After enduring a highly publicised trial that recounted her harrowing experience of being drugged and raped by over four dozen assailants, Gisèle Pelicot was canonised and became France’s newest symbol of resistance against sexual violence. In the wake of two more public trials—this time involving a surgeon’s terrifying child abuse and multiple allegations of sexual abuse aimed at revered French actor Gérard Depardieu—France’s lower house of Parliament responded by passing a bill to expand the legal definition of rape. And the new changes are centred around one, vital word that has previously been absent from sexual assault legislation: consent.

Many countries define sex in the absence of consent as rape, however, France has previously not been one of them. Instead, the legal threshold for defining an action as sexual assault requires evidence of violence, constraint, threat, drug-facilitated abuse, or surprise, making the legal approach “coercion-based” rather than consent-based.

For a country of people who love to say ‘non’ it was always difficult to understand why the law fell short of recognising the word’s crucial meaning.

Feminist campaigns have long struggled to move the government on the issue and reacted with outrage in February 2024, when France—together with Germany—tanked an EU law that would have defined sex without affirmative consent as rape across the bloc.

However, the cause gained strong tailwinds after it was discovered that 72-year-old Dominique Pelicot drugged and raped his wife Gisèle over decades, on top of recruiting dozens of men to rape her over in online forums. Pelicot and the other attackers have since been convicted, after a months-long public trial that stunned the world and incited protests across France.

The violent reckoning prompted the country’s new Justice Minister Didier Migaud to say that he is in favour of updating the law in addition to President Emmanuel Macron.

“This is a starting point, not a final one,” EELV (The Ecologists) politician Marie-Charlotte Garin, one of the two lawmakers who proposed the bill, told the National Assembly after the vote. “We are moving from a culture of rape to a culture of consent, and this is the first stone we are throwing against the wall of impunity.”

The bill will now go on to be debated in the upper house.

Consent-based rape laws already exist in Sweden, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom and more than a dozen other European countries, with the rise of the feminist #MeToo movement in 2017 prompting legislative reform in some jurisdictions.

Most of these laws are based on the ‘no means no’ principle, rather than the more comprehensive ‘only yes means yes’ affirmative action directive. However, conversations about transitioning from the former to the latter have already been sparked in Germany and Sweden.

After all, affirmative consent isn’t a new invention. In Canada, the definition of rape has included affirmative consent since 1983.

It is a known fact that up to 70 per cent of rape victims freeze or dissociate during sex, rendering them incapable of resisting, something Garin stressed when proposing the law.

“We would not be here without the Pelicot trial,” Ms Garin emphasised. “It revealed how big rape culture is in France and, because of that, it became politicly unacceptable to not change something in the law.”

In most rape cases, attackers’ main defence is that they believed the plaintiff wanted to have sex, a legal scholar and proponent of the law, Catherine Le Magueresse, added.

“We would be adding a safety step for women, and then he couldn’t even say, ‘I thought she agreed’,” added Le Magueresse.

It’s important to highlight that the head judge, Roger Arata, made sure to ask every defendant in the Pelicot trial whether they believed Gisèle had consented to sex at the time. Some of them argued that they were under the belief it was role play and that the victim had only pretended to be unconscious.

Many ultimately admitted that they had never spoken to her and said that they believed her husband consented for her, a shock to many in France.