"Enough horror, I don't want to live feeling like a victim anymore": Gisèle Pelicot's testimony shakes the world

©picture alliance / MAXPPP | LP/Olivier Arandel

Even before you open the book, the title perplexes you, like an unresolvable contradiction: A hymn to life. Gisèle Pelicot's book, co-written with journalist and novelist Judith Perrignon, hit the bookstores on February 19, with simultaneous publication in twenty-two countries.

A few excerpts, previewed by the French press, have provoked reactions that go far beyond the editorial field. For this is not just a book, but a first-person account of one of the most staggering cases of se.xual violence of recent years, and, at the same time, a relentless attempt to remove this story from the realm of horror.

Gisèle Pelicot's story

For ten years, Pelicot was drugged by her husband, rendered unconscious in her own bed and delivered to at least fifty men who raped her, while he photographed and filmed everything. The reality only came to light in 2020, when an investigation uncovered  files on her husband's computer. Summoned to the police station, she was confronted not only with the faces of her attackers - complete strangers - but  with an unrecognizable image of herself, drained and reduced to an inert body. It's from this fracture, both physical and in terms of identity, that the journey recounted in her memoirs begins.

The trial

The trial held in Avignon between September and December 2024 established a clear judicial truth: all the defendants were found guilty of extremely serious crimes, and the ex-husband was sentenced to the maximum penalty under French law, twenty years in prison. But the public significance of the case lies not only in the verdict. Above all, it's due to Gisèle Pelicot's decision to refuse to testify on camera, exposing herself to starring, insinuations and the very real risk of further humiliation. A choice which, in the book, is also revisited in the light of age - as if, at seventy, social judgment loses some of its coercive force - but which is above all born from a radical moral shift: shame must not belong to the victim.

Shame must change sides

This phrase, which in the space of a few months became a worldwide slogan for movements fighting se.xist violence, resonates in the book not as a rhetorical formula, but as the culmination of a profound inner conflict. In it, Gisèle Pelicot recounts her fear of her attackers' gaze, the weight of their numbers, the feeling that she could once again become the object of their lies and contempt; and yet, it's precisely at the heart of this fear that the decisive question emerges: whose silence would really have been protected? His, or theirs? In this shift, the personal story is transformed into a political gesture, not because it claims to represent all victims, but because it refuses to remain confined within this single identity.

One of the most unexpected aspects of the book is precisely its refusal to wallow in suffering, which some French critics have described as a rejection of 'dolorism'. Horror is not watered down, nor is it the sole prism of the narrative. On the contrary, the narrative insists on the 'after': the children, inevitably bruised; a new love; the attempt to rebuild a daily life that is not mere survival. Neither redemption nor consolation, but the very real possibility of choosing again.

In this light, her clearly expressed wish to see the man who orchestrated violence on her for so many years in prison is striking: "It's not a gesture of forgiveness," says Pelicot, " but of the need to get answers and say one last word to him. It's not a gesture of forgiveness," says Pelicot, "but of the need to obtain answers and bid him a final farewell", as if the story's closure depended on a final face-to-face encounter capable of giving her back control of her destiny. Here again, the movement is not towards the past, but towards the future.

This is where the title ceases to seem paradoxical. A hymn to life does not celebrate what has happened, nor does it seek to transform violence into an edifying lesson; rather, it affirms that life can be reclaimed, even after it has been radically denied. And this claim, this act of reclaiming, by becoming public, forces an entire society to question what it has preferred not to see for far too long.

(©GreenMe.it 2026/Managing editor : Julie Morgan - The Press Junction/Picture : picture alliance / MAXPPP | LP/Olivier Arandel)