Brilliant, luminous, free and borderless troubadour, Jacques Higelin took on life to the fullest. But the “singing madman” kept a heavy secret throughout his life, until his death on April 6, 2018. In the book Because silence always killshis biographer and confidante, Valérie Lehoux, recounts the sexual abuse of which the giant of French song was the victim for several years in his early adolescence.
Magnificently prefaced by Arthur H., the eldest son of Jacques Higelin, the work is written in a tone of confidence and reflection. Several passages in the book trace a number of recent cases of sexual crimes committed against young people, notably the account of Camille Kouchner, The big family (Threshold). The author also takes up the staggering figures published in March 2022 by the Independent Commission on Incest and Sexual Violence Against Children, which estimates that more than 160,000 the number of minors attacked each year in France.
Far from sensationalism, the specialist in French song atTelerama recounts with respect and finesse the childhood of Jacques Higelin in Chelles, his native village located in Seine-et-Marne, marked by the influence of “Bob the stuntman”, a big guy in his charismatic and seductive twenties who will take under his wing a young and frail boy in search of a surrogate father. “Mentor” before becoming his executioner, Bob was a close friend of his family. He died in prison years later after being convicted of a dark pedophilia case.
Valérie Lehoux had already co-signed the memoirs of Jacques Higelin in 2015, I don’t live my life, I dream it (Fayard). Together, they had depicted the exceptional destiny of a young flayed alive clinging to his dreams. Subtly, between two pages, the poet returned in a few shocking words to the horror experienced. “How can you rape a child? Those who suffer it feel dirty. And they even feel guilty. It’s crazy. I know it. I lived it. No need to epilogue “, he had then written without ambiguity, speaking of the rape.
The courageous revelations of the then 74-year-old artist, however, had very little effect at the time, going almost unnoticed, to the chagrin of the singer himself, who would have liked to shake people’s minds about the tragedy. sexual abuse. This was before the #MeToo movement, before the book came out The consent (Grasset), by Vanessa Springora, on the Matzneff affair, notes the journalist.
It was to somehow give a voice to the victims that Higelin would later ask Lehoux to come back to this sad episode in his life, but only posthumously. Here she is, therefore, keeping her promise by publishing, five years after the death of the singer, this book which finds an echo in the drama experienced by another famous French artist, Barbara, whom Jacques Higelin incidentally knew well. Because as the interpreter of The black Eagle — which will only evoke the incest of which she was the victim as a teenager after her death — the poet delivers from the top of his cloud a strong and poignant testimony.