‘In struggle against femicide and patriarchal violence, everywhere and at all times’, read the huge purple banner that opened the feminist demonstration in Paris. At the head of the march, among dozens of feminist activists, was Sophie Binet, the secretary of the CGT [major progressive trade union confederation], one of the 400 organisations that organised the demonstration. Binet claimed ‘more than 80,000 participants’ in the march that crossed the north of the capital and that, together with the other events throughout the country, brought hundreds of thousands of people to the streets, from Marseille to Lille.
The annual feminist international day against violence against women (UN designate on 25th November each year] comes just as the first phase of the Mazan rape trial is concluding, where some 50 men are accused of rape against Gisèle Pelicot while she was unconscious, drugged by her own husband.
On Wednesday, during closing arguments, one of Pelicot’s lawyers, Antoine Camus, had asked the judges to ‘put the church back at the centre of the village’, starting with the ‘notion of consent in sexual matters’, one of the issues at the heart of the court case that has caused a wave of shock in the country. Another lawyer of Gisèle Pelicot, Stéphane Babonneau, had pointed out that Mazan’s trial had become the trial ‘of rape culture’ in France, and that it is precisely for this reason that it is aimed at changing French society’.
The history of the violence suffered by Gisèle Pelicot hovered over the French demonstrations yesterday. The trial of Mazan ‘cruelly illustrates what rape culture is, it is essential to mobilise to demand a framework law against sexual and sexist violence’, said, for example, the secretary of the French Communist Party, Fabien Roussel.
All parties of the French left responded to the call of civil society organisations for a demonstration. Along the boulevard Magenta, in Paris, La France Insoumise [LFI -France Unbowed] had placed a large stand dominated by the colour purple, at which a good number of their Members of Parliament, such as the leader of the Chamber, Mathilde Panot, gathered.
‘Today, if you cannot prove that there was violence or threats from your aggressor, you are presumed to have consented,’ said Parisian LFI deputy Sarah Legrain, reflecting on the Mazan affair in a video message posted on social media. In a week’s time, Legrain will propose a law at the Assemblée Nationale [national parliament] ‘to include the notion of consent in the criminal definition of rape or sexual assault,’ the MP said.
Olivier Faure, secretary of the Socialist Party, also took his cue from the Mazan trial in a message published on the occasion of the rally ‘As Gisèle Pelicot said, in this trial that will hopefully make people change their behaviour, la honte doit changer de camp’, “shame must change camp”, i.e. move from that of the victims to that of the aggressors.
In addition to the victim of Mazan, many other slogans were chanted by the torrent that lined the streets of Paris. The anti-fascist bloc, in which numerous organisations from the capital’s movements took part, demonstrated against the ‘advance of the extreme right in France and the world’, as ‘the extreme right attacks the rights of women and gender minorities, from the voluntary interruption of pregnancy in Hungary, Poland and Italy to attacks against the rights of trans and homosexual people in the USA’.
Also marching nearby was the large march for Palestine, to ‘bring the voice of Palestinian women’ and their resistance, demanding the ‘release of Palestinian women prisoners’. The latter ‘suffer extremely harsh prison conditions’ including violence, sexual aggression and arbitrary detention, such as the Palestinian MP Khalida Jarrrar ‘held in solitary confinement’ for more than three months, wrote the Urgence Palestine collective, which has been coordinating initiatives in support of Palestine in Paris for more than a year now.
Art (50) Book Review (111) Books (114) Capitalism (65) China (77) Climate Emergency (97) Conservative Government (90) Conservative Party (45) COVID-19 (44) Economics (37) EcoSocialism (51) Elections (82) Europe (44) Fascism (54) Film (48) Film Review (61) France (69) Gaza (59) Imperialism (97) Israel (117) Italy (45) Keir Starmer (51) Labour Party (110) Long Read (42) Marxism (47) Palestine (141) pandemic (78) Protest (146) Russia (326) Solidarity (126) Statement (47) Trade Unionism (133) Ukraine (328) United States of America (124) War (360)