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The director of France’s prestigious Sciences Po university has said he will step back “temporarily” from his role after being questioned by police over allegations of domestic violence made by his former partner.
Mathias Vicherat, who has headed Sciences Po since 2021, has denied wrongdoing in what he cast as a private matter. But the case sparked uproar amid students at the university, which has a checkered record when handling sexual scandals at the top.
Vicherat’s ex-partner Anissa Bonnefont, a documentary film maker, went to police on December 3 and filed a complaint that he had pushed her, according to Le Parisien newspaper. Vicherat soon after also went to police to report that she had slapped him. The two were questioned by police separately and released without charges.
While the alleged incident remains unclear, it touched off a wave of anger among Sciences Po students, with three student unions calling for Vicherat’s immediate resignation. Several hundred students held a sit-in last week, demanding protection for victims and describing Sciences Po as “a paradise of impunity”.
Vicherat, a former Danone executive and elite civil servant who was once a classmate of Emmanuel Macron, had sought to calm the crisis by holding meetings with professors and students.
But on Monday he announced in an email to staff and students that he had proposed to the FNSP, the school’s oversight body, to temporarily “withdraw from my functions” for a period and on terms to be decided by them.
“I contest having committed the acts of violence that have been reported by the press and on social networks,” he wrote, emphasising that no formal complaint had been filed or restraining orders issued after he and Bonnefont were heard by police.
Bonnefont wrote on Instagram that she was “shocked by the media frenzy” into her private life and that of Vicherat, adding that “the sadness of couples belongs to them and it is never all white on one side and all black on the other”.
This is not the first time that Science Po has been rocked by crisis.
Vicherat’s predecessor Frédéric Mion was forced to resigned in 2021 over his handling of incest allegations involving veteran professor and well-known political commentator Olivier Duhamel. That case came to light when Duhamel’s stepdaughter wrote a memoir alleging he sexually abused her twin brother.
The book shook Sciences Po and reverberated more widely because critics charged that many in the French intelligentsia and political elite had harboured suspicions about Duhamel’s conduct, but had kept quiet.
When he took over, Vicherat promised to overhaul Sciences Po’s rules and reporting systems with regard to sexual harassment and sexual assault to better protect students. It was reflection of how the #MeToo movement that began in 2017 in the US was slowly reaching France.
Inès Fontanelle, who heads the left-leaning Students Union at Sciences Po, said it was those promises meant that Vicherat had to be held to a higher standard.
“There used to be hopes among students that Vicherat would help change things, but trust has now broken down,” she told the Financial Times. “A change in leadership and an overhaul in governance are needed for Sciences Po to be known again for academic excellence and not for scandals.”
It will now fall to the Sciences Po oversight body FNSP to determine the length and terms of Vicherat’s suspension. The head of the FNSP Laurence Bertrand Dorléac said in an email to staff and students that she would consult with various groups and boards in coming days and communicate once decisions were made.
The French political and business elite follow what happens at Sciences Po closely because many of them are alumni or donors, and a revolving door policy means some have also taught there. Macron studied there, as did previous presidents François Hollande and Jacques Chirac and multiple prime ministers. The director of the school is named by presidential decree.
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