The Freytag: Shame Changes Sides

FEUILLETON

On October 16, 1793, Marie Antoinette died under the guillotine, following a trial that also served as a form of public exposure. Gisèle Pelicot has rewritten the rules of such spectacles—redefining who is subjected to public shaming, and who has the power to inflict it.

Two Courtrooms

There are evenings when a room is quieter than the number of people present would suggest. Last week, on the Wednesday evening of the Frankfurt Book Fair, the German National Library on Adickesallee was one such place. The event was sold out; those who could not secure a seat followed via a live stream. On the podium sat a seventy-three-year-old woman whose face the world has come to recognize from images emerging from Avignon: Gisèle Pelicot. She had come to present her memoirs, and the evening was framed by a phrase that has become something of a rallying cry since the autumn of 2024: “Shame must change sides.”

Two hundred and thirty-three years earlier—on this very date—another trial concluded in a dimly lit hall within the Palais de Justice in Paris. Around four in the morning, following two days of proceedings, the Revolutionary Tribunal delivered its verdict against the defendant, then referred to only as the “Widow Capet.” When asked if she had anything further to say, she shook her head. A few hours later, Marie Antoinette—her hands bound behind her back, her hair shorn short—was transported in an open cart to the Place de la Révolution.

Two courtrooms, two women, two public spheres. One should not be too quick to draw a parallel between them; the former was a deposed queen accused of treason, while the latter is the victim of crimes of such magnitude that they defy all imagination. And yet, both scenes are linked by a question as old as the public sphere itself: who is to be shamed before the eyes of all—and who has the right to do so?

The Accusation Behind the Accusation

The trial of Marie Antoinette was, from a legal standpoint, a mere formality. The verdict had been decided before the public prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, even opened his files. She was accused of conspiring with foreign powers, squandering the state treasury, and exerting influence over the weak-willed King. Much of this could be justified on political grounds, and some of it was not entirely unfounded; for a Republic at war, a Habsburg at liberty posed a genuine risk.

Yet, running parallel to this indictment was a second one—one that had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with humiliation. Jacques-René Hébert, editor of the coarse, popular rag *Le Père Duchesne*, appeared as a witness and leveled an accusation involving her eight-year-old son—a claim that had been coerced from the boy while he was in prison. It was monstrous, and it was a fabrication. At first, the accused remained silent. When a juror pressed her for an answer, she replied that nature itself refused to respond to such an allegation against a mother: "I appeal to all the mothers present here."

Accounts from the time suggest that the courtroom grew restless, and women in the galleries began to weep. According to an eyewitness, Robespierre—over dinner—flew into a rage at Hébert’s stupidity; his anger stemmed less from compassion than from cold calculation, for the accusation had, for a fleeting moment, restored to the accused the very dignity they had sought to strip away.

Hébert had invented nothing that had not already appeared in print. Since the 1780s, hundreds of scurrilous pamphlets—known as *libelles*—had circulated in Paris, turning the Queen’s body into a stage for political fantasies. The historian Lynn Hunt has shown how, in these pamphlets, the woman at the king’s side was portrayed as the embodiment of all the corruption of the *Ancien Régime*. This sexualized slander was not a mere peripheral aberration; it was a political language. To dishonor the queen’s body was to desecrate the monarchy.

The Hunt for Hypocrites

In her book *On Revolution*, Hannah Arendt offers an explanation for why the French Revolution intruded so relentlessly into the private lives of its enemies. Her key concept is what she terms "the social": with the incursion of poverty—the stark destitution of the masses—into the political sphere, the Revolution shifted its focus from the establishment of freedom to the alleviation of suffering. Compassion became a political virtue, and such compassion, Arendt argues, knows no bounds. It demands authenticity; it demands that the heart be laid bare.

This gave rise to what Arendt calls the "hunt for hypocrites." Anyone who demands that virtue stem from one’s innermost being must inevitably suspect a lie behind every façade. The revolutionaries sought to tear the masks from people’s faces. Arendt reminds us that the Latin word *persona* originally referred to an actor’s mask, and in Roman law, it evolved into the concept of a "legal person"—a protective space that renders an individual visible as a bearer of rights without stripping them entirely bare. To tear away the mask does not reveal the "true" human being; it reveals only a defenseless body.

This is precisely what occurred in October 1793. The Queen was stripped of more than just her crown; she was stripped of her *persona*. The tribunal did not merely seek to convict a traitor; it aimed to unmask a hypocrite—a bad mother, a dissolute woman. Public shaming served as proof of the accusers’ own virtue. Shame was meted out like a verdict preceding the actual judgment.

The Scaffold as a Stage

In *Discipline and Punish*, Michel Foucault begins with one of the most brutal scenes in the history of European penal justice: the execution of the would-be regicide Damiens in 1757. Through this event, he develops his thesis regarding the "spectacle of punishment"—the idea that the sovereign’s power was manifested upon the tortured body of the condemned, with the public serving not merely as spectators, but as witnesses and active participants. Punishment required a public audience because it was, in essence, a message.

The guillotine was intended to break with this tradition. It was conceived as a humane, egalitarian machine—swift, uniform for all, and devoid of torture. Yet, the final journey of Marie Antoinette reveals the extent to which the old spectacle persisted within this new mechanism. In January, Louis XVI had been transported to the scaffold in a closed carriage; his widow, however, was denied such discretion. She was conveyed in an open cart—much like any common criminal—past a crowd that had gathered to watch.

From a window on the Rue Saint-Honoré, Jacques-Louis David sketched her as she passed by. The drawing, now held in the Louvre, depicts a woman sitting upright, her lips pressed together, wearing a simple cap; she appears far older than her thirty-seven years. It is an image devoid of any mercy—and, for that very reason, a deeply unsettling document. The painter of the Revolution captured precisely what the Revolution sought to display: a dethroned woman, visibly marked by humiliation. That this same posture might also be interpreted as dignity was certainly not his intention.

