There is a title that surprises even before opening the book, almost as if it were a contradiction impossible to resolve: A hymn to life. Gisèle Pelicot’s memoir, written together with the journalist and novelist Judith Perrignon, arrives in bookstores on February 19th simultaneously in twenty-two countries – in Italy for Rizzoli – after some extracts were anticipated by the French press, sparking attention that goes well beyond the editorial dimension. Because this is not just a book, but the first-person account of one of the most shocking incidents of sexual violence in recent years and, at the same time, the stubborn attempt to remove that story from the sole category of horror.
The book can be booked here:
A hymn to life
The story of Gisele Pelicot
For ten years Pelicot was drugged by her husband, rendered unconscious in her bed and handed over to at least fifty men who raped her while he photographed and filmed everything. A reality that emerged only in 2020, when an investigation led to the discovery of the materials in the man’s computer and the woman being summoned to the police station, where she found herself faced not only with the faces of the attackers – complete strangers – but also with an image of herself unrecognizable, emptied, reduced to a helpless body. It is from that fracture, both physical and identity-related, that the journey told in the memoir begins.
The process
The trial held in Avignon between September and December 2024 established a clear judicial truth: all the defendants found guilty of very serious crimes, the ex-husband sentenced to the maximum sentence provided for by French law, twenty years of imprisonment. But the public significance of the case does not depend only on the sentence. It depends above all on Pelicot’s decision to refuse the session behind closed doors and to testify publicly, exposing himself to stares, to insinuations, to the concrete possibility of a new humiliation. A choice that in the book is also reread in light of age – as if at seventy years of age social judgment loses part of its coercive force – but which above all arises from a radical moral reversal: shame must not belong to the victim.
Shame must change sides
That phrase, which in a few months has become a global slogan of the movements against gender violence, in the memoir does not sound like a rhetorical formula but as the result of a profound internal conflict. Pelicot talks about the fear of the attackers’ gazes, the weight of their numbers, the feeling of being able to once again become the object of their lies and their contempt; and yet it is precisely within that fear that the decisive question emerges: who would really protect the silence? You or them? In this gap, the personal story is transformed into a political gesture, not because it claims to represent all the victims, but because it refuses to remain imprisoned in that single identity.
One of the most unexpected aspects of the book is in fact the absence of satisfaction in pain, what certain French critics have defined as the rejection of “painism”. The horror is not attenuated, but nor is it transformed into the only possible center of the story. On the contrary, the narrative insists on what comes next: the children, inevitably wounded; a new love; the attempt to rebuild a daily life that is not simple survival. Not a redemption, nor a consolation, but the concrete possibility of choosing again.
From this perspective, the declared desire to see the man who orchestrated the violence for years again in prison is also striking: not a gesture of forgiveness, Pelicot specifies, but the need to obtain answers and pronounce a definitive farewell, as if the closure of the story passed through a final glance capable of giving her back control of her own destiny. Once again, the movement is not towards the past but towards the future.
This is where the title stops seeming paradoxical. A hymn to life it does not celebrate what happened or try to transform the violence into an edifying lesson; rather, it states that life can be reclaimed even after having been radically denied, and that this claim, when it becomes public, forces an entire society to question itself about what it has preferred not to see for too long.
