The Codification of Consent in French Criminal Law: Substantial Reform in the Wake of the Pélicot Case
- Apr 22
- 8 min read
Updated: Apr 23
Written by Claire Divisia
Edited by Eika (Rujia) Xu
Claire Divisia is an undergraduate student at Sciences Po Paris, Le Havre Campus. She’s passionate about anything social sciences, particularly economics, policymaking, and history.
In the last months of 2024, France was shaken by the unprecedented Mazan rape case, which exposed how Dominique Pélicot drugged and raped his wife Gisèle Pelicot from 2011 to 2020, inviting at least 72 other men through the Internet to participate in the rapes while she was unconscious.1 The scale of the crimes and the public nature of the proceedings mandated by the victim drew attention and admiration from the whole world, while exposing the limits of the French legal definition of sexual assault. The media attention and discourse centered around the Pelicot family shed further light on an issue that was gaining slow traction around Europe since the #MeToo movement in 2016: better laws against violence against women.2
Pelicot’s ordeal successfully led to a change in the law in France, expanding the definition of rape from penetration using violence and coercion to sexual acts committed without consent. This amendment represents a success for France, but it was long overdue. Critiques from both outside and inside the French government has accused the French justice of being too laxist with sexual harassment for years3. The Pelicot case became a paradigmatic example to argue that not just the enforcement, but even the substance of the laws against sexual assault were inadequate.
This article examines the significance of the amendment of Article 222 of the French Penal Code that redefined acts of sexual harassment, effective as of November 8, 2025, focusing on (1) what legal change did the amendment introduce, (2) the debate around this amendment in the legal and political world, and (3) the legal context in the European Union. Ultimately, the core issue remains whether the revised law will effectively benefit women and victims of sexual assault, or become another symbolic gesture without addressing a deeper systematic cause.
The law before its revision
Before 2025, sexual assault was defined in Article 222-22 of the French Penal Code as “any sexual act committed with violence, coercion, threats or surprise, or, in cases provided for by law, committed on a minor by an adult.” Thus, sexual assault and rape had to involve at least one of the four cited elements: violence, coercion, threats, or surprise. Gisèle Pelicot was entirely incapacitated during her rapes, which made resistance unfeasible. During the trials, one of the 49 men found guilty of raping her admitted that the absence of her reaction during the assault led him to believe she might be dead4. Another one, Jean-Marc Leloup, even claimed in court he had no idea that what he did could be rape, as he thought rape was “something violent”.5 The question is then, how to prove the rape was committed, if there was no clear sign of violence, threat, coercion, or surprise? The case exposed the limits of the former French legal definition of sexual assault, that omitted entirely the notion of consent.
The revised law
On the 29th of October 2025, the law was finally revised to include the notion of consent, modifying the original article to “any sexual act or non-consensual sexual act committed against another person or against the perpetrator," followed by a full definition of consent as “free and informed, specific, prior, and revocable, [...] assessed in light of the circumstances [and not] inferred solely from the silence or lack of reaction of the victim.” This signifies that consent to one sexual act doesn’t imply consent to another, and that the person can revoke their consent at any time.
One of the goals of this altered law was to also recognize better sexual violence within couples, especially married ones. By not solely relying on the tools of violence, threat, surprise and coercion to identify assault, the law widens the scope of what can and should be investigated in rape cases. Audrey Darsonville, a professor of criminal law at the University of Paris-Nanterre, stated that in most cases, because the victim was raped by someone in her inner circle, the moral manipulation used to coerce the victim represented evidentiary difficulty, leading to many cases being closed for insufficient evidence. The addition and centralization of the element of non-consent reverses the paradigm, with judges looking for the existence or not of consent, instead of observing the tactics used by the rapist.
