In 2018, France's Catholic bishops commissioned and financed an independent panel, the Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Church (CIASE), to examine clergy sexual abuse in the French church since 1950. Chaired by Jean-Marc Sauve, a former senior civil servant, and staffed by 21 unpaid members from law, medicine, history and other disciplines, the commission operated without church control over its findings. It released its final report in October 2021.
The report carries two distinct kinds of number, and keeping them separate matters. Direct testimony and church archive review identified 2,900 to 3,200 individuals who held positions in the church and were credibly identified as abusers between 1950 and 2020, a documented count in the same register as the John Jay Report's 4,392 or the Pennsylvania grand jury's 301. Separately, the commission worked with polling researchers to survey a representative national sample of more than 28,000 French adults and extrapolate a national victim estimate: 216,000 minors abused by clergy over the same 70 year period, rising to 330,000 if lay church employees are included.
That second figure is an estimate built from a population survey, not a count of identified victims, and this atlas records it as debated for that reason rather than folding it into the same certainty as the commission's direct findings. The distinction is the commission's own: it presented the two figures separately, on different evidentiary bases, and a reader comparing France's numbers to the United States' or Pennsylvania's should compare the documented counts to documented counts, not a survey extrapolation to a diocesan self-report.