Translation of the French article by Jacques Rouchaud
Released in cinemas today is L’Affaire Marie-Claire, by Lauriane Escaffre and Yvo Muller, with Charlotte Gainsbourg in the role of the lawyer Gisèle Halimi. Go and see it, and take your children. Because this story is not an old story. It is ours.
She was 16
In the early 1970s, Marie-Claire Chevalier is a high-school pupil. She is 16. A boy from her school rapes her. She becomes pregnant. She does not want to keep the fruit of that rape. Her mother, Michèle, helps her find a solution, and that solution is clandestine, since the law of 1920 forbids abortion. The procedure goes wrong: haemorrhage, hospital.
And here is the most revolting part. The rapist, arrested in a completely different matter, a car theft, denounces her to get himself off. He gets away with it. She finds herself prosecuted. She had been raped, and she is dragged before a court. Her mother too. Five women prosecuted in Bobigny, in 1972, before a society made by men and for men.
The macho fauna that we were
Let us say it frankly: it was us. A society where the man decided, where the raped young girl bore the shame in place of her attacker, where a woman risked both prison and death.
For they did not stop because of the law. At the time there was talk of hundreds of thousands of abortions a year: Simone Veil would cite the figure of 300,000. For those who had money, it was the trip abroad. For the others, it was clandestinity: the knitting needles, the haemorrhages, the infections, the fear, the solitude. And every year, it is estimated that more than 250 women died of it.
Raped young girls had to struggle alone, in silence, at the risk of their lives, so as not to carry their attacker’s child. How many? No one will ever know.
In Bobigny, it was the State that was tried
In 1971, 343 women had dared to write publicly that they had had an abortion. In November 1972, at the Bobigny court, Gisèle Halimi does not merely defend these women: she turns the trial around. In the dock are women. But the real accused is the State: its law of 1920, its justice of men, its hypocrisy. That day, it was the State that was tried.
Marie-Claire, a minor who stood trial separately, was acquitted and freed. Her mother was sentenced to a suspended fine of 500 francs. The law of 1920 had just received a blow from which it would never recover.
Two years later, Simone Veil faces insults of unheard-of violence in the National Assembly. Her law is passed on the night of 29 November 1974 and promulgated on 17 January 1975.
But look closely at this figure. In that Assembly which decided over women’s bodies, there were 9 women for 481 men.
That is the heart of the matter. It took a 16-year-old girl being dragged into court, and women dying by the hundreds, for men finally to agree to hear what half the population already knew.
With demosciocracy, women will no longer ask for permission
Demosciocracy changes the rule at the root. Article 2.4 of its Constitution says it plainly: women and men have equal access to responsibilities, and appointments must respect parity, in a transparent and verifiable way.
- In every Territory Council, as close to you as possible: as many women as men. Health, education, safety, prevention and local justice are discussed and overseen on a parity basis.
- In the two Chambers in Paris, the Chamber of the People and the Chamber of Corporations: as many women as men. Never again 9 women for 481 men.
- No parties, no careers, no notables: the drawing of lots brings to the table the high-school girl, the nurse, the farmer, the retired woman, those who know what women live through because they live through it.
- The same rights everywhere: the Constitution guarantees that fundamental rights and freedoms are identical throughout the country. No territory can reduce them.
Women will no longer have to beg an assembly of men. They will be half of those who decide. They will be able to defend all their rights, whatever they may be: their bodies, their safety, their pay, their careers, their pensions, justice in the face of rape. They will be in equity, in perfect balance with men, not by anyone’s favour, but because that is the rule.
And this holds for all countries. Wherever women are still tried, imprisoned or put in danger because men decide in their place, parity in the territories and in the chambers is the answer.
Marie-Claire is watching us
Marie-Claire Chevalier died in January 2022. She had asked for nothing. She simply wanted to live. We owe her more than a film: we owe her a system in which no young girl will ever again have to pay for a man’s crime.
Liberty — Equality — Truth.
Contact: jacques.rouchaud@me.com
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