Domination masculine

Domination masculine names the unequal power between men and women that the novel makes visible in two sharply contrasting settings: a household conversation and a rape trial. Jean Farel treats women’s testimony about coercion as an attack on ordinary relations between the sexes; the defense of Mila Wizman insists that pressure, fear, and traumatic immobility cannot be reduced to a failure to say no. The contrast shifts the question from whether a woman visibly resisted to whose account of power is believed.

A domestic argument about power

Jean raises the subject while his young wife, Quitterie, feeds their little daughter. He predicts that public controversies between men and women will lead to mutual incomprehension and separation, and says that he now leaves his office door open when receiving a woman. His worry is framed as a loss of ordinary intimacy: he fears that men will no longer dare to flirt, kiss without first obtaining consent, or even joke and behave warmly toward women.

Quitterie rejects the scale of his prediction. She says women are not asking for separation, but for respect and a fairer distribution of power. When Jean argues that anyone who feels under another’s power must free themselves, she answers that this is easier to say than to do. His advice to assert oneself and say no meets her reminder that doing so is not always possible. The exchange makes their disagreement concrete: Jean describes power as something an individual can simply refuse, while Quitterie points to the constraints that make refusal difficult.

Jean’s language then turns accusation into a general account of women’s behavior. He says he has known women who used men as stepping-stones and went to bed with them without being threatened, and condemns those who later denounce men online as hypocrites. Quitterie identifies the coercion he leaves out: the threat was insidious, because women understood that advancement required submission. His dismissal of talk about male domination therefore sits beside an account of professional pressure that is not reducible to an explicit threat.

Power inside the couple

The dispute returns from public debate to the couple’s own arrangements. Quitterie laughs with their daughter in her arms and asks who decides everything in their relationship. Jean answers that she does, insisting that he does everything she wants. The juxtaposition complicates the confidence of his earlier pronouncements: when invited to examine power at home, he describes himself as wholly compliant, even as Quitterie’s question challenges that self-description.

The scene gives the argument a domestic setting rather than leaving it at the level of political slogans. Their child is present throughout: Quitterie feeds her, holds her, and finally places her in Jean’s arms. The ordinary acts of care surround a disagreement about who has agency and whose account of a relationship should be trusted. Jean’s broad claim that men risk losing the ability to approach women is set against Quitterie’s narrower demand for respect and a more balanced share of power.

The trial’s account of coercion

The later account of Mila’s assault gives the debate’s abstract terms a specific and devastating referent. The trial advocate describes repeated forced penetration, an insult, and a knife whose presence Mila feared. A witness, the advocate argues, had reason to tell the truth despite having much to lose. Mila did not call out because she thought resistance could make the danger worse. Her stillness is presented not as agreement but as a survival response: in a state of traumatic shock, a person may be unable to reason or organize resistance.

The advocate also addresses the social imbalance between Mila and Alexandre Farel. Mila, from a practicing Jewish middle-class family, felt out of place and lacked the interpretive codes that might have helped her understand how he was treating her. The argument is not that these circumstances make her responsible for what happened; it is that Alexandre recognized her vulnerability and exploited it. She had not wanted to drink or smoke, and had never wanted to end the evening in a refuse room or have sex with him. The advocate allows that she may have wanted a kiss, perhaps, while distinguishing that possibility from consent to what followed.

The account traces coercion beyond the assault itself. Mila later blamed herself for failing to oppose Alexandre, feared that he had a knife, felt ashamed and dirty, and came to hate and mistreat her body. She wore loose black clothes to hide it from men and told men she met that she had uterine cancer in order to keep them at a distance. These behaviors are described as efforts to survive and protect herself, not as evidence that she had consented.

Denial, testimony, and the aftermath

The four-day trial intensifies the conflict over who gets to define the encounter. Mila’s sexual history is examined, and the proceedings raise the implication that she was not as innocent as she claimed. Alexandre, according to the advocate, repeatedly denies the truth and adds a claim he had not made before: that Mila experienced pleasure. The advocate rejects that claim and returns the focus to what the trial has done to her: the experts said she had reached rock bottom, she had mistreated her body, and she had cried throughout the two years since the assault.

The speech connects Mila’s case to the broader release of women’s testimony following the Weinstein affair and the growth of #MeToo and #BalanceTonPorc. It presents the end of silence and shame as a historic change whose first effects are only beginning to appear, while warning that the change is not secured merely because women have begun to speak. The reference to Gisèle Halimi’s defense of two young women raped by three men, roughly forty years earlier, places the trial within a longer struggle to recognize rape as a crime and to challenge the cultural arrangements that enable it.

The advocate’s closing appeal is that the jurors tell Mila that shame belongs to the aggressor, not to her. Her continuing nightmares, avoidance, and difficulty leaving home show that speaking in court does not undo the harm. The speech also sets the case against a world in which a privileged caste assumes that everything is owed to it and everything is permitted. Jean’s earlier fear that men will be unable to flirt or joke is thus placed beside a more consequential question: whether a woman’s vulnerability and lack of outward resistance will be treated as permission, or whether the power behind them will be recognized.

Narrative significance

The concept emerges through a deliberate contrast in voices. In the domestic scene, Jean treats women’s public complaints as a threat to ordinary relations and casts women as manipulators; Quitterie answers by naming submission under an insidious threat. At the trial, the advocate supplies the circumstances that Jean’s generalization erases: unequal social position, fear, bodily immobility, self-blame, and the long aftermath of violence. The scenes do not equate an argument about changing social norms with Mila’s assault; rather, the trial makes the stakes of misreading power unmistakable.

The novel also shows domination operating through competing descriptions of events. Alexandre’s account casts Mila as attracted and consenting, while the advocate reconstructs the encounter through her vulnerability, refusal, fear, and suffering. The dispute is not only about what happened but about which person’s interpretation is allowed to count as reality. By ending the argument over power with an appeal to place shame on the aggressor, the trial speech challenges the inherited reflex to scrutinize the victim’s conduct before recognizing coercion.