All the Guilty: The Pelicot Trial as Documentary Theatre by Milo Rau and Servane Dècle

Prerequisites and gesture: the ethics of form

The oratorio by Milo Rau and Servane Dècle, composed in the winter and spring of 2025 (published by Flammarion in 2026), is first and foremost a response to a demand—a demand made by Gisèle Pelicot herself when she rejected the huis-clos, the exclusion of the public: she instead called for publicity as a condition of truth. The theater makers adopt this gesture and translate it into a different language. Rau and Dècle explicitly formulate this principle in the preamble: “Gisèle turned her trial into theater, so she readily accepts that we turn the theater into a trial.” ¹ The reciprocity of this formulation is programmatic: for Rau, theater and justice have always been sister institutions, both places of public truth production, both dependent on testimony, evidence, language and the collective body of the audience.

The choice of the subtitle "Oratorio en 40 fragments" refers to two models that have a structuring effect. First: the church oratorio as a form without scenic action, in which only texts are recited – a form of meditative contemplation that allows for both distance and closeness. Second: Peter Weiss' The investigation (1965), explicitly mentioned as a subtext, an oratorio in eleven cantos based on the transcript of the Auschwitz trials. Rau and Dècle write: “This too is the Pelicot trial: a documentary theatre work that reveals the everyday, unconscious, and effective structure of violence in our society, simple and profoundly disturbing like an archaic chant.” ²

In doing so, Rau positions the piece in a long tradition of documentary theatre – from Erwin Piscator to Weiss to his own work (The Condemnation of Socrates, The Congo Tribunal, General Assembly) –, which makes its claim to art not despite, but because of its proximity to the factual.

Prologue: Petrarch and the Male Gaze as a structural framework

The oratorio opens with a prologue that is both a critical irony and a topographical anchor: The Ascension of Mont VentouxPetrarch's ascent of Mont Ventoux (1336/1350). Mont Ventoux is both a real element of the landscape where the crimes took place—it was visible from the window of the Pelicots' house, and Dominique Pelicot, a cycling enthusiast, enjoyed riding up it—and a symbol of a particular epistemic stance. Petrarch is considered a founder of modern subjectivism; his text describes the climb as an act of self-reflection, followed by a moral self-examination by Augustine: "Do not forget to look at yourself." ³

The poet climbs the mountain not out of religious fervor, but out of a pure thirst for knowledge – “driven by the mere desire to see a place of remarkable height.” ⁴ —and once he reaches the top, he reads in Augustine's Confessions the famous sentence: “People tirelessly admire the mountain peaks […] but they forget to examine themselves” ⁵This is the philosophical core: modern man directs his sovereign gaze upon the world, he describes, names, desires, appropriates – but he does not turn this gaze back upon himself. Rau and Dècle use this text with a double irony: for them, Petarca is not only the founder of humanism, but also the founder of... male gazebo —that imperious male gaze that objectifies what is described. Dominique Pelicot, a passionate cyclist, often conquered Mont Ventoux; it can be seen from the window of the house where the crimes took place, and it hangs as an abstract tapestry in the courtroom behind the judges. The mountain thus combines Renaissance subjectivism, Provençal topography, and crime scene geography into a single symbol—and Augustine's exhortation to examine oneself is addressed in the oratory to society as a whole: to the men who did not look, who did not denounce, who looked away.

Rau and Dècle use this text with a double meaning: for them, Petrarch is not only a cultural founding father, but also the originator of that sovereign, authoritarian, quasi-divine male perspective that appropriates everything described and desired, in a figurative or literal sense. ⁶The gaze that sweeps across the world from the mountaintop and places itself at the center would therefore be structurally related to the gaze of the men who filmed Gisèle Pelicot. Both gazes would constitute the object as available.

The prologue thus accomplishes several things: it situates the crimes within their cultural and historical context, it formulates an appeal for self-reflection (by the audience, the men, and society), and it establishes the interweaving of landscape, literary history, and violence as the text's fundamental pattern. The mountain in the courtroom—as an abstract tapestry behind the judges—connects the two spaces.

Dramaturgy of the 40 Fragments

The 40 fragments do not follow a strictly chronological order of proceedings, but rather a dramaturgical logic that can be described in concentric circles: from the outer legal shell to ever deeper layers of social, psychological and cultural explanation.

