Why Macron and the French elite still worship Gérard Depardieu

Within the French film industry, opinion on Depardieu remains starkly divided, with plenty of support for Macron’s point of view. One petition published in the Right-wing Le Figaro, entitled “Don’t Erase Gérard Depardieu”, tried to denounce what it referred to as the actor’s “lynching”, and was signed by many of his friends and former associates, including the country’s first lady Carla Bruni, Charlotte Rampling, and Depardieu’s ex-wife, Carole Bouquet.

However, when it emerged that the originator of this text was a little-known actor called Yannis Ezziadi, who writes for an ultra-conservative magazine called Causeur and is reputedly close to Depardieu’s daughter Julie, several of the signatories distanced themselves from what they had put their names to – among these Bouquet, the film critic Serge Toubiana and filmmaker Jacques Weber.

Meanwhile, more than one counter-petition followed fast upon it. The most successful of these racked up 8,000 signatures, arguing that the Ezziadi text in support of Depardieu “spat in the face of his accusers”. Another petition entitled “Address to the Old World” gained traction from luminaries including Anouk Grinberg, the actress who not only co-starred with Depardieu in The Green Shutters and Merci La Vie (1981), but has a son with the latter film’s director Bertrand Blier, one of Depardieu’s most prominent collaborators and allies. Part of it read: “No one wants to erase the artist. But the talent of Gérard Depardieu does not permit the indignity of his behaviour.”

Grinberg has described how she and others on the set of The Green Shutters were “treated to his salacious nonsense from morning to night”, declaring to Agence France-Presse that “when film producers hire Depardieu on a film, they know they are hiring an aggressor”.