Gisele Pelicot has spent two years learning to live inside a story the world could scarcely fathom. Now, in a memoir released this week, the 73-year-old French woman who became a galvanizing figure in the fight against sexual violence lays out, in spare and searing detail, how she survived a crime orchestrated within her own home — and why she chose to attach her name and her face to a case that forced France to look hard at itself.
In “A Hymn to Life,” Pelicot retraces the 2024 mass-rape trial in which her former husband, Dominique Pelicot, and 50 other men were convicted of raping her while she was unconscious. The case drew international attention and spurred France to revamp its rape law. The book is less about the legal reckoning than the human one: the ordinary moments that coexist with the unimaginable and the deliberate choice to speak in public rather than remain protected by silence.
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Explaining why she waived her right to anonymity, Pelicot writes: “No one would ever know what they had done to me… No one beyond those involved in the trial would see their faces, look them up and down and wonder how to pick out the rapists among their neighbours and colleagues.” Naming herself, she suggests, was a way to return the gaze and reclaim a measure of power.
The memoir’s most crushing scenes are also its plainest. “The officer says a number. He tells me fifty-three men had come to my house to rape me,” she recalls. She remembers returning home after that revelation and hanging out her husband’s washing. “I was like a dog waiting by the garden gate for its master,” she writes, laying bare the rituals of a life that, from the outside, had seemed unchanged — a house, a marriage, a routine — even as the truth was detonating within it.
There is the impossible task of telling the people she loves. Pelicot describes confiding in friends and, most painfully, preparing her children for the ordeal ahead. She knew her daughter Caroline would “go through hell and back.” Those lines carry the quiet knowledge that trauma extends in concentric rings, convulsing families and the communities that hold them.
In court, Pelicot did not address her former husband directly. But on the page she is unsparing, and she allows herself the questions she has yet to put to him. “Did you ever think, ‘I must stop’? Did you abuse our daughter? Did you commit the most abject crime of all? Do you have any idea of the hell we’re living in? … Did you kill? … I’ll ask him all these questions. I need answers; he owes me that much.” She writes of planning to visit him in prison, not to reopen wounds but to force a reckoning with what was done — and with what cannot be undone.
Throughout, she returns to the chorus of women who made it possible for her to endure the trial’s glare. “Not long after the trial began, I started to be presented with a bundle of correspondence at the end of each day … I preferred to read their letters rather than the newspapers; they gave me the chance to listen to women’s voices,” Pelicot writes. She conjures the line of supporters who gathered outside the courtroom, a living rampart of solidarity: “How could I tell the women … that their presence outside the courtroom eased for me what was happening inside.”
Her account also gestures toward the country beyond the courtroom doors. The verdicts — a rare aggregation of accountability — sparked a public reckoning in France, where the case accelerated efforts to tighten rape statutes and better define consent. Pelicot does not wade into legislative particulars. She doesn’t need to. The force of the book is in its insistence that the law is only one dimension of justice, and that the work of rebuilding a life happens elsewhere — in kitchens and hospital rooms, at police stations and in the hush after a courtroom empties.
If the book’s title suggests defiance, it also reflects a broader idea of survival — not only the fact of having lived through something, but the decision to live toward something. After the trial, Pelicot writes that she found love again through mutual friends. The evening she met him, she was “light-headed with happiness.” The sentence floats in a sea of heavier ones, a small boat of reprieve. “I needed to love again. I wasn’t afraid. … I still have faith in people. Once, that was my greatest weakness. Now it is my strength. My revenge.”
That word — revenge — is the fulcrum of her final chapters. Pelicot does not cast vengeance as punishment doled out. Instead, she frames it as the reclamation of trust, the refusal to surrender the world to what happened in a single house. The men were sentenced; her former husband is in prison; those facts matter. But so does her insistence that life is not surrendered to them. Her faith in people, she writes, is both fragile and unbreakable now, something tested and tempered, steeped in the letters of strangers and in the company of women who showed up day after day.
“A Hymn to Life” is not a tidy narrative. It is not meant to be. It loops through disbelief and fury, grief and formal testimony, domestic duty and the yawning blank of trauma. The effect is both devastating and clarifying. Pelicot names what was done to her in the simplest language she can find, then supplies something rarer: a ledger of the life that followed, rich with the small acts of courage that never make it into news copy or legal filings.
That is also the lesson Pelicot seems most intent on leaving: justice can be institutional, but healing is communal. It is letters and handholds, the sight of a stranger’s face just outside the doors. It is the decision to stand behind a name, even when anonymity is available. It is the walk back to the garden, the clothesline lifted, the day begun again, and again.
For many readers, her story will be a challenge — a confrontation with the idea that horror can be orchestrated in the humblest of spaces. For others, especially survivors who have written to her or stood outside the courthouse, it will be proof that the line between ruin and resilience is traversable, if rarely straight. Pelicot does not claim to have crossed it once and for all. But she is moving along it in public, and that, as much as any verdict, is part of the record now.
In the end, Pelicot’s voice is not only an indictment but also an offering: a reminder that solidarity is its own form of power, that naming is sometimes the first act of repair, and that, even after the worst thing, life can be sung.
By Abdiwahab Ahmed
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
