France: The Freedom to Importune, and the Trial That Moved the Shame

Most countries that went through #MeToo argued about facts. Did it happen, how often, who knew. France argued about something else, and the difference is the reason it belongs in this chamber. France argued about whether ambiguity — the unstated, the half-offered, the advance that might or might not be wanted — was a thing worth protecting.

It could argue about that because, unusually, it had written its position down. There is a French literature, stretching back decades and drawing on centuries, that treats the mixed company of men and women as a civilisation rather than a battlefield and treats the game of approach and refusal as the substance of eroticism rather than its obstacle. When the American movement arrived in 2017, it did not land on an undefended culture. It landed on a defended one, and the defence was published within three months.

This essay follows that argument from the letter of January 2018 to the trial in Avignon in the autumn of 2024 and the consent law of 2025, because the sequence is the point. France did the cultural fight first, in public and at length, and the legal reform last. Japan, as this chamber has already found, did the legal reform first and the cultural fight almost not at all. Neither order is complete. What the French case adds is a way of telling two kinds of ambiguity apart — and that distinction, not the vocabulary, is what a reader here can actually use.

The claim that France is different in this respect is not a foreign stereotype. It is a French argument, made by French writers, about France. Its most serious form holds that the relations between men and women in France were shaped by the mixed salon, by a tradition of gallantry in which the approach was ritualised and the refusal was expected to be graceful, and by a habit of treating the sexes as partners in a shared civility rather than as parties to a conflict. On this account the American way — rules, complaints, procedures, the presumption that an advance is a threat until proven otherwise — is not more advanced. It is a different and poorer settlement, in which the pleasure of the game has been traded for the safety of the rulebook.

This position has serious authors and it should be stated at its strongest, because the essay is going to hold it against something and a weak version would prove nothing. Its strongest form says: ambiguity is not a defect of erotic life but its medium. The moment of not knowing whether the other person wants this, and the small moves by which two people find out, is where desire lives. Remove it — require that every step be requested and granted in words — and you have not made intimacy safe. You have made it administrative.

The chamber has met a version of this argument before, in Spain, where a Catholic moral order gave way to a public language of desire. The French case is different in that the language of desire was never suppressed. It was the official culture. Which is why, when the reckoning came, it took the form it did.

In January 2018, three months after the American movement began and its French counterpart had launched under a cruder hashtag, a hundred women published a letter in Le Monde. Its signatories included one of the country’s most famous actresses and one of its best-known writers on sexuality. Its central sentence defended what it called a freedom to importune — to bother, to press, to make an unwanted advance — as indispensable to sexual freedom.

The letter made two claims that its critics and its defenders have both tended to run together. The first was procedural: that the movement had become a public denunciation without trial, in which men were named and finished before anything was established. The second was substantive: that an advance which is clumsy, insistent or unwelcome is not the same thing as an assault, that the movement was collapsing the distinction, and that a culture which cannot tell the two apart is a puritan culture in which women are cast as permanent victims.

The reaction was immediate and it split along a line the letter had not anticipated. Women who had experienced coercion read the phrase about a freedom to importune as a description of the thing that had been done to them, dressed as sophistication. Within days the most famous signatory published a second text, apologising to victims who had been hurt by the letter while standing by its argument about justice. The apology was itself telling. It conceded that the sentence had landed on people for whom the ambiguity being defended had not been a game.

The counter-thesis this essay is required to hold is that the defence of ambiguity as erotic sophistication and the defence of ambiguity as cover for coercion can be, word for word, the same sentence — and that the difference between them is not in the sentence. It is in who is speaking and what they have already decided.

Consider the letter’s central claim spoken by two people. The first is a woman describing her own erotic life: she enjoys not knowing, she enjoys the approach, she does not want a rulebook between herself and the man across the table, and she is entirely capable of ending the game with a word if it stops being one. The second is a man describing the same situation from the other side, and what he means by the freedom to importune is the freedom to keep going after the word has been said, on the grounds that the word is part of the game.