Fragment 0 – “Reconnaissez-vous les faits reprochés?” – is a pure roll-call piece, a procedure of calling names: the list of the 51 defendants, their brief yes, no, and evasive answers. For the audience, this opening is a shock of sheer volume. The no dominates; the nuanced formulations – “I acknowledge the actions, but not the intent” – ⁷“I am more the victim of an organized scheme.” ⁸ – already reveal the central problem of the trial: the linguistic erosion of the concept of crime. The fragment has a litany-like, hypnotic quality; the repetition of the question (anaphora) makes the structure of a failed collective accountability visible. The audience experiences the impossibility of a moral answer as a physical sensation.

Fragments 1–6 form the narrative core around the main character: Mazan's house (fragment 1), Gisèle's four years in hiding (fragment 2), the courtroom as a location (fragment 3), the indictment (fragment 4), the criminological Scenario type (Fragment 5), and Gisèle's first major monologue (Fragment 6). These fragments follow a logic of revelation: we move from external space (the house, the hall) to internal experience (Gisèle's testimony). The description of the house in Fragment 1—from the book by daughter Caroline Darian—is marked by an almost unbearable ambivalence: the house was beautiful, it was a place of joy, "of barbecues, conversations, and loud laughter." ⁹, and became the scene of the crime. The olive tree, planted as a symbol of hope after the birth of grandson Tom, the oleander, the view of the garrigue – these details are the material from which the bourgeois idyll, inhabited and destroyed by the perpetrator, is made.

Fragment 6, Gisèle's first appearance, is the dramatic centerpiece of the first half. The monologue is extended, interrupted by questions from the judge, and contains passages of enormous eloquence: "All these rape scenes I discovered in May, with dialogues of terrifying obscenity, when I see them, I tell myself that I have been sacrificed on the altar of vice. [...] They see me like a rag doll, a garbage bag." ¹⁰ The formulations possess a literary power that does not originate from Rau's pen, but from the actual protocol – which justifies Rau's decision not to fictionalize the material.

Fragments 7–13 radically expand the framework: they integrate journalistic voices, street interviews, feminist manifestos, and procedural struggles (for the public exposure of the video screenings). This is the democratic ecology of the process: society reacts. Fragment 7, Lola Lafon's Tribune “En faire un boucan d'enfer,” formulates the central paradox in a rhetorically pointed way: “If not all men are rapists, then apparently any man can be a rapist.” ¹¹ This tribune serves as a dramaturgical coda to the preceding material: it explains and generalizes what the trial shows.

The street interviews in Fragment 11 are particularly well-crafted from a dramaturgical perspective. They are short, rich in contrast, and show the full spectrum of societal reactions: from empathy to self-reflection ("This whole thing made me think about my own behavior. I used to sometimes exert too much influence on my ex-partners.") ¹² Regarding defense: “But they’re totally crazy. No, seriously, they’re psychopaths.” ¹³ to the point of anger ("They all need to be castrated.") ¹⁴This polyphony is not a democratic pluralism of arbitrariness, but a cartography of societal mechanisms of repression. The interview with the young woman at the bus stop is particularly insightful: she wishes that the men would not start with the question of why they didn't do it, but rather in what kind of world they might have done it.

Fragments 14–15 constitute the darkest section: the psychiatric description of the videos from the indictment and their public presentation. Rau makes an extreme formal decision here: he has the court file read aloud. The clinical language—"The flaccidity of the tissue, the drooping of the mouth and facial muscles, the loud snoring, the open mouth ultimately convey an impression of discomfort: at this level of sedation, the somnophilia could be reminiscent of necrophilia." ¹⁵ This is not an aestheticization of crime, but its coldest documentation. The immediacy of these descriptions is difficult for the theater audience to bear; but Rau stands by his decision: one must look. This is the point where the aesthetic form—the oratorio, the meditative lecture—is most strained and reveals its dual nature: it is simultaneously a sanctuary and a confrontation.

Fragments 16–21 are the sociological heart of the work: and thus, the perpetrators. Rau and Dècle make a courageous decision here: they give the perpetrators space. Not to excuse them, but to understand them. The sequence begins with fragment 16, the man who not Jérôme B., the truck driver who drove to Mazan, quits when he hears about the drug – thus establishing a kind of control group: When exactly is the step from hesitation to action taken?