Today, anyone walking through Lucerne who pauses before the *Dying Lion*—carved into the living rock—encounters the other side of this same history. The monument commemorates the Swiss Guards who perished during the storming of the Tuileries in August 1792, while attempting to protect the royal family. The queen is not to be seen on the relief. She is the absent figure for whom men died, even before she herself was put on display.

Avignon, with Doors Wide Open

And now, Avignon, in the autumn of 2024. Dominique Pelicot and fifty other men stood before the criminal court of the Vaucluse department. For nearly a decade, he had drugged his wife and invited strangers to sexually assault her. He recorded these acts. The footage was only discovered when the police were investigating an unrelated offense. In December, he was sentenced to twenty years in prison, and all his co-defendants were found guilty.

The court could have held the trial behind closed doors—a protection French law specifically provides for victims in such cases. Gisèle Pelicot declined this. She insisted that the doors remain open, that the press be allowed to report, and that the presentation of evidence not take place in private. She chose to forgo her anonymity—not in spite of the potential impact of public scrutiny, but precisely because she understood what that scrutiny could achieve.

Herein lies the true reversal—one far more precise than the popular catchphrase might suggest. Historically, public proceedings concerning sexual violence have followed a silent choreography: the victim was forced to account for herself, her life was placed under a microscope, and her credibility was put on trial. Shame clung to her, while the perpetrators remained shielded by the very anonymity their own actions had created. Pelicot upended this order. She made herself visible in order to direct the gaze where it truly belonged. It was not her body that was on trial, but the actions of the men—men whose names were now laid bare.

What she accomplished can be understood through the lens of Hannah Arendt: she forged a persona for herself. She did not discard the "mask" that the law provides; rather, she consciously donned it—as a witness, as a plaintiff, and as a citizen. This fundamentally distinguishes her appearance from the scene in 1793. Marie Antoinette was stripped bare. Gisèle Pelicot chose to reveal herself. The difference does not lie in the visibility; it lies in the question of who has control over her.

The Limits of Transparency

At this point, one must exercise caution—even regarding one’s own enthusiasm. In his book *The Transparency Society*, Byung-Chul Han warns against conflating visibility with truth, or disclosure with freedom. A society that puts everything on display no longer possesses any sense of distance; and without distance, Han argues, there can be no shame in its protective sense—no hesitation, no consideration, no space left shielded from the gaze. For him, total transparency is a form of violence, precisely because it masquerades as liberation.

One might therefore ask whether the Pelicot case has itself become part of the very logic of exposure that it seeks to combat. The photographers gathered outside the courthouse, the murals, the posters that have turned her face into an icon—all of this sets in motion a dynamic that eludes the control of the person most affected. Even a column such as this one is part of that same phenomenon. I am writing about a woman I do not know, using her fate to develop an idea. This is the age-old temptation of the *feuilleton*—to transform the suffering of others into insight, while forgetting that for those involved, it is no mere metaphor.

Han describes a public sphere in which everyone becomes an exhibitor of their own self. Pelicot has done something different. She did not put her innermost self on display; rather, she brought a legal process into the public eye. She did not demand transparency regarding her own person, but rather accountability from others. This is the distinction between exhibitionism and bearing witness—and it is a crucial one. The question remains, however, whether a media-driven public sphere—which thrives on the act of exposure—can sustain this distinction in the long run.

Who Has the Right to Shame?

In his theses "On the Concept of History," Walter Benjamin wrote a sentence that takes on an unexpected sharpness when one thinks of Marie Antoinette: "Even the dead will not be safe from the enemy, if he wins." The Queen is a case in point. After her death, her image was distorted just as much as it had been during her lifetime—first as a depraved spendthrift, then as a holy martyr of the Restoration, and finally as a fashion icon, a cinematic figure, and the source of a quote about cake that she never actually uttered. Every era has laid claim to her.

Elsewhere in the same theses, Benjamin speaks of a "tiger’s leap into the past"—a moment when the present seizes upon a fragment of history because it suddenly begins to speak to it. Perhaps the time has come to view the trial of 1793 through a different lens: not as the tragedy of a fallen ruler, but as an early object lesson in the politics of shame. It reveals how a revolution, launched in the name of human rights, employed the sexualized humiliation of a woman as a weapon—and how a single sentence—an appeal to the mothers present in the courtroom—was able, for one fleeting moment, to reverse the direction of that shame.

This brings us to the question that connects both settings. Public shaming is a form of power; for a long time, it was the prerogative of those who controlled the sphere of visibility—sovereigns, tribunals, pamphleteers, the majority. Those who were shamed generally lacked the means to redirect the gaze of others. What is new in the Pelicot case is not that the perpetrators are being shamed. What is new is that a woman—who had lost every form of protection one could possibly lose—has reclaimed control over that sphere of visibility.

It remains a cautionary reminder. Even shaming in the name of justice can become excessive; Arendt demonstrated where compassion that knows no bounds can lead. The assertion that “shame must change sides” is not a blank check for the pillory. Rather, it is a demand upon the law—a requirement that the burden of shame should rest where responsibility lies, and nowhere else.

Two hundred and thirty-three years ago today, shortly after midday, the blade fell on the Place de la Révolution. The crowd cried out, “Long live the Republic!” Marie Antoinette had been unable to defend her dignity before the tribunal—save for a single sentence. Last week, in Frankfurt, there sat a woman whom no one had managed to silence. Between these two moments, there is no straight line of progress. Yet, there is an insight—one that took a long time to arrive at—that shame is not the price one pays for suffering, but rather the burden that accompanies an act.

Sapere aude!

S.

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