The first person is describing a shared ambiguity. Both parties are inside it, both are enjoying it, and either can end it. The second is describing an imposed one. One party has decided in advance what the ambiguity means, and the other party’s attempts to leave it are being read as moves within it. The sentence is identical. The structure is opposite.

This gives a test that does not depend on vocabulary at all. Ambiguity is shared when both people hold the exit — when either can say a plain sentence and have it end things. Ambiguity is imposed when one of them has lost the exit: when the plain sentence has been reclassified as coyness, or when the situation has been arranged so that no plain sentence is available. The letter defended the first. Its critics had experienced the second. They were not, in the end, disagreeing about the same thing.

A country that had theorised seduction so carefully turned out to have left something out of its law, and the omission is instructive. Until 2021, French law set no age below which a child was simply deemed unable to consent to sex. Rape required proof of violence, constraint, threat or surprise, and in the absence of that proof the question of whether a child had consented could be, and in a small number of notorious cases was, put to a court.

The cases that forced the change involved girls of eleven. In one, prosecutors initially charged a man in his twenties with the lesser offence rather than rape because the child had not physically resisted, and the public reaction to that reasoning was what finally moved the legislature. A law of April 2021 set a threshold of fifteen, and eighteen where the adult is a relative or has authority, below which no defence of consent is available.

The point for this essay is not that France was uniquely lax. Several countries with reputations for propriety had comparable gaps, and this chamber has already found that the threshold in Japan sat at thirteen from 1907 until 2023. The point is that a culture organised around the sophistication of ambiguity had, for a very long time, no floor beneath it. Ambiguity had been defended so successfully as a value that the law had not been asked to say where it could not apply.

In September 2024 a trial opened in Avignon that ended the argument, or at least the version of it that had been available since 2018. A man in his seventies from a village in the Vaucluse was charged with drugging his wife over nearly a decade and inviting men he found online to rape her while she was unconscious. Fifty men stood trial beside him. They were, by every account, ordinary: tradesmen, a nurse, a journalist, a soldier, men with families, from within a short drive of the house.

The wife could have had the trial held behind closed doors. She refused, and she refused the anonymity she was entitled to, on the stated grounds that the shame was not hers to carry. The sentence that came to be attached to the trial — that shame must change sides — was not new to French feminism, but it had never before been demonstrated in a courtroom with the doors open and the press inside.

What the trial did to the argument of 2018 was structural, and it is worth being precise. The defence of ambiguity requires that there be some ambiguity to defend. Here there was none: the woman was unconscious. And yet a substantial number of the accused offered, in their own defence, a version of the letter’s logic — that the husband had consented on her behalf, that they had believed the arrangement was a game the couple played, that the absence of refusal was permission. The trial exposed the imposed ambiguity of the earlier section in its purest form: consent delegated to somebody else, and a woman’s silence read as a move in a game she was not in.

In December 2024 every one of the fifty-one defendants was found guilty. The husband received the maximum term. The verdict settled the facts of the case. What it settled in the culture was different: it made it impossible, for the moment, to say the sentence about a freedom to importune without the image of that courtroom arriving with it.

Within a year the legislature did what it had declined to do for decades. In the autumn of 2025 France wrote consent into the legal definition of rape and sexual assault. The text defines consent as free and informed, specific, prior and revocable; says that it is to be assessed in the light of the circumstances; and states that it cannot be inferred from silence alone or from the mere absence of reaction. The last clause is the letter of 2018 answered in statute.

This chamber has already found that Japan did the reverse. Its 2023 revision replaced a framework built on resistance with one built on whether consent was genuinely possible, and it did so without the culture having moved first; the people who forced the change paid for it individually, and the social permission to speak in an ordinary room barely shifted. France ran the sequence the other way round. It had the cultural argument in public for seven years, it had the trial, and only then did it write the standard down.

It is tempting to rank the two orders and the essay declines to. A law without a culture reaches only the cases that get to court, which in both countries is a small fraction. A culture without a law leaves the floor undefined, which is how a country of seduction came to have no age of consent. The honest finding is that each country has done the half the other has not, and that neither half, alone, changes whether a woman can end an evening with a plain sentence and have it hold.

