One of the first things you realise when reading Gisèle Pelicot’s memoir, A Hymn to Life, is that the incredibly dignified woman we saw on the news, waiving the right to anonymity during her husband’s trial for drugging and gang raping her, had actually spent over four years becoming that person. “Shame has to change sides,” she famously said in 2025, after her husband, Dominique, and 50 other men were found guilty. But in 2020, when first informed of their crimes, she had felt enormous shame, as well as utter disbelief. And as the criminal proceedings progressed, she had insisted there was no way she could face the media, let anyone see her face or even find out her name. That is, until an army of female supporters started turning up at the court and encouraging her.
“And here I am, in my seventies, a martyr, the symbol of a new feminist wave that I hardly know a thing about,” she writes. Had she been 20 years younger, she still wouldn’t have dared request the case be heard in open court, “too afraid of the looks: those damn looks that women of my generation have always had to contend with”.
And it is exactly this position, of being a woman born exactly halfway through the 20th century, modern but old-fashioned, newly feminist but endlessly forgiving, raped by perhaps 70 men but refusing to hate or blame all men for it, that makes her book particularly fascinating. She has already lived through tragedies, such as her mother dying very young and then her brother, possibly gay but tortured by it, dying young too. She grew up in a Europe freshly ravaged by war; her parents were French but working in Germany, so she was born into contradiction.
But here’s the thing that the book reveals, whether wittingly or unwittingly. While she bears a stoicism that is somewhat lost to my generation (like her children, I was born in the Seventies), one that has inspired enormous admiration in women all around the world, it is that stoicism that has driven her children mad. That insistence on dignity; that refusal to lash out, has sent some other people spiralling. Including me, I must confess.
Her own lawyer berated her for being her husband’s “best advocate”. “I believed he belonged in prison,” she writes of Dominique Pelicot, “but I would not kick a man when he was down.”
It is her husband’s lawyer who has to come over during the trial and say not to be too easy on him, which Gisèle interprets, with no evidence, as her husband “speaking through the lawyer, recognising his guilt”. All while knowing, for example, that he had actually increased his attacks on her after the police first seized his phone, knowing he would soon not be able to drug and rape her any more.
Of her elder son she says, “When I reminded David how close he had been to his father, how Dominique had always been there for him, helping him at every stage of his life, it only fed his rage.” Well, yes.
Then there’s the bit when her husband is in prison awaiting trial, before the news has gone public, but his cellmate discovers the nature of his crimes. Dominique contacts his wife to tell her that he believes their daughter Caroline must have blabbed something to this other prisoner’s family in the outside world, and Gisèle turns on their daughter to ask if it’s true. She does, in the book, acknowledge the folly of this, “that even now he had managed to manipulate us to turn against each other”, but you can imagine this was pretty damn hard for their daughter to take.
She and Caroline are nowadays largely estranged, because when they had to examine photos found in the father’s possession, of Caroline asleep in bed in her underwear, they reached different conclusions. Caroline has already published her own memoir and said she does not speak to her mother any more because her mother did not support her in accusing her father of incest.
Gisèle’s take on the photos is this: “Basically, we were both looking at them from the perspective of who we were: I was warding off the worst-case scenario, while my daughter was heading straight for it.” Her daughter has an enormous emotional reaction to the whole thing, screaming in court, told off for it by her highly composed mother. “Did she let out the screams that I held in,” Gisèle wonders now, “allowing herself to collapse as I did not?” But ultimately, “we were so different in our approaches to life and its tragedies”.
It does seem cruel to ask a woman who has suffered so much to do even more for others or to accept her entire family life has been a lie — yet you can also understand what her children are asking her for. Incest remains beyond what she can believe her husband capable of. She just can’t go there. Later in the book the police link him to a cold case which raises the possibility he has also murdered an estate agent — again, she is keen to stress that he legally remains presumed innocent.
Here’s the reason behind all of it. After a very sad childhood, Gisèle felt there was a spark in her that only came alive when she met her future husband. It is this spark, she says, that has got her through absolutely everything, including the revelations that have turned her family life into a barbaric joke. And for as long as that spark remains in her, she cannot separate it entirely from the man she loved. So while she is able to describe him as “my torturer”, she refuses to accept that all of their memories together are bad. If she does that, where will her mind have left to go?
“Must I blow the spark out now, once and for all, as David and Caroline seemed to be asking me to do?” she writes. “You don’t get a second chance at life. If I erased everything, it would mean I was dead. And had been for years.” She says she was partitioning Dominique in two, to protect not him but herself, and that she was not turning away from the horror. “I was pitting myself against it with my tears, my solitude, my sorrow and my happy memories.”
The uncomfortable truth is that they do have happy memories. Indeed, one of Gisèle’s motives in writing the book seems to be pointing out all the ways in which they were just normal people living a reasonable life, or so she thought. If her expectations for that sometimes appear low — “he had only used physical violence on me once” — she is also the product of a time and a place.
Her husband was often a failure at work, getting them into debt, while she held down a job and got promoted. He had grown up sharing a bedroom with Nicole, “a little girl with a learning disability who was a ward of the state being fostered by the family”. Nicole was not encouraged to have any life outside of the family at all, even as a young adult still living with them, and when the mother died of cancer the father promptly married Nicole, his foster daughter, who was by then 25. “It does you no end of good to have a young thing in your bed,” his father said to him. Dominique’s brother Joel, a doctor and town mayor, suggested that incest was normal when asked if this girl had been abused.
Yet Dominique and Gisèle really did manage to achieve many of their hopes for a decent family. The kids grew up to get good jobs while the parents retired to a house in the south of France with a swimming pool which the grandkids loved to visit. Their children would joke that when the parents talked about their painful childhoods it sounded as bad as “something out of a Zola novel”.
Sometimes she comes home to find he has got dinner waiting in the oven for her, “mashed potatoes in two separate dishes, since he liked his with butter and I liked mine with olive oil and parsley”. The bitter irony is that so many of his kindnesses to her are in fact part of his depravity planning — her potatoes are laced with zolpidem and lorazepam. Drugs not only used to knock her out, but muscle relaxants too, which is how she couldn’t feel the rapes the next day. “How did I persist in seeing kindness,” she writes, “where there was nothing but manipulation?”
In court, the female magistrate keeps asking “What do you have to say about that?” As each new horror is revealed, or a new accusation levelled at her, the victim. Gisèle sometimes cannot think of anything to say — how can she possibly find yet more comments? One gets the impression that she has written the book to answer that wretched question once and for all. And what she has to say is that she feels disgust, shock, horror and has been through hell, but has come out of it with no resounding hatred for humanity, or men. That she has found love again. That “contrary to what people might think, unhappiness does not bring people together”, and that she desperately misses her estranged grandchildren. I pray with all my heart that she will get to see them again.