The report includes gruesome accounts of violence and degrading punishments inflicted against students. It concludes that, for decades, “Bétharram was the setting for an onslaught of violence that cannot be reduced to isolated incidents.”
The scandal has dogged the prime minister since early in his tenure, dragging his polling ratings to historic lows.
“When people think of Bayrou, they don’t think about his actions as prime minister. They think about Bétharram,” Fréderic Dabi, the head of the polling institute Ifop, said last month.
An Ifop survey published last month found that 80 percent of French voters surveyed last month said they were unhappy with Bayrou’s performance — a figure the pollster described as a record.
The inquiry’s co-chairs, hard-left lawmaker Paul Vannier and centrist MP Violette Spillebout — a member of Bayrou’s own coalition — heard a total of 135 people during their probe.
They found that French schools “operate on a model that belongs to the past,” which overemphasizes “learning to submit to authority” and notes that the risk of violence is “accentuated” in Catholic schools, where there is “a tendency to manage matters internally.”