Fragment 17, Christian L., the firefighter, is a masterful piece of perpetrator characterization. Rau presents a man who, in a lengthy biographical narrative, crafts a coherent, even noble, life story for himself: the hero of the missions, the family man, the departed, who carried the coffin of fallen comrades nine times. The perpetrator's story is not false—and that is precisely what makes it unbearable. The sentence, "In the videos, it's my body, but not my brain," ¹⁶ This is a theatrically powerful scene in the oratorio: absolute dissociation as a protective strategy. Fragment 18, the testimony of the firefighter colleague, confirms the perpetrator's good reputation without excusing it – and shows how the social environment constantly reconstitutes the perpetrator.

Fragment 20, concerning Christian L.'s pedophilic chat conversations, radically shatters the protective framework established by Fragment 17. The materials—explicit conversations about the sexual exploitation of children—are almost unbearable in their raw brutality. Rau opts for complete transparency: no paraphrasing commentary, but direct quotations from the investigation file. The effect is that of a second revelation: behind the understandable perpetrator lies another, even deeper abyss.

Fragment 21, featuring the psychiatric expert on the "complex MILF" and the connection between pornography consumption and rape aversion, provides a rationalizing counterpoint to this revelation. The figures – "90% of pornographic content does not depict simulated violence against women," "47% of boys believe that girls expect assault" – appear, after experiencing the preceding material, not as abstract statistics, but as causal explanations.

Fragments 22–33 broaden the investigation towards a systemic analysis: evolutionary biology (fragment 22, in which biologist Louve D. discusses the libido dominandi), detailed perpetrator biographies (Jean T., Jérôme V., Jean-Pierre M., Karine M.), the role of technology (fragment 28, the letter about Coco.fr and the Carnival effect the social networking of perpetrators), psychiatric expert opinions (fragment 32) and finally the Tribune des Hommes (Fragment 33): a manifesto signed by two hundred men containing a guide to action against patriarchal structures.

Fragment 30/31 (Karine M. and Jean-Pierre M.) is, in its structure, a kind of bourgeois tragedy in miniature: the wife, who still cannot understand her husband, who stays with him because the children need him, and he himself – a silent man traumatized by incest, who only begins to articulate the mechanisms of his perpetration in prison: “Silence is hell.” ¹⁷Fragment 31 shows how Rau adopts Weiss's method: The perpetrator's biography is not an excuse, but an explanation – and the two are not the same.

Fragment 34 is Dominique Pelicot's last major appearance. He speaks from an elevated position. ¹⁸ The courtroom setting is already a stage-worthy mise-en-scène. His final monologue is a prime example of the narcissistic clivage described by the psychiatrist: regret that always revolves around himself; his wife as a "saint" and "goddess," and as "not submissive, who must be dominated." ¹⁹The apology as a claim to power. The sentence "I wanted to make her submissive. In recent years, she said no more easily. I wanted her to pay the price of her freedom." ²⁰ This is the key sentence of the entire oratorio: It makes violence visible as a response to female autonomy.

Fragment 35, Gisèle's second monologue, concludes the perpetrator section. The sentence "For me, this is the process of cowardice" ²¹ This is her response to 51 men who didn't stop, didn't denounce anyone, didn't return. The apparent leniency towards Dominique Pelicot – which her defense attorneys point to – is not empathy for the perpetrator, but rather bearing witness to a story: "I had such a wonderful life with Mr. Pelicot, I had everything, I don't understand it." ²².

Fragments 36–39 expand the legal-political debate: Me Camus's plea for "free will" as the only common denominator among the perpetrators; the plea of ​​a defense attorney who calls Dominique Pelicot "our Roman Polanski of Vaucluse"; the text message dialogue (fragment 38) between two feminist activists about punitiveness and transformative justice. This dialogue is a formally bold interlude: a highly theoretical debate is conducted in the everyday language of text messages. The argument—based on Geoffroy de Lagasnerie's thesis that punishment prevents truth—remains deliberately unresolved. The oratorio offers no answer; it poses questions.

Representation of family, men, media and feminism

In the oratorio, family is portrayed as the primary site of violence and destruction. The Pelicot family—a supposedly ideal structure to which even outsiders refer ("You were the ideal couple")—is not merely a backdrop, but the scene of the crime. The perpetrators' families are also shown: Karine M., who nevertheless stays with her husband; Safira T., who feels guilty for not having warned anyone ("I could have saved this lady"); and Christian L.'s daughters, who are not allowed to go to prison. These families are not depicted as accomplices—they are secondary victims, and the oratorio insists on this distinction.

