On July 18, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin banned the sale to minors of Bien trop petit, by Manu Causse, a book published more than a year ago in the “Ardeur” collection of Thierry Magnier editions and whose content was suddenly deemed “too explicit” by the Commission for the supervision and control of publications intended for children and adolescents.

For parents who have to fight, with little help from our political decision-makers, against the porn that invades their young children’s smartphones, this government zeal to ban a book clearly intended for those over 15, and which was in in addition, so far sold to 500 modest copies, has something, obviously, to make smile…

The writer Nicolas Mathieu, Prix Goncourt 2018 for Their children after them, and very active on social networks, responded to the ban on his Instagram account under the keyword

Barely three weeks later, thousands of texts accompanied by drawings, photos, have flourished following his on Instagram, evoking these erotic readings which, much better than YouPorn, have always accompanied the awakening to adolescent sexuality. Testimonies so numerous and so rich, that the publication of a collection is under study… Should he, too, be banned?

Le Point: Why did you react so strongly to the banning of Manu Causse’s book? Did the book seem harmless to you?

Nicolas Mathieu: I haven’t read it yet, but it’s a principled approach. I know the publisher Thierry Magnier well, who asked me two years ago to participate in his Ardeur project. This erotic collection is a way to accompany kids in their awakening to sexuality. The approach is educational, virtuous, these people are anything but dangerous pornographers!

And then, this ban is totally hypocritical… At 15, you’re no longer a child, and literature, adolescence and desire have everything to do with it. And then, if teenagers want to have access to this book, they can have it bought by an adult or find much worse in the library of their parents! At 15, I was reading Three Girls and Their Mother, by Pierre Louÿs, which is otherwise devastating… So this kind of ban is totally absurd.

Especially since teens are infused with porn sites…

But yes, in two clicks, all the pornography in the world is pouring onto your screens! And we tackle these kinds of texts? That we protect children from pornography, fine, but banning books that are precisely suited to an adolescent audience is not at all right… We all had, in adolescence, erotic, clandestine readings, which did not traumatize us, which are part of the process of separation from parents. Why is Darmanin poking his nose into this?

Is this symptomatic of the prudishness of our time?

I don’t know. But I believe that freedom of expression is a permanent conquest. As soon as you let go, order returns, freedom regresses, so you have to be in a combat dynamic.

How many posts under the keyword

No idea but I’m overwhelmed… Some post on their own account with this hashtag, others send me their anonymous testimonials in private and ask me to post them through my account, and the mass of texts is such that, for fear of lose it, I have just created an email address for people to send their stories directly to it… I will leave the keys to this email account, for a possible work that many are asking for, to Thierry Magnier and his team. What is springing up is incredible.

What do these texts say?

May literature emancipate and liberate! There are very beautiful messages, deep, sometimes even heartbreaking, I have reposted many of them… A young woman tells, for example, how she was abused in her childhood and later rebuilt herself, thanks to literature erotic. Another evokes the severe censorship that is rampant in her country and the way in which the forbidden books, which she managed to obtain as a teenager, helped her to conquer her freedom, to allow herself to live a sexuality outside marriage… A man still writes that overwhelmed by the discovery of his homosexuality in adolescence, it is the reading of Armistead Maupin that saved him, offering him models, light and funny, with which to identify. Erotic texts, when you’re a teenager, are for precisely that: to build yourself as an adult.