“A customer came in the other day and criticised her for having her photo in the paper. I told him: ‘So you think she should hide? You’re forgetting she’s the victim.’
“She is so brave to face her husband and these rapists openly. I served one of the accused but he’s since moved out.”
Further out, Elodie Fellon, 37, a wine seller, said she was appalled by one defence lawyer’s attempts to insinuate that his clients had not technically committed rape because under French law “it is not necessary to have obtained the victim’s consent”.
Mrs Fellon said: “When they arrived, they could see that the lady was totally asleep. They must have known at some point and went ahead with it. We need to catch up with other countries like the US on this.”
Macron backs law change
At present, French law defines rape as “sexual penetration, committed against another person by violence, constraint, threat or surprise” but does not explicitly include the question of consent. Emmanuel Macron, the president, backs changing the law.
In court, Ms Pélicot shot down such defence arguments. “They didn’t rape me with a gun to my head. They raped me with a clear conscience,” she told the packed room.
This week, Aurore Bergé, France’s outgoing gender equality minister, said the case made it clear that “the law needs to be changed and the issue of consent needs to be written in black and white in the penal code”.
‘Not monsters’
As Mazan wrestles with its newfound notoriety, Christelle Taraud, a historian and feminist writer, said the case spotlit something French society didn’t want to see: the men involved were not “monsters”.
“It’s unbearable for society to say to itself that these people are not Jack the Rippers or sadistic perverts, as it would be all too easy to believe,” she told La Provence newspaper.
Citing figures for conjugal violence, rape, and femicides in France and other countries, she said that “all men are potentially capable of violence against women”.
Ms Taraud continued: “It is a reality that nobody wanted to face until very recently. [By] facing her aggressors and casting them into oblivion [Ms Pélicot] is making choices for all of us and we should thank her for that.”