Every once in a while, history is made by one ordinary person thrown into extraordinary circumstances. Some people, in extremis, discover themselves to be possessed of untapped reserves of fortitude, and the moral ambition to change things for good.
“All I have ever wanted is a conventional, quiet life,” writes Gisèle Pelicot in her recently published memoir A Hymn to Life. It wasn’t to be. The conventional life Gisele thought she was living up until five years ago — a wife, mother and grandmother living with her husband of four decades in a house with a swimming pool in the south of France — turned out to be a fiction — a flimsy stage built over a cesspit of degradation.
That fiction collapsed in November 2020, on the day a local police officer showed her images in which she appeared, drugged into unconsciousness by her husband, being raped by strange men he’d recruited through a forum online.
In that moment the self she recognised — the happily married woman at the centre of a close, functional family — collided with another self she didn’t know. It was her body, yes, but “transformed” through heavy sedation and abuse into “a piece of junk”, she writes, by the man she trusted most. It’s no surprise that she struggled to identify with the inanimate object she saw, stripped of all personhood, a thing to be used and abused by strange men — “A shell. A corpse. A doll made of flesh and blood.”
Last month, I interviewed Pelicot in London, during her world tour to promote her book. The evening before we met, she had been onstage at the Southbank Centre with Emma Thompson, Juliet Stephenson and Kristin Scott Thomas.
The most surprising thing about her was her effervescence, her lightness. Over ten years, she was subjected to unthinkable humiliation — a campaign of obliterating violence that demolished her life. One understands then, that her initial impulse, on discovering the truth, was to hide her face. But slowly, as her trial approached, she changed her mind, eventually deciding that her best hope to win back her dignity was to allow herself to be seen. The stakes, for her, were existential. “I will never be reduced to my tortured body. That is not where my soul is” she writes in her book. So she chose to repudiate the shame; to stare it down.
If the trial, and the eventual verdict in her favour was a first, crucial step in rebuilding herself from the ashes, of reanimating and restoring dignity to that limp body displayed as evidence in court, writing the book A Hymn To Life was a continuation of that process.
In it, she invites us to know her as a person, rather than a victim; her sensibilities, her subjectivity, the relationships and experiences which structure her inner life.
There are certain things, in particular, that she puts on the record with a kind of quiet vehemence. First, the fact she comes from a place of love — the child of parents who were warm, moral and kind. Second, the value system she adheres to. As a public figure, Gisèle Pelicot’s mission to “make shame change sides” is progressive by definition. But despite this, the personal message of redemption and hope which emerges from her book is firmly anchored in a traditional moral universe. She repeatedly refers to herself as a “modest woman.” She rejects, emphatically and repeatedly, sexual liberalism, even if that has sometimes made her seem unfashionable to her peers. “I recognised the condescending attitudes and smiles of those who revelled in excess — the heavy drinkers and the sex enthusiasts deemed to be bon vivants’ she writes. She has, we learn, a robust work ethic — career success comes easily to her, and she and her husband quickly established a “modern” approach to the division of labour in their home. And yet the small-c conservative institutions of family and marriage are the foundations on which her identity is built, even now, after all she has been through. “I love that word, family,” she writes. “It is the realm of my suffering and my healing.”
Pelicot’s traditionalism, her claim to propriety and to virtue, is not just a quirk. It is an essential, if overlooked, part of her identity as a public figure. It is the scaffolding that kept her upright over the last four years, and allowed her to face the abject humiliations of the Mazan trial with dignity.
In her book, these values are directly contrasted with the moral corruption of her abusers, and by extension, to the subcultures of libertinism and pornography from which they emerged.
That one ought not need to be a perfect victim to deserve justice goes without saying, of course. Unfair and unequal expectations of chastity or purity are still commonly leveraged in court to undermine female plaintiffs in cases of sexual violence, and to protect their aggressors from sanction. Gisèle Pelicot herself has denounced the punishing tests of virtue that she was subjected to during the trial. Plaintiffs, she later complained “are treated as guilty by default.”
But on the world stage beyond the courtroom, Gisèle Pelicot’s moral clarity is ennobling. She stands as a conscientious objector to the pornification of contemporary culture. Not only that, her position forces us to consider the possibility that it is a culture which degrades relations between men and women more generally, that it risks devolving into a wasteland of estrangement and alienation.
She has lived out the most gruesome end point of that culture, has been martyred to it — “sacrificed” she has said, “on an altar of vice.” It’s rare these days to hear the term vice applied to sexual behaviour — contemporary sexual mores reject notions of “sin” or “evil” in favour of the tenets of “consent” and “harm”. But Gisèle Pelicot doesn’t shy away from canonical language, despite her own secular worldview (she told British Vogue she doesn’t believe in God). In defiance of her attackers, she has doubled down on her own ethical framework for sexual relations — one that treats sex seriously, as something relationally and morally meaningful. Her beliefs are a form of resistance against the “culture of domination” she denounces in her book.
It is significant that in Hymn To Life, her own recovery is finalised when she finds love again. She writes touchingly, about how in the context of real intimacy, the damage of her past is erased — “all the images, all the abuse, all the numbers that were now public knowledge, they had no place in my bedroom…”
Sexual union with another person can be redemptive, then, when it is an expression of ardour and respect. There is a powerfully salient message here for her army of young acolytes — the men and women who have been raised on extreme pornography, whose preferences and expectations have been shaped by it; for the hetero fatalists navigating a culture of hook-ups and situationships, and despairing of the possibility of seeking authentic, mutual connection with the opposite sex. And for the generation of young women who, contemplating the contemporary dating landscape, hesitate between going “boy-sober” completely, or surrendering to the pull of online hustle culture, and trading their bodies as fungible assets on OnlyFans instead.
Justice was served in the Avignon Courtroom last year. But the force of Gisèle Pelicot’s personality carried the impact of the case much further. By the end of her book we almost feel sorry for her abusers, condemned to an existence of spiritual bankruptcy and relational poverty. It is they, ultimately, who are dehumanised and diminished by sexual violence.
“We wonder how a human being could be capable of doing that,” she said during her Newsnight interview last month, when Victoria Derbyshire asked her how she felt watching them defile her body on film. “Where is the pleasure?” She wonders. “To me they seemed to be animals, rather than human beings.”
