Indeed, there is a near consensus among campaigners and experts that things are, instead, deteriorating.
“Unfortunately, the government does not react,” said Céline Piques, pointing to statistics showing that conviction rates are flat-lining despite a sharp rise in reported rape cases.
“The picture is bleak. There is a backlash. Rape culture ideas are coming back very strongly. We can see this with the masculinist movement rising in popularity, especially with young boys and teenagers,” added Alyssa Ahrabare, also citing the rise of deep-fake pornography.
In the midst of a financial and political crisis in France, with public debt soaring, and the country having five prime ministers in the past two years, the government has strongly defended its record, saying it has made “decisive” changes, including trebling spending in this field in the past five years – an “unprecedented” increase.
However, a scathing Senate report this summer concluded that the government was “lacking a strategic compass”, when it came to tackling rape and other forms of sexual violence. The Council of Europe has also been highly critical, recently, of France’s efforts to protect women.
A well-placed source told us that even data about the number of rapes reported in France were unreliable due to an overly complex bureaucracy.
Occasionally, a news story will offer another small jolt of optimism.
In Dijon, a 60-year-old accused of drugging his wife for others to rape her, was arrested in August after one man, invited to participate, later called the police, having doubted “her consent”.
The alleged victim’s lawyer Marie-Christine Klepping told us she was “sure” that knowledge of the Pelicot case, and fear of being caught up in something similar, had prompted that phone call.
In May, the French film star Gérard Depardieu was found guilty of sexually assaulting two women in what many lawyers and activists hailed as a significant blow against a widely perceived culture of impunity enabling powerful men to abuse women.
“It could mean something,” Elodie Tuaillon-Hibon told the BBC, “because he has been very protected, [even] by President Macron”, who appeared to defend the actor at one point. Ms Tuaillon-Hibon is a Paris-based lawyer who had previously been involved in prosecuting Depardieu.