Men are portrayed in three categories that gradually dissolve: perpetrators, neutral witnesses, and reflective allies. The blurring of these categories is a central political thesis of Rau's work. The street interviews in Fragment 11 reveal how society's distancing strategies—"they are psychopaths, not people like you and me"—are systematically undermined. Fragment 33 (the men's tribune) shows the possible path of alliance—but with a self-critical tone that avoids performance.

The media are portrayed in a complex light. On the one hand, the journalists—Britta Sandberg, the Avignon correspondent for Ici Vaucluse—are the ones who actually provide the material from which the oratorio is made. They are allies. On the other hand, they produce the icon "Sainte Gisèle" (Fragment 10), which is no less problematic than its misogynistic counter-icon: The canonization of the survivor absolves society of the question of why it needs saints at all. The journalist who says, "She is the only one who doesn't matter" ²³ – this statement too is a media construct.

Feminism appears as a necessary and contradictory force. Fragment 12 shows the circle of witnesses on November 25: traumatic narratives, including the harrowing account of Cam from Marseille, who is ashamed of the video screening and makes this shame public. Fragment 38 reveals the fault line within feminism between punitiveness and transformative justice. Fragment 39 shows the final demonstration: the batucada, the slogans, the sirens. Rau does not idealize any of these positions; he shows them in their tension and vitality.

The pronouncement of judgment as ritual and as an open question

Fragment 40 is the end of the oratorio – and it is an end of extraordinary formal rigor and poetic force. A voice reads out the verdicts. The full name of the 51 condemned, their sentence, sentence by sentence. It is a pure list. No commentary, no music, no interpretation. The last sentence: "All guilty." ²⁴.

Then the epilogue: Gisèle Pelicot speaks before the court, outdoors, to the crowd. It is a political speech that ends with the concept of the future: “I now trust in our collective ability to shape a future in which every person, women and men, can live in harmony, respect, and mutual understanding.” ²⁵.

This ending is open to interpretation. It is not a triumphant finale: the oratorio has led us through too much abyss for the concluding formula to be read as a naive reconciliation. It is more of a promise—or a mandate. The epilogue is not one of the 40 fragments; it stands outside the numbering. In doing so, it marks what transcends the trial: not legal truth, but societal transformation.

The dramatic logic of the ending is reminiscent of ancient tragedies – Rau explicitly mentions in the preamble the Greek tradition of theater as a public service, as a duty upon returning from war. “Theatre makes it possible to confront brutality, to embrace complexity, to seek answers – and perhaps even to heal people.” ²⁶The play ends where catharsis is supposed to begin – not as a release, but as a call to action.

What Rough not shows – and why

The selection principles of the oratory are as revealing as the events depicted. Technical legal questions, for example, are only touched upon – by Grégory S.'s defense attorney, who criticizes the "pelying of the pain" – because Rau is not a trial observer in the legal sense, but rather a moral and political seismograph. Also noteworthy is his treatment of the political class: Fragment 39 explicitly mentions their absence – "Oh no, the politicians, in fact they were absent, completely absent." ²⁷ —and this void is political commentary through negation. Likewise, the oratorio consistently rejects any sentimentality: it does not show a weeping Gisèle as a victim-icon, but rather a political actor who observes, takes notes, and judges. The sparse didaskalia—"Gisèle Pelicot takes notes," "Gisèle Pelicot cleanses her eyelid"—give her a physical presence devoid of pathos.

And finally, the piece also refuses to provide a resolution: The SMS dialogue about punitivists ²⁸ and transformative justice in Fragment 38 ends without synthesis, the tension remains open – which is courageous from a didactic perspective and appropriate from a political one.

Overall political-poetic assessment

Rau's method is that of pluralistic documentaryism: he compiles without leveling. The 40 fragments each have a different state of aggregation—dossier, letter, street interview, tribunal plea, monologue, text message dialogue, tribune, song (the prologue is Petrarchan poetry)—and this formal diversity corresponds to the epistemological thesis underlying the oratorio: that a single perspective, a single discipline, a single voice is insufficient to understand what happened in Mazan. Only the polyphony—anthropology, psychiatry, feminism, perpetrator biography, victim testimony, street opinion, philosophy—creates a picture. And even this picture remains, as Rau and Dècle explicitly state, a marécage—a quagmire.

The effect on the audience—according to the accounts in the preamble and the logic of the form—is threefold: shock (the video sequences, the indictment), insight (the analytical passages, the perpetrators' biographies), and impetus for action (the women's manifestos, the epilogue). In the Weissian tradition, the oratorio is not aimed at catharsis in the Aristotelian sense—at relief through pity and horror—but rather at what Brecht called "alienation" and Weiss "enlightened indignation": a state of knowledge that allows no peace.

