Joel Le Scouarnec, 73, is accused of assaulting or raping 299 children – the majority former patients of his – between 1989 and 2014, mostly in Brittany.
He has admitted to some charges, but not all.
The trial in Vannes, north- west France, follows a painstaking police investigation lasting several years.
It is likely to raise uncomfortable questions over whether Le Scouarnec was protected by his colleagues and the management of the hospitals that employed him, despite an FBI warning to the French authorities that he had been consulting child abuse websites, after which he was given only a suspended sentence.
A staggering number of opportunities to stop the former surgeon from having contact with children appear to have been missed or rejected.
Members of his own family also knew of Le Scouarnec’s paedophilia but failed to stop him, it is claimed.
“It was the family’s omertà which meant his abuse was allowed to continue for decades,” one lawyer involved in the case told the BBC.
Le Scouarnec, once a respected small-town surgeon, has been in jail since 2017, when he was arrested on suspicion of raping his nieces, now in their 30s, as well as a six-year-old girl and a young patient. In 2020 he was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment.
After his arrest, police searched his home and found child-sized sex dolls, more than 300,000 child abuse images, and thousands of pages of meticulously compiled diaries in which Le Scouarnec is alleged to have logged assaults he carried out on his young patients over 25 years.
He has denied assaulting or raping children, arguing that his diaries merely detailed his “fantasies”.
In several instances, however, he had also written: “I am a paedophile”.
Le Scouarnec is facing more than 100 rape charges and more than 150 charges of sexual assault.