What a reader here is most likely to take from France is the wrong thing: that the answer to the grey zone is more explicitness, that a culture of unstated wants should become a culture of stated ones, and that the way to be safe is to say everything. This essay’s reading is different, and it follows from the distinction drawn earlier.

The problem in the imposed ambiguity was never that too little was said. In the courtroom at Avignon, a great deal was said — by the men, about what they had believed. The problem was that the exit had been removed: there was no sentence the woman could say that would have ended it, because she was not able to say anything, and the men had arranged their understanding so that her silence counted as a yes. The French argument, at its best, was never about the quantity of words. It was about who holds the exit.

This bears on the script this chamber has read several times — the ideal in which a considerate adult reads what is not said, in which restraint is a virtue, and in which having to say the plain sentence is a small failure for everybody. France defended ambiguity as a pleasure. That script enforces it as a courtesy. They arrive at the same difficulty from opposite directions: in both, the person who needs the exit finds that the plain sentence has been made expensive — in one case because it is unsophisticated, in the other because it is rude. A woman here who cannot find the sentence that would end an evening is not in a different situation from the woman the letter’s critics were describing. She is in the same one, with better manners.

This chamber has held that consent is a conversation that keeps going, and that on the night one needs to talk one needs a word. The French case adds the reason those two findings matter: not because words are safer than silence, but because a conversation is the only arrangement in which the exit stays available to both people at every point. Shared ambiguity survives a plain sentence. Imposed ambiguity cannot, which is how one tells them apart.

The essay refuses three readings. The first is that France is decadent and got what it deserved — that a culture which defended seduction produced Mazan. The men in that courtroom were not products of a philosophy. The trial is evidence that the imposed version of ambiguity exists, not that the shared version caused it, and a reader who concludes that eroticism should be administered has learned the wrong lesson from a case in which nothing erotic occurred.

The second is that the signatories of 2018 were apologists. Some of the letter’s claims have aged badly and its central phrase was, at best, carelessly chosen. But the strongest form of its argument — that a culture unable to tell an unwelcome advance from an assault will end by treating every woman as a victim and every man as a suspect — is not answered by the trial, and remains an argument a serious person can hold. The essay has tried to separate what the letter defended from what its critics had experienced, rather than to declare a winner.

The third is that Japan should copy France, or that France should have copied Japan. The sequences are different and both are incomplete; the useful comparison is the mechanism, not the model.

Its limits are these. The French intellectual tradition on gallantry and mixed company is characterised here at a level of generality that flattens a real literature with real disagreements inside it. The trial is described from the public record and no claim is made about the individual defendants beyond the verdicts. The 2025 law is described by its principal clauses and its practical effect is not yet measurable. National surveys of sexual behaviour in France, which record both a rise in the share of women reporting forced sex over recent decades and a decline in sexual activity, are cited directionally and their figures are deliberately not quoted, because the essay makes no prevalence claim and the numbers move. And the essay is written by an outsider to both cultures it compares.

This house sells evenings, and the evenings are organised so that the exit is built before anything begins: a form states what is wanted and what is not, a word is agreed that ends anything without explanation, and the person providing the evening is bound by it and has no standing to reinterpret it. In the terms of this essay, the house sells shared ambiguity with the exit guaranteed — the pleasure the letter defended, minus the risk its critics described.

That is a product, and the house benefits from the fear that makes it one. A woman who has learned, from her own history or from the grey zone this essay describes, that a plain sentence may not hold is a woman for whom a room where it is guaranteed to hold has a value. The house should say that plainly rather than pretending the value comes from anywhere else.

What it must not claim follows. Nothing here is a model for how an ordinary evening between two people should be run; a courtship conducted by form and safeword would be the administrative eroticism the French argument rightly feared. Nothing here teaches a woman to hold the exit in a room where nobody guaranteed it. And nothing here is a contribution to any movement, in either country. What one evening can honestly offer is a single experience of ambiguity that stays shared to the end — of finding, once, that the plain sentence was available the whole time and that saying it changed nothing about the pleasure. Whether that experience travels is not in the house’s gift.