By largely dispensing with costumes, set design, and directing actors—the oratorio is a reading—Rau creates a space of maximum concentration on language itself. The bodies of the readers—actresses, activists, psychiatrists, lawyers, all at one lectern—are witnesses and transmitters simultaneously. They suffer, weep, explode, and support one another. The theater becomes a collective body that absorbs and disseminates individual trauma. "The collective effort is directed toward not sinking into the trauma." ²⁹This formulation is both a program and a practice.

The Oratory Le Procès Pelicot It is such a significant contemporary political theatre text – not despite its formal austerity, but precisely because of it. It bears witness. And it demands the same from the audience.

1. “Gisèle a fait de son procès un theater, elle accepte donc volontiers que nous fassions du theater un procès.”>>>
2. “This is also the process of Pelicot: a documentary oeuvre of the theater that describes the structure quotidienne, inconscient and effective, of violence in our society, simple and profoundly dérangeante comme un chant archaïque.”>>>
3. “N'oublie pas de te regarder toi-même.”>>>
4. “Poussé par le seul désir de voir un lieu d'une altitude also remarquable”>>>
5. “Les hommes don't let themselves pass the admirer la cime des montagnes [...] mais ils oublient de s'examiner eux-mêmes”>>>
6. “au sens figuré or au sens propre”>>>
7. “Je reconnais les acts mais pas l'intention”>>>
8. “Je suis plutôt victime de ruse organisée”>>>
9. “des barbecues, des discussions, des fous rires”>>>
10. "Toutes ces scènes de viol que je découvre au mois de mai, avec des dialogues d'une obscénité terrifiante, quand je les vois, je me dis que j'ai été sacrifiée sur l'autel du vice. […] Ils me voient comme une poupée de chiffon, un sac-poubelle.">>>
11. “If all men don't have the same son, they can also have their own clothes.”>>>
12. "Ça m'a amené à réfléchir sur mes propres comportements, this affaire. Parfois, avant, j'insistais trop avec mes ex.">>>
13. "mais eux, quand même, c'est des barjos. Non c'est vrai, c'est des psychopathes">>>
14. “Il faut tous les castrer.”>>>
15. “La flaccidité des tissus, la ptose de la bouche et des muscles faciaux, les ronflements sonores, bouche ouverte, achèvent de thunder une impression de malaise: la somnophilie, à un tel degré de sédation, pourrait évoquer la nécrophilie”>>>
16. “Sur les vidéos c'est mon corps, mais c'est pas mon cerveau”>>>
17. “Le silence, c’est l’enfer”>>>
18. “Depuis son box qui surplombe la salle d'audience, il semble dominer l'assemblée”>>>
19. “Soumettre une femme insoumise”>>>
20. "You want to return soumise. Dans les dernières années de relation elle arrivait mieux à dire non. J'ai voulu lui faire payer le prix de sa liberté">>>
21. “Pour moi c'est le procès de la lâcheté”>>>
22. “J'ai eu une vie tellement chouette avec M. Pelicot, j'ai eu tout, je ne comprends pas”>>>
23. “C'est la seule qui ne joue pas un rôle”>>>
24. “All culpables”>>>
25. “I have confidence in our ability to speak collectively and have access to the lequel chacun, women and men, who live in harmony, in respect and mutual understanding”>>>
26. “Le theater permet d'affronter la brutalité, d'embrasser la complexité, chercher des réponses - and peut-être même de soigner les humains”>>>
27. “Ah non, pas les politiques, en fait ils étaient absents, totalement absents”>>>
28. By punitivism, I mean the view that justice is primarily achieved through punishment—the harsher the punishment, the greater the justice. In the context of the Pelicot trial, this means specifically: the demand for the longest possible prison sentences, for castration, for the lifelong exclusion of perpetrators from society. This stance is, of course, emotionally understandable and politically widespread, including within feminist circles. The text message dialogue in Fragment 38 contrasts it with transformative justice—a tradition that originated in Black American feminism of the 1980s and 1990s and poses the question differently: not "how do we punish the perpetrator," but "how do we heal the victim, how does the community change, how do we prevent it from happening again?" From this perspective, prison is not seen as a solution, but as a displacement of violence.>>>
29. “L'effort collectif s'applique à ne pas sombrer dans le trauma”>>>