Sexual Violence. Nicolas Bedos: What Should We Learn from His Book After His Conviction?

La Soif de honte is an autobiographical tale in which Nicolas Bedos engages in a dialogue with himself as if in a theatrical inner courtroom, where he plays the roles of both judge and accused. By avoiding a feverish monologue, the comedian protects himself from overly crude confessions, while still giving the illusion of brutal lucidity.

The "you" becomes a character in its own right, a literary doppelgänger who carries the darkest or most shameful aspects of his psyche. He writes: "The evil double who, on certain nights, takes hold of you and lives in the illusion that the world is a vast playground."

He plays the victim

Prosopopoeia, a rhetorical device consisting of making an abstract or absent entity speak, is diverted by Bedos to engage in a singular shirking of responsibility, as if he were the plaything of another, morally ambiguous self. By externalizing his faults, Bedos also makes his "double" a convenient scapegoat.

Addressing this evil "you," the 46-year-old actor and director portrays his own excesses, the part of himself that gives in to vanity, self-destruction, or the quest for recognition. The son of comedian Guy Bedos presents himself as a victim: of his alcoholism; of a rape suffered at the hands of a "person, much admired at the time" and against whom he "never considered filing a complaint."

By imagining this "you" as a dark alter ego , he approaches shame and ego with ironic detachment—the hallmark of a man perpetually torn between self-deprecation and sincerity. He plays on it. He writes: "You ask me if your book seems honest to me? Yes and no. It is because you say everything you feel and everything you think; it is not because you have not questioned yourself enough to reveal other thoughts."

Figures of speech and full light

As a master of rhetoric confronted with the collapse of his reputation, Nicolas Bedos deploys another strategy to defuse accusations of victimization, insincerity, or self-serving attempts at rehabilitation: argumentative prolepsis. A rhetorical device that consists of anticipating objections or criticisms in order to respond to them in advance, thus strengthening his argument.

"Mediapart will take you apart, Libération will write that your book is a disguised plea, that you're not so much thirsting for shame as for rehabilitation. That you want to pass yourself off as a victim. That you don't take responsibility for anything. They'll say that you're in control of everything, even your shame, even your fall, and that you find a way to still be the hero of this story. They'll be partly wrong because you don't spare yourself and you do a job that many men don't do, but they'll be right because you don't take enough time to look back."

By using words and rhetoric, Nicolas Bedos puts himself back in the spotlight, unlike the filmmaker Samuel Theis, who withdrew from promoting his film Je le jure (I Swear ), or Joachim Lafosse, who refused to present his film, Les Petits voleurs (The Little Thieves), at the Cannes Film Festival . His discourse on the "grey areas of a changing society," as his publisher calls them, puts his behavior into perspective by placing it in a broader societal context, minimizing his individual responsibility.

The Thirst for Shame is undoubtedly indicative of societal tensions in the face of sexual violence; it is also a man's plea for a form of understanding and empathy. Even an apology: "What matters is that I caused harm. Most often without meaning to, but I did it."