From Gisèle Halimi to Gisèle Pelicot: how two women shaped France’s legal understanding of rape

UCL Law for All Society
Nov 14
4 min read

By Andrea Berkovic

Between the 19^th century and today, the judicial definition and social conception of rape in France have undergone significant transformations. In 1980, Gisèle Halimi, a pioneering feminist lawyer, helped secure the recognition of rape as a crime. Forty-five years later, in 2025, Gisèle Pelicot, a survivor of one of the most shocking cases of sexual violence in French history, became the catalyst for redefining rape around the principle of consent.

At the beginning of the 19th century, rape was defined solely through the lens of physical violence, whilst other forms of violence were not recognized. The Penal Code of 1810 classified sexual offenses under ‘offenses against morality’, conflating rape with other acts deemed indecent. The 1832 reform introduced a distinction between rape and ‘outrage upon decency’, yet it was only in 1857 that jurisprudence began to define rape as a non-consensual sexual act, defining it through moral violence and ‘surprise’.

Over a century later, in 1978, Gisèle Halimi—a Tunisian-French lawyer, politician, and feminist activist famous for her work on the decriminalization of abortion in France—represented two Belgian lesbian women who had been raped by three men, in a case which broke legal and social taboos. This case was the first in French legal history where rape victims succeeded in bringing their case before the Cours d’Assises, a criminal court adjudicating on serious crimes. Indeed, although rape was considered a felony under French law, in the rare cases that had previously come to trial, charges were consistently reduced by the courts to assault and battery, and treated as a misdemeanour. The fact that the plaintiffs, Anne-Marie Tonglet and Aracelli Castellano were lesbians allowed their attorney to nullify the principal defense in the case: the implied consent of the women. That trial led to the 1980 law, which officially declared rape a crime in France, then defined as ‘any act of sexual penetration committed by violence, coercion, threat, or surprise’. Crucially, the law requires proof of constraint, rather than an absence of consent. The scope of the offense was also broadened to include all forms of sexual penetration, regardless of the sex of the perpetrator or victim.

Over the following decades, the legal definition of rape in France continued to evolve, reflecting the gradual shift from an emphasis on physical violence to a broader understanding of sexual autonomy. In 1992, the law expanded the notion of constraint to include threats, acknowledging that psychological pressure could be as coercive as physical force. Around the same time, jurisprudence began to challenge sexual violence within marriage. First recognized by the courts in 1990 and codified in 2006, conjugal rape marked a decisive departure from the long-standing presumption of marital consent—a presumption definitively abolished by the law of July 9, 2010. By abolishing the presumption of consent between spouses, the law established any non-consensual act of sexual penetration to constitute rape, regardless of the relationship between the perpetrator and victim. The law promulgated on 21 April 2021 removed the requirement to prove coercion in cases of rape committed against minors under 15, or under 18 in cases of incest, and created a specific offense: any sexual act between an adult and a minor under 15 is considered rape, unless the age difference is less than five years. This law rendered the legal definition significantly more precise by expressly including the notion of ‘oral-genital’ penetration. However, legal scholars already criticized the increasing complexity of these laws and the lack of an explicit reference to the notion of consent in the legal definition of rape, even though the numerous aggravating circumstances of the offense relate to a lack of consent (notably the victim’s state of vulnerability).

Now, in 2025, following the harrowing case of Gisèle Pelicot – a 72-year-old woman repeatedly drugged and raped over several years by her husband and approximately 50 other men he recruited – France has once again revised its legal definition of rape, to explicitly include affirmative consent. During the trial, 35 of the defendants said they had not raped Pelicot, despite the videos showing she was clearly unconscious, arguing that they were not guilty, lacking intention to rape her, and merely assuming that she had accepted this ‘libertine game’. Up until now, the notion of consent was not explicitly mentioned in the law, which can complicate rape cases where women freeze or do not speak during an attack, or in cases like Pelicot where the victim is unconscious or incapable of expressing their consent.

On 29 October 2025, the French Senate voted and passed the bill amending the legal definition of rape and sexual assault to explicitly include the notion of consent. Consent here must be ‘free and informed, specific, given in advance, and revocable’; it can never be inferred from silence or a lack of reaction from the victim. This reform marks a shift in focus, namely, from scrutinizing the victim’s behaviour to examining how the perpetrator ensured that consent was obtained. However, the law has sparked debate in France, with critics – particularly from the far-right Rassemblement National – arguing that this law would shift the burden of proof from the victim to the perpetrator.

The 2025 reform thus represents a historic step in recognizing that rape is fundamentally about the absence of consent, not just the absence of force.

Sources:

Edited by Artyom Timofeev

Image sources: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1elzzz6g0lo

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/18/world/gisele-halimi-influential-french-lawyer-and-feminist-dies-at-93.html

From Gisèle Halimi to Gisèle Pelicot: how two women shaped France’s legal understanding of rape

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