The holy resilience of Gisèle Pelicot

A Hymn to Life is not a religious book. When asked if she believes in God, Gisèle Pelicot answers, “No, I believe in forces that are bigger than us, but not in a God.” The memoir, written by the survivor of one of the worst sexual abuse crimes imaginable, contains no theology of suffering, no account of divine providence, no attempt to explain the evil that was done to her. Yet reading it convinced me in a profoundly deep way that human beings are more than our bodies and more than what has been done to them. Put simply, this memoir is a story about the way that memory constitutes the self, and about the beauty, persistence, and dignity of the human soul.

I came to the book reluctantly. I am not drawn to true crime and would have had no intention of reading a memoir centered on one of the most horrifying criminal cases in recent memory. But I heard a podcast interview with Pelicot, and I found myself captivated by the extraordinary dignity of her voice. She spoke in French, with a simultaneous voice-over translator, and it was her actual voice, its cadence and its calmness, that affected me. There was something in that voice, along with the words she said, that felt deeper than resilience—something that touched the very essence of human dignity. The book is, as its title promises, a hymn to life.

Gisèle fell in love with Dominique Pelicot when she was just 19. She spent nearly 50 years as his wife, raised three children with him, and eventually retired with him to a charming home in the small village of Mazan, France, where their grandchildren could swim in the backyard pool. Their long marriage was both ordinary and happy. Over the years they weathered a normal course of financial challenges and career changes, but overall there were many years of love, laughter, and companionship. On this, she is insistent.

Then, in 2020, when she was 67 years old, her husband was arrested for looking up the skirts of women at the supermarket. After his arrest, the police found evidence on his computer showing that, for the previous ten years, Dominique had been drugging his wife, raping her, and allowing more than 70 men of all ages to rape her as well. Her decision not to conceal her identity during the 2024 trial of Dominique and the other perpetrators made her a feminist icon in France and around the world. Yet this is not really a story about feminism either, except insofar as feminism is about insisting on the inviolable dignity of women.

When Dominique’s crimes were revealed, the couple’s adult children reacted with shock and outrage. They immediately begin destroying family photographs and keepsakes, purging the house of anything to do with him. But Gisèle did not want everything to be destroyed. “The children had been loved and cherished,” she writes. “The last fifty years were so much more than a lie.” It is true that she couldn’t bear to have been so wrong about the man she loved, but the reason for that has to do with the way that memories are constitutive of the self. “If the last fifty years of my life were taken away from me,” she writes, “it would be as if I had never existed. I would be dead.”

She needed to find a way to face the horror of what was done to her without losing her entire identity in the process. This struggle resulted in tension with her adult children, who could not understand their mother’s desire to hold on to the past. Of their experience she writes, “They probably felt betrayed and at the same time guilty for all the laughter and fun they had shared with their father, and tainted by being the children of a man guilty of such crimes. They wanted to erase it all. And that erasure included me as well.”

The evidence presented at the trial included many hours of video of the assaults perpetrated on Gisèle by Dominique and dozens of other men. Since she was present at each day of the trial, Gisèle had to watch these too. At first she disassociated from “the snoring woman” in the videos. But eventually she came to know that unconscious body as herself, but not all of her. That body does not contain her essential essence, her humanity, her dignity. She writes, “I will never be reduced to my tortured body; that is not where my soul is.” The insistence on the inviolable dignity of the soul of this ordinary woman who was the victim of almost unimaginable violations is the extraordinary heart of the book.

Pelicot’s narrative voice, just as I heard on the podcast, is poised, formal, and possessed of a deep strength. This, we learn, extends also to her physical presentation. Always well dressed (in the way of French women), as the trial goes on she became ever more elegant, countering the assumption “that a woman who had been so tormented would not have the resilience to care about her appearance.” Pelicot’s strength is the refusal to allow her life and her identity to be reduced to the crimes committed against her by the person she loved most.

I have heard it said that the proof that one has truly loved is the ability to love again. Near the end of the memoir, Pelicot falls in love again, with a quiet widower named Jean-Loup, who doesn’t ask her any questions about the crimes and doesn’t make her feel embarrassed or in the least bit awkward. Their first kiss leaves her “lightheaded with happiness.”

A Hymn to Life is a powerfully realized story about the power of memory and the reality of love, even in the presence of extraordinary darkness. She loves Jean-Loup, and she also places flowers on his wife’s grave because “the past does not erase the present.” While the crimes described in this book should make anyone deciding to read it proceed with caution, in the end it is a story about joy and life—or, as Pelicot puts it, the joie de vivre that she refuses to surrender.

Choosing joy, life, and love takes a great deal of strength, and although this is not a book about God, in Pelicot’s resilience and strength I glimpsed something spiritual, perhaps even theological. In the book’s final pages, Pelicot describes what she calls a “strange little sanctuary within herself,” one that holds both her solace and her sorrow. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a better description than that of the holiness of the human soul.