Not the first sadist of Mazan

…and probably not the last

Provence is a pretty place. Stunning countryside, gorgeous coastline, temperate climate, plenty of Roman ruins and other splendid sights, various cultural festivals: theatre in Avignon, jazz in Nîmes, film in Cannes, to name but three.

Admittedly, it can get terribly overcrowded in summer, but fortunately there are plenty of accommodation options available, from tent camping to luxury hotels.

A fine example of the latter is the Château de Mazan, in a village some 35 kilometres north-east of Avignon. It was built in the early 18^th century by Count Jean Baptiste de Sade, father of the notorious Donatien Alphonse François, better known simply as the Marquis de Sade, pornographic writer and abuser of women for whom the term “sadism” was coined. The Sade family was one of the most prominent in the region, having been so since the 14^th century, and was particularly associated with Mazan.

The ruined Abbey of Mazan. Not the only thing ruined there…. Photo by Marianne Casamance.

_{The Marquis behind the neologism}

Interestingly, Donatien Alphonse François organised at the castle in 1772 what is believed to be France’s first theatre festival. He was also frequently arrested for his “debauched” behaviour (his accusers generally being women but their welfare being less important to the State at the time than his immorality which included his oft-expressed irreligious views). He ended his days in one of what used to be called asile d’alienés (lunatic asylum in English), in Charenton, after having already spent some twelve years in prison in Vincennes (out of a total of 27).

Peter Weiss’s play Marat/Sade is set in Charenton, where he has Sade directing a play about Marat and featuring several philosophical conversations between Sade and Marat. Sade did indeed direct plays in Charenton, the asylum director Coulmier did indeed exist, and Jacobin leader Marat was indeed assassinated by Charlotte Corday of the moderate Girondin faction. The rest of the play is of course fiction.

As for the castle, where Sade sometimes spent time although he was often in Paris (in or out of prison) and in other places in Europe, it remained in the Sade family until 1850, when it was sold and subsequently converted into a religious school. It then became a retirement home during much of the 20^th century before being transformed into a four-star hotel and restaurant in 2003: the late 20^th and early 21^st century fate of many European castles and manors as it happens. Even if I wished to spend that sort of money in the area, I would avoid this place over which, for me at least, continues to loom the shadow of Donatien Alphonse François de Sade.

Sade’s life has been much mythologised and many—including Angela Carter, known as a feminist writer of magical realist and picaresque fiction—have tried to rehabilitate his reputation due, among other things, to his support of Enlightenment views. Carter’s take was that he did not consider women primarily as breeders and she found this refreshing, but her 1979 work The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography had as many critics as fans. However, Sade’s views on women were less than enlightened (an understatement): whichever way some (including Angela Carter) may spin it, or whatever the debate concerning the extent to which he was a practitioner of the sadism to which he gave his name, Sade was an abuser of women. There is no “feminist” way to spin this. Andrea Dworkin, who devoted an entire chapter of her 1979 book Pornography: Men Possessing Women (now helpfully archived online) to the not-so-cher Marquis, was no fan of Carter’s work nor of that of others seeking to celebrate Sade rather than condemn his misogyny and (imagined and actual) sexual violence against women (and indeed men). Dworkin wrote:

In Sade’s fiction, men, women, boys and girls are used, violated, destroyed. At the top, in control, are the libertines, mostly old men, aristocrats, powerful by virtue of gender, wealth, position, and cruelty. Sade describes the sexuality of these men essentially as addiction: each sex act contributes to the development of a tolerance; that is, arousal requires more cruelty each time, orgasm requires more cruelty each time; victims must increase in abjectness and numbers both. Everyone inferior to the aristocrats on top in wealth, in social status, or in her or his capacity for cruelty becomes sexual fodder. Wives, daughters, and mothers are particularly singled out for ridicule, humiliation, and contempt. Servants of both sexes and female prostitutes are the main population of the abused, dismembered, executed. Lesbian acts decorate the slaughter; they are imagined by a man for men; they are so male-imagined that the divine fuck imbued with murder is their only possible resolution.¹

I could find plenty of images of Sade but none of his victims (except the fictional ones on the covers of his books): women with no faces and often, no names. So I’m giving you Andrea Dworkin instead.

