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Few of us will forget the trial of Gisèle Pelicot’s husband, Dominique, in 2024. It was turning over the stone of civilised society and seeing unspeakable things. For at least a decade, Dominique Pelicot had drugged his wife of 50 years with sleeping pills and chemical relaxants so that he and men he met online could rape her — orally, vaginally and anally — as she lay like a dead woman. She was dressed grotesquely in the suspenders that she had refused to wear. There were 50 men on trial for participating in the rape; some 20 others could not be identified.
Gisele Pelicot
AFP via Getty Images
The reason why we remember the trial was not just the unthinkable crime; it was that Gisèle Pelicot had waived her right to anonymity. She had realised that in a closed court, it would be she and her lawyers against all the defendants and their lawyers. Initially she wore sunglasses; later she discarded them and we saw an elegant, dignified and composed Frenchwoman leaving court day after day. And gradually she found she was surrounded by crowds of supportive women as she left court; that gave her strength.
It was only when Dominique Pelicot was arrested for taking pictures up women’s skirts that police seized his laptop and Gisèle Pelicot’s world fell apart. The story — written in the first person by Judith Perrignon, a professional writer — begins on the morning she and her husband had breakfast before attending the police station and she found the police had discovered extraordinary footage on her husband’s laptop.
The story flits, chapter by chapter, between the past and present, between her childhood, his childhood, their marriage, and the ordeal that she underwent as the investigations went on, the trial, up to the present. She has tried to make sense of the 50 years she spent with her husband, to salvage something that was true from their early years of marriage.
Gisele Pelicot – A Hymn to Life
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She goes back to her and his troubled childhoods for a reason. It makes sense to describe why it was that they married so young — she was 19 — and why it seemed like a route from unhappiness. Gisèle had lost her beloved mother when she was nine and her much-loved soldier father married a widow who was cruel to her and to her brother. Dominique Pelicot was in flight from his abusive father who had tormented his mother, sadistically bullied his children and had plainly sexually violated his foster-daughter. Dominique seemed to Gisèle vulnerable and needy, and their married life was initially happy. Was it her growing success that soured him? He could not hold down jobs whereas she, by hard work, rose through the ranks of electricity company EDF. His debts engulfed them both. But nothing explains what happened, not his sexual fantasies which she refused, not their financial hardships.
It was probably necessary that Gisèle Pelicot should have had a ghost-writer but you wonder what she would have revealed left to herself. It seems wrong that this modest woman should describe what sexual practices she allowed her husband, and what she refused. It seems wrong that she must tell us about an earlier affair and at what point she began a sexual relationship with the decent man with whom she now lives. Some of this book feels very uncomfortable.
Reserves of inner strength
What is clear, however, is the source of her inner strength. Her mother died young of cancer, but even in pain she smiled and kept cheerful. Her grandmother lost a granddaughter and wore black but she was always loving and dignified. Her father was heartbroken by his loss but never left his daughter in any doubt that he loved her. What made Gisèle Pelicot was not just the enduring trauma of loss but that she was largely surrounded as a child by love.
Many women commentators considered that Dominique Pelicot and the other rapists showed the real nature of men. Gisèle Pelicot doesn’t go there; many men in her life have been decent. In her dignity as well as her anger, she is more of a role model than she knows.
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