congregation, which had around forty establishments in France in the middle of the 20th century, has long prided itself on educating adolescent girls with “problems”. Several dozen of them, now elderly, denounce serious abuse and demand compensation.
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A cry, a long cry from afar, a cry from a past that Michelle-Marie Bodin-Bougelot wanted so much to bury. ” Nope ! Nope ! Don’t close this door! I hate closed doors. At my house, the doors are always open! » Even that of the bathroom, we have been warned. ” The low, she says in anger, everything was locked. » Over there, at the Bon Pasteur d’Orléans, this place of suffering where her adoptive mother placed her one day in 1959, at the age of 13. “Mom thought I was too wild. Back then, people whispered that this place was for sluts. But I hadn’t done anything…”
Since the death of her husband, Michelle-Marie, a short 1.48 meter woman with the temperament of Ma Dalton, has lived in the family home of Sainte-Thorette, in Berry. On the ground floor of this old renovated farmhouse, several doors have been removed, the others are blocked by a stone. On the long wooden table in the dining room, the former drawing teacher has placed a red binder on which it is written “prohibited file”. The file of ” the low “, as she always says. Photos, memories of a teenager thrown on squared paper after leaving Bon Pasteur, at the end of 1960. Michelle-Marie hid it in the back of a closet for fifty years, but now it faces her.
Casting director, Fabienne Bichet worked for a long time at Canal+ where she selected, among other things, the “miss weather”. This gentle 65-year-old woman talks fast and non-stop, perhaps because she had to be silent for too long.
She also lived « brutal » when, after a chaotic childhood, her mother entrusted her to the Bon Pasteur Sisters of Toulouse. She was 14 years old. Unlike Michelle-Marie Bodin-Bougelot, the phobia of confinement does not torment her, but, she says, smiling sadly, “There is something I can’t get rid of. I bump into table corners and get my clothes caught in doorknobs.”
Caning victims
Badly “lateralized” – that’s the medical term -, Fabienne Bichet is moving with fragility, a dark legacy of her years in Toulouse. She describes the “beating”, this collective punishment inflicted on the whole of a dormitory when no one denounced after a mistake. “We had to pull up our nightgowns, bare ass, and lie down on our bed. A sister held our arms, another knocked with a wand, and a third surveyed the room. Fifteen shots. At first, you bite the pillow, but after… Some, I remember, pissed on themselves. » Faced with this degrading violence, the young Fabienne developed a technique to ward off the pain: “I learned to dissociate my head from my body, but I never managed to bring the two together again. That’s why I still have difficulty navigating through space. »
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