Brave, brave women

Let us keep Dworkin’s words in mind as we now turn our attention to Mazan’s 21^st-century sadist. I speak, of course, of one 71-year-old Dominique Pelicot, who for ten years between 2011 and 2020 drugged his wife Gisèle and invited at least 80 other men recruited online to come and rape her. He took pleasure in filming those rapes of his unconscious wife.

D. Pelicot’s crimes were finally uncovered after 12 September 2020, when a security employee at a supermarket in the larger neighbouring town of Carpentras caught him using his mobile phone to film up the skirts of three female shoppers. The guard alerted police, who subsequently discovered photos and videos of Gisèle Pelicot being raped on an external hard drive.

Since the discovery of these facts, Gisèle Pelicot’s daughter Caroline Darian has become an activist against chemical submission of women for the purpose of sexual abuse. She set up an association #MendorsPas (don’t put me to sleep) and in 2022 published her personal testimony under the title Et j’ai cessé de t’appeler papa (I’ve stopped calling you Dad).

As for her mother Gisèle Pelicot, who was unaware of what was being done to her while she was drugged, she has become a heroic figure for feminists in France. She insisted that the trial be public “in order for shame to change sides”. She sat stoically through several hours of her abuser husband’s testimony without flinching, and was applauded by spectators in the room and by women assembled outside, many of whom were following the proceedings via video link.

Gisèle Pelicot has been sitting through the criminal trial in Avignon since 2 September last, and will have to deal with several more months of it as all the co-accused have to testify and be cross-examined. In the first days of the trial she told the court that “her calm demeanour masked a ‘field of devastation’,” triggered by the moment she learned from a policeman in 2020 that her supposedly “loving” husband had been drugging her for a decade and inviting some 80 local men to rape her in her bedroom of the family home, while he filmed them (reported and translated by the BBC, 10 September).

After decades of marriage and raising three children, to suddenly find herself the survivor of this sadism, and to find her voice in speaking out against it … well, I can only imagine how vast that “field of devastation” has been for Gisèle Pelicot. I can only applaud her bravery and dignity in the face of having to relive this abuse through the legal system. For the extent of the latter, read on.

Le mur du çon

When lawyer for several of the 50 co-accused claimed last week that “there is rape, and then there’s rape”, implying that a man who was unaware he was committing rape could not be judged for the crime, Gisèle Pelicot retorted from the stand: “When you see a woman deeply asleep on her bed, isn’t there a moment when you wonder, ‘Isn’t there something wrong here?’  … Rape is rape. Whether it’s 3 minutes or an hour. It’s absolutely despicable” (reported and translated by France 24, 19 September 2024).

Of course, hubby and some of his rapist buddies have their “poor victim me I was an abused child” defence all lined up. “Yes I’m so guilty so sorry but I myself went through abuse as a child [sometimes by the mother]”. (Subtext: so go easy on me, I’m just a product of a horrible system and the victim of a horrible mother so you can’t entirely blame me. Yeah, right. When in doubt, blame The Mother.)

Many of the accused are known to local residents, with local women now feeling very uneasy and some of the accused claiming that they and their families are being harassed. Well, to the accused I say: you asked for it you bastard. To their wives and kids I say: get out of there NOW. More worryingly, some 30-odd men who participated in D. Pelicot’s little rape game are still at large. Making the women of Mazan feel even more uneasy.

