On courage
Gisèle Pelicot’s remarkable fortitude is a reminder of both the value and the rarity of moral courage.
The Leopard is not grand enough a publication to hand out awards, but if it were, our Person of the Year would be an easy choice. Gisèle Pelicot stared shame in the face and refused to blink. With her life turned upside down, she chose to relive her ordeal before the eyes of the world, sparking a global conversation about sexual violence.
When the trial began three months ago, Pelicot’s divorce from the man who drugged and raped her for years had only just been finalised. She nevertheless waived her right to a private trial, and then insisted that public observers should be able to remain in the court when the graphic video evidence was shown. Last week, she was vindicated with guilty verdicts against her ex-husband and some 50 other men.
She explained these decisions with expressions of deceptive simplicity. “The shame is theirs,” she said, referring to the dozens of men who abused her. And yet shame is a strange emotion. Against all logic, as anyone who has been beaten up or cheated on can attest, it affects the victim much more than the perpetrator.
Anyone who survives abuse and returns to face their tormentor is brave. But several factors elevate Pelicot’s emotional courage to a level rarely seen. The horrific scale of the ordeal. Her complete inexperience, at an advanced age, of being in the public eye. The fact that she herself only became aware of the crimes against her when they had been going on for nearly a decade.
Her life was otherwise ordinary, which is what makes the case so poignant. You might have walked past her in a supermarket. And, while her ex-husband was clearly a man of unusual depravity, the willingness of so many other men to abuse her while she was unconscious raises uncomfortable questions, and prevents us from explaining away the case as one bad apple.
It is this juxtaposition, this horror show beneath the surface of an ordinary small town, that sticks in the mind. That the person at the centre of it should be a woman of such extraordinary courage is what makes it an event of historical significance, that has drawn the attention of world leaders and millions of ordinary people.
The banality of evil
The everyman nature of Pelicot’s abusers reveals one of the darkest aspects of human nature, whereby people immersed in wrongdoing quickly lose their moral compass. The ‘banality of evil’, a term coined to describe the worst atrocities of the 20th century, is the tool of tyrants small as well as large.
The testimony of the convicted men is uncomfortable but essential reading. Men of diverse ages and social backgrounds, most of them were not habitual sexual predators. Many claimed to have been drawn in by Pelicot’s ex-husband, to have believed his claims that it was a marital game or some other thin veil of consent. Several of them said “I’m not a rapist” even as they admitted to rape.
Those men knew what they were doing and they deserve their convictions. But the crucial instigating role played by Pelicot’s ex-husband – a single man orchestrating dozens of crimes – shows how easily people can be goaded into evil acts.
Courage, by contrast, is much less common than we would like to think. Few people, when witness to wrongdoing, will stick their head above the parapet; most will opt for a quiet life and avoid rocking the boat.
While several of the men claimed to have felt that something about their encounter with Pelicot had been wrong, not one of them reported it to the police: The crimes were only discovered after her ex-husband had been arrested on an unrelated charge of taking upskirt photos in a supermarket.
Pelicot’s ex-husband recruited all the men on an online chatroom, apparently without any thought to secrecy or security. In online messages before the crimes took place, revealed to the court, he didn’t try to hide what would take place. The chatroom itself was titled “without her knowledge”.
And yet none of these men – neither those who raped Pelicot, nor the many others who presumably exchanged messages with her ex-husband but didn’t go through with it – informed the police of what was going on. That too would have been an act of courage, to expose one’s own crimes to prevent others from being committed; but not one of the dozens of men involved did so.
The rarest virtue
The value and scarcity of courage have been recognised since ancient times, when Stoic philosophers identified it as one of the four cardinal virtues, alongside wisdom, justice and temperance. Marcus Porcius Cato, that most grizzled Stoic, believed so firmly in the Roman Republic that he took his own life rather than kneel before the victorious tyrant Julius Caesar.
The Stoic virtues were later folded into Christian tradition, though the concept of courage was diluted by ideas of passivity and meekness. As theological hierarchies became entrenched across Europe, courageous heretics, scientists and other free-thinkers were put to the sword or the pyre – and too few people spoke out against it.
Established churches have continued to disdain courage in the modern age, with both the Catholic and Anglican hierarchies preferring to protect abusers in their ranks rather than give them over to justice.
Neither has secularism provided an answer. In the absence of gods or of a unifying ethical code, there is no set of virtues that we all agree on as a society. We have become atomised, which further removes incentives for courage – since the sacrifice it requires is normally performed in service of loved ones or of the broader community.
That thought seems to have sustained Gisèle Pelicot, who said last week that she had decided to fight for the sake of her grandchildren. In the event, her dignity and courage inspired a great many people besides.
The Leopard will be asleep up a tree for the next two weeks, and will next publish on Monday 13 January. Happy New Year.