2 hours ago
7
It is a mark of the power and honesty of Gisèle Pelicot’s memoir, A Hymn to Life – a seemingly impossible writing project in which the author must reconcile herself with horrors of which she has no recollection – that in the first 40 pages, the person I felt most angry towards was Pelicot herself. Her ex-husband, Dominique, who will almost certainly be in jail for the rest of his life for drugging and raping his wife and recruiting 50 men over the internet to do likewise, takes his place among the monsters of our age. In his absence, the reader may experience a version of what happened in Gisèle Pelicot’s own family – namely, the misdirection of anger towards her.
I have read enough books by female survivors of male sexual violence to say with confidence that Hymn to Life is unique. Pelicot – she decided to keep her married name in the interests of giving those of her grandchildren who share it a way to be proud rather than ashamed – was 67 when her husband of almost 50 years was arrested in 2020 for upskirting women in a supermarket in Carpentras, a small town in the south-east of France near the couple’s retirement home in the village of Mazan. When the police investigation uncovered a cache of videos and photos in which an unconscious Pelicot was shown being sexually assaulted by scores of men, she entered a nightmare.
A Hymn to Life is alive with the kind of detail that wouldn’t look out of place in a good novel, but it’s the expression it gives to something glimpsed at during the trial that makes it so singular; namely, the transformation of Gisèle Pelicot from a self-avowedly ordinary woman, “content with my little life”, into a figure of astonishing power. After her husband’s arrest, she moved from Mazan to the Île de Ré, where in an effort to share her state of mind with new friends she told them she’d “been struck head-on by a high speed train”. (In a moment of grim humour, one neighbour took her literally and remarked, “the surgeon who had rebuilt my face had done an excellent job”.) Detailing what it took to emerge from this state to become a national – if not global – icon is the unsparing mission of the book.
Part of Pelicot’s renewal entailed confronting a question that lurked in the minds of millions of observers during her husband’s trial: how could she not have known? She writes wretchedly of “the shame of having understood nothing – of feeling like an idiot in the eyes of others, and in my own.”. To that end, the book is a detective story in which the reader accompanies Pelicot back through her memories in search of clues overlooked. Was it significant that her husband came from a violent, sexually abusive family governed by a father who brutalised them? Was his behaviour linked to “our patriarchal, sexist society” – words, she writes, “I would never have uttered before”? Had her own beloved mother not died of cancer when Gisèle was nine, might she have been less quick to marry this person?
Both Pelicot and her husband are from rural backgrounds two generations removed from poverty. But while Dominique struggled to stay employed, Pelicot thrived, rising from an entry level job as a secretary at an energy company to a management position. She wonders if her success fuelled her husband’s resentment. And then there was the couple’s sex life. Sifting for evidence, she puts before us Dominique’s decades-old request for anal sex and to film them in bed. If she had indulged him, she wonders, might his offences have been forestalled?
This last thought experiment will be recognised by anyone who has been involved with an abuser and pursued the logic that by acting differently, they might’ve altered the outcome. Or as Pelicot puts it: “I might have prevented it all, I might have saved us.” In the days and weeks after her husband’s crimes were revealed, she sought refuge in memories of the happy times, urging her three children to remember that Dominique had been a good dad, a form of denial that upset them so violently that for a while, of her three kids, two weren’t speaking to her. (They have since reconciled).
The most serious rift was with her daughter, Caroline, who has written her own memoir and with whom Pelicot was at loggerheads for months. Whereas Caroline “broke down”, growing so distraught she spent a night in a psychiatric unit, her mother returned home from the police station and did her husband’s laundry. “Putting on a brave face was all I knew how to do,” writes Pelicot, but it went further than that. When the weather took a turn for the worse, she worried that Dominique would be cold in jail and dropped off a sweater. “What is left for a woman my age,” she laments, “when she doesn’t have a husband any more, just her children and grandchildren?”
I’ll confess, this is where I lost it; the abject thrust of a sentiment in which Pelicot seems to register the loss of a husband – any husband – more forcefully than the violence her actual husband had done to her. She explains that she is of a generation of women for whom, “the principal axis of our lives was the man we had married”, and that this conditioning can’t be undone overnight. If we’re angry with Pelicot, she’s angry right back. The worst thing about being a victim, she writes, is being lectured – by her children, by court psychologists, by the press – that there’s a right and wrong way to do it. How dare we, she implies, and of course she is right.
The trial took place in 2024 and occupies only the last fifth of the book; “It was those bastards I wanted in the spotlight, not me,” she writes of her decision to open proceedings to the public, giving rise to her famous statement and the subtitle of the book, “shame has to change sides”. She wrestles with the word “dignified”, often used to describe her in that period and which she finds coded and judgmental – another incitement to silence. While the horrific rape videos play in court, Pelicot stares fixedly at her phone, scrolling through happy photos of her grandkids. Her courage, she writes, comes from the memory of love from her mother and from the women who gather outside the court every day to support her. “This crowd saved me.”
By the end of the book, by feeling her “way forward at my own pace”, she reaches a place where she is able “slowly and painfully” to let her husband go. He is “a pathetic creep”, she writes, but she won’t be bullied into arriving at someone else’s conclusion. “I know my story has fuelled disgust for men, but it has not done that for me.” The memoir ends not only in defiance of her abusers, but of those observers who would bend her story to a different, more strident conclusion. Instead, this: she meets a man, Jean-Loup, falls in love and moves in with him. What can one possibly say but bravo? “The feeling persists: love is not dead.”
