2. French Opera

In the years following the 2017 #MeToo movement, the French classical music world has experienced a huge social media increase of testimonies and discussions related to gender-based violence. In August 2020, a storm broke over the professional world of opera: French soprano Chloé Briot announced in La Lettre du Musicien that she had lodged a complaint against a fellow singer, whom she accused of sexually assaulting her on stage during a performance of The Flood, declaring that she wanted to ‘put an end to the law of silence’. The information was immediately relayed and discussed in various media outlets, as evidenced by Clément Buzalka’s lengthy column on the France Musique radio website dated August 21, 2020. At the time no other victim had publicly denounced any wrongdoing, but in private conversations it was a hot topic. Although the complaint was dismissed on September 19, 2022, it did raise a number of questions. Are sexual assaults commonplace in the opera world? Are they symptomatic of a wider sexist pattern in this profession? Can we really speak of a “law of silence”? If so, what are the risks for those who report sexual violence and/or sexist acts? Is the world of opera one that is conducive to gender-based violence against female opera singers? Those questions were at the basis of a study conducted in France in 2020 by means of questionnaires and qualitative interviews. This chapter examines the social conditions that produced the different forms of gender-based violence reported by the study’s research participants and identifies the structural foundations underpinning both the ubiquitous nature of gender-based violence and the underreporting of these acts in the French operatic world.