“When I opened the doors to this trial on 2 September,” Gisèle Pelicot said on the final day of France’s mass-rape trial in Avignon last year, “I wanted society to be able to take part in this debate. I have never regretted that decision.”
At the time, her words sounded almost like an act of faith: a woman brutalized by her husband and fifty strangers still hoped that justice could be a collective act. And yet while the case drew massive attention, much of this hope was taken from her.
Despite her wish for the public to “take part in the debate,” in Avignon wider society was locked out. Because of a 2023 reform, her case — the largest rape trial in modern French history — was not heard by a circuit court, where a peer jury sits beside magistrates, but by a newfangled departmental criminal court, made up entirely of five professional judges.
The Justice Ministry called it “streamlining.” Critics decried it as a technocratic shortcut that stripped trials of their democratic legitimacy. In practice, it removed rape cases from trial by peer juries — the citizens whose moral voice has given the law its meaning since the Revolution.
But when Gisèle Pelicot returned to court last week for the appeal of one of her rapists, something fundamental had changed. In Nîmes, citizens were back in the courtroom.
Nearly a year had passed since the original verdict stunned the country. In Avignon, fifty-one men were convicted of raping Gisèle Pelicot over almost a decade. Her husband, Dominique, had drugged and filmed her as she lay comatose…
Auteur: Diane de Vignemont
