He’s lost nothing of his rage
The organisers of a music festival in northern France have defied pressure to cancel a performance by a once-idolised French musician who has served a jail term for beating his girlfriend to death.
More than 65,000 people have signed a petition demanding that Bertrand Cantat, former frontman of Noir Desir, be removed from the programme of the Papillons de Nuit festival, which takes place in May in the Normandy town of Saint-Laurent-de-Cuves.
“By putting Bertrand Cantat in the spotlight you are normalising violence against women and even condoning it,” claims the petition on the Change.org website, started by a “citizen feminist”.
The organisers of the festival, which drew 68,000 rock fans in 2017, have rejected the call, saying in a statement: “We consider that our only criteria should be artistic.”
Because art exists in a sealed-off vacuum and has no impact on the larger world, is that it? But the problem there is, it doesn’t.
In a profile on the festival website, Cantat, 53, is described as “having lost nothing of his brooding nature, rage and critical thinking”.
The brooding nature and rage of a guy who beat a woman to death, and the critical thinking that failed to clue him in that he shouldn’t do that.
Cantat, whose group enjoyed cult status in France in the 1990s, killed Marie Trintignant in a hotel room while on tour in Lithuania in 2003. Trintignant, an actor, died following severe brain damage after Cantat beat her during a fight.
The killing sent shockwaves through France, where Cantat was known as a champion of social causes.
Oh well, she was only a woman.
How do you get max 15 years for beating someone to death? I mean, I’m all about reforming prisoners and making them productive members of society, but one would think that murder is a pretty big deal…
“They’re gonna put me in the movies
they’re gonna make a big star out of me.
And all I gotta do is
act naturally.”
@BKiSA:
It’s even worse than that. He was sentenced to 8 years, and was released after 4 years. I guess if you’re a star, they let you do it – grab ’em, kill ’em….
I see Cantat is also implicated in the death (by suicide) of his next wife. She alleged that he was mentally torturing her, although one of her former boyfriends alleges that Cantat was also physically assaulting her.
When you read two or three articles about him, it’s easy to form the view that he is a deeply unpleasant person with an immature outlook on relationships, a sense of entitlement and poor anger control. Not the sort of person you want in a relationship with a friend and not the sort of person I’d pay money to watch perform.
Rrr – I have now been singing that song all evening. Thanks.
It’s a good thing my husband likes that song, and that he doesn’t mind that I’m an awful singer. ;-)
“Brooding and rage”, probably.
“Critical thinking”? Wait, what did you say? It’s never past a very low threshold of immature confuse thinking with very far stretched images standing in place of reasoning.
Yeah, France has a very enlightened penal systeme.
@John P, #7.
Maybe that’s because both the jail time and penal deal actually happened in Ukraine (the country where the murder of Marie Trintignant took place) and not in France, and that the whole affair involved complex diplomacy issues.
She died in Vilnius in Lithuania. Lithuania borders on The Baltic Sea, whereas Ukraine borders on The Black. Lithuanian law calls for 8 years for involuntary manslaughter. However, he did his sentence in France. According to French law you can be released after having served half your sentence. After learning he’d be released feminists in France and elswhere had petioned Sarkhozy and officials to keep him behind bars. The French nontheless CHOSE to release him…such is their compassion.
So if you’re going to ‘off’ your partner, take out French citizenship, I guess, and then do the deed in Vilnius.