Criticisms and responses in the French legal and political world
While the Senate voted 327-0 in favor of the bill, the far right voted against it in the National Assembly, France’s lower legislative house.6 The Rassemblement National notably denounced “an unprecedented moral and legal drift,” and how lawyers would have to “dissect not the violence of the guilty, but the gestures, the words, the silence of the [...] victim.”7 Meanwhile, through the approval of the bill, France joined a dozen OECD member countries, including Spain, Germany, Denmark and Switzerland, that updated their rape laws in the wake of the 2016 #MeToo movement, and followed the progress catapulted forward by the enshrining of abortion as a constitutional right in March 2024.8
The new law should be considered as a victory for all women and victims of sexual assault of France, yet it drew and still draws resistance. Julia Courvoisier, a lawyer at the Paris bar, expressed her worry about how the introduction of non-consent in the penal definition of rape would brutally destabilize the foundations of the justice system. She explains that the justice system should be founded on the presumption of innocence of the defendant, and that revising the law would move the weight of the lawsuit on the victim and their testimony would create a de facto “presumption of guilt”9. Accordingly, the essential difficulty of future cases will have to be the finding of evidentiary support of given consent. Perhaps, to truly change the paradigm, how consent is expressed or validated (tacitly or explicitly) should be defined more clearly.10
The preexisting context in Europe
The amended article represents real progress for France, but in reality, having ratified the Istanbul Convention (on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence), France was already supposed to include a definition of consent in the legal definition of rape since 2014. It had already previously been flagged by the European Court of Human Rights numerous times for violating the European Convention on Human Rights.11 Strasbourg formally denounced France’s legal framework to not effectively respond to non-consensual sexual acts, partially because the laws lacked sufficient clarity on consent and the courts failed to properly account for specific contexts of sexual assault cases, such as those involving minors12 or committed within the marital relationship13. Additional reproaches were the structural deficiencies on how French authorities handle sexual violence cases, asking for reforms to recognize coercive control dynamics, and on the secondary victimization perpetuated by domestic courts through victim-blaming approaches14.
The efficiency of French rape law has been doubted for years. Currently, in France, less than 1% of rape cases end with a conviction.15 To compound matters further, this harrowing number doesn’t include assaults that weren’t pursued in legal action, and discourages victims to press charges on their rapists. Experts say most rapes go unreported due to a lack of tangible evidence: about 80% of women don’t press charges, and 80% of the ones who do see their case dropped before it is investigated.16
The rewritten law was much needed. As Ms. Aurore Bergé, Minister for Gender Equality and the Fight Against Discrimination, stated during parliamentary debate: “Consent is at the heart of our fight against sexual violence. [...] Yet, this concept remains deliberately distorted, caricatured, [...] obscured by clichés: [the reality is] in nine out of ten cases, the victim knows her aggressor.”17In practice, the inclusion of the definition of consent is intended to circumvent common myths of “she didn’t say anything,” or, “she didn’t fight back,” the reality being that up to 70% of victims don’t react due to a state of astonishment and shock.18 Instead of having the judges focus on the behavior of the victim, this revised article would shift it to the author of the acts: did they check for the consent of their partner? How did they do it? Did they use violence, coercion, threats or surprise to obtain consent? Were they in a position of superiority that would coerce the victim to express consent? The codification of a formal definition of consent serves to displace colloquial interpretations and provide a rigorous framework for future rulings.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the reform represents a necessary alignment of legal theory with empirical reality. It might draw disappointment at the lack of an affirmative yes-means-yes model of consent, and the avoidance of a comprehensive definition of constraint in all its forms, but it can also be welcomed as a major symbolic advance. A paper published by the Council of State in March of 2025 reaffirms this idea, underlining that the main advantage of the bill will be how it “centers judicial debate” and “echo in society the reality that rape, like other sexual aggressions, is before anything, a violation of consent.” It hopes to have an impact “in particular on the conscience of authors of the acts,” by moving away from the common representation of “rape as an act of violence committed on the street by strangers.”19 It cannot be considered a landmark case, but it’s an essential step in achieving better legislation against sexual assault, and deterring future acts. At present, a bill (no. 2175) is waiting to be approved by the Senate, that would abolish sexual relations as a marital duty (or devoir conjugal) and preclude their absence from serving as grounds for divorce.
The revision of Article 222-22 of the Code Pénal, together with this bill halfway to adoption, marks a significant legal advance in terms of recognizing violence perpetrated against women and the realities of sexual assault, but its effectiveness will depend on its implementation and sustained legislative reinforcement.
Bibliography
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