But the rapists and their lawyers aren’t the worst in dishing out predictable “we’re not so bad really, we’re victims ourselves/we didn’t know she wasn’t consenting” bunkum. That dubious honour does to the Mayor of Mazan, one Louis Bonnet, a right wing politician with far-right National Rally leanings (although not, to date, a member of that party from what I can glean). In that same 10 September BBC article (although reported in France as televised on 17 September), Bonnet is quoted as attempting to downplay the gravity of the offences and their reflection on his town, by suggesting that many of the accused were out-of-towners and the Pelicots themselves hadn’t lived there long (unlike the Sades, perhaps). He went on to say:

People here say “no one was killed”. It would have been much worse if [D. Pelicot] had killed his wife. But that didn’t happen in this case … [Gisèle Pelicot will] have trouble getting back on her feet again for sure [but at least she was unconscious at the time]. When there are kids involved, or women killed, then that’s very serious because there’s no way back. In this case, the family will have to rebuild itself. It will be hard. But they’re not dead, so they can still do it.

This interview with the BBC was widely reported and commented upon in France, perhaps most pointedly by the satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné, in its mur du çon feature. The paper was founded in 1915, making it the oldest French satirical newspaper still in existence, and it has been credited since the 1960s with exposing a number of political scandals. Its name, roughly translated, means “the chained rag”, or perhaps more poetically and assonantly, “the shackled rag”. Canard (duck) is slang for newspaper and the reference to being chained is because of censorship at the time of its first publication. Le mur du çon is a play on words: the mur du son is the sound barrier, while the word con means idiot, jerk. By adding the cedilla to the c the paper is creating a hybrid word, implying that whatever item is featured that week has broken the “idiot barrier”. Well, this time it was broken by one Louis Bonnet, the Jerk of the Week.

Breaking through the idiot barrier “with much delicacy” as the Canard Enchaîné sardonically put it on its front page on 18 September.

Following the media furore and mockery over his remarks, Bonnet quickly attempted to walk things back. He did so in an interview on 19 September with the regional daily Le Dauphiné Libéré (so named because founded in 1945 by seven members of the French resistance, with the tagline “the free paper of free men”). Not sure he succeeded too well though. Here is what the paper quotes him as saying:

.…my goal was to show that Mazan is not a village of rapists, but a peaceful village, without a curfew nor people who are afraid, as I have said to all the media. For that, I used words that were not entirely appropriate, I acknowledge it. When I say “no person died” [in the original he uses homme, man, to designate a “person”], it’s true that Mrs Pelicot wasn’t killed. In rape cases, there are often murders lying behind. She could have been killed if they had continued, if her husband had continued to increase the dose to send her to sleep, over some years [my translation].

Yeah, good one, Louis, you cleared that right up for us.

No one died. Neither did Jeanne Testard, Rose Keller, or the many other women and girls the Marquis de Sade abused. They lived to tell the tale. As does Gisèle Pelicot. She has no interest in “rebuilding” her former family though: her divorce with her abuser came through on 22 August last, less than two weeks before his trial began. Lawyers for the defence, however, persist in calling him “her husband” or “your husband”, as an added form of humiliation.

The Marquis de Sade and his 21^st century inheritor of sorts, Dominique Pelicot, are two men. Even if one adds in all their accomplices and protectors, that’s still only a handful. But let’s add in this statistic: every minute or so, somewhere in the world, a man rapes a woman or girl. And that’s just the ones we know about. Not all men, you keep telling us? But statistically speaking, it’s at least 525,600 men every year. Then let’s add in all the other men who beat their wives or murder their exes, all the men who sexually harass women (without going “all the way” to rape), and all the men who threaten women and celebrate real or imagined violence against them online (including through porn). Starts to add up now, doesn’t it?

So, to all those blokes who have become scared and confused and apparently don’t know how to behave around women anymore (I heard another one bleating about it on the radio just this morning), let me say this: women are human. Not objects, thus: not your toys. It really is that simple.

Calling Minerva’s magpie…again

1. Pp. 92-3, UK edition (The Women’s Press, 1981).