DAVID JONES: Inside the sordid sex clubs arranging ‘Gang Bang Nights’ that expose the rotten heart of France… even as the country reels from the details of the mass-rape of Gisele Pelicot

Walk 800 yards from the court where the verdicts in the rape trial that has shocked the world will be announced later this week, and you will find the Rue Four de la Terre.

On one end of this narrow side street in the centre of Avignon stands a drab building with blanked-out windows and a peephole cut into its heavily barred door.

A small sign embossed in gold reveals this to be the Club Aphrodite – the fleshpot that caters for the perversions of the town’s swingers. Or, as they rather grandly describe themselves, ‘libertines’.

If we believe the French commentariat, the prosecution of Dominique Pelicot, and the 50 wretched men he enlisted to abuse his drugged wife, will be remembered as a brave new dawn for Gallic gender equality.

It has been hailed as the case that will finally drag an outdatedly patriarchal nation, no doubt kicking and screaming in some quarters, into line with countries where women and their rights are better respected.

A long overdue change, we might think, given that President Macron last year championed actor Gerard Depardieu – charged with 13 counts of sexual assault – as the sort of man who ‘makes France proud’.

It was partly with the aim of ending this kind of machismo attitude that, with extraordinary courage, Gisele Pelicot decided that her identity, and harrowing details of her ordeal, must be made public.

Quite how this moral sea change can come about when sleazy dives such as the Club Aphrodite continue to be acceptable accoutrements to French society, however, is yet to be explained.

And, as we will see, the age-old French penchant for libertinism – a philosophy that rejects every tenet of conventional sexual morality – goes to the very heart of the Pelicot case.

Under questioning, at least nine of the accused preposterously claimed to have had sex with the drugged Gisele in the belief that she was pretending to be asleep as she and her husband indulged their libertine fantasies.

We will come back to them.

First, though, steel yourself as a male undercover Mail on Sunday reporter describes the debauchery he witnessed behind that barred door in Avignon.

By long-held tradition, Thursday night is ‘Gang Bang Night’ at the Club Aphrodite, a phrase still being bandied – in English – on its website, despite its horrifically brutal overtones.

When a female reporter phoned to enquire exactly what this entailed, a woman assistant assured us that, should she attend, she would be afforded ‘maximum respect’. Men and women were treated entirely equally, she said.

The club’s rules told a different story. Whereas the dress code for men was merely smart-casual, women were required to wear ‘sexy’ outfits and stiletto heels. The entry fee for single men was 70 euros (including a drink); single women, presumably being much in demand, paid just ten.

And, of course, the star turn in the ‘gang bang’, at least as advertised on the website, was to be a woman: a masked young ‘libertine’ who goes by the name of Lisa Coquines (the French word for ‘naughty’).

‘Gentlemen, Lisa is waiting for you for a Night of Madness!’ declared the internet tease. ‘Be a player! Be in shape! Be enduring! To all the skills of plurality, dare your fantasies!’

But when our reporter arrived, Lisa wasn’t there.

Instead, he found five older, less alluring women, two of whom were dressed in lingerie and carried whips, like dominatrices in some Belle Epoque boudoir, as they bantered with punters.

The male clients outnumbered them by at least five to one: ‘Monsieur les Ordinaires’ (‘Mr Ordinaries’) of early to late middle age and different social backgrounds, just like the 50 men accused of raping Gisele.

This is not to suggest they were in any way behaving aggressively or otherwise comparable.

What they were about to do was perfectly legal, and the women were there of their own accord – though there was a suspicion that at least three of the five had been employed by the club.

The Aphrodite’s website presents it as a glamorous establishment with a young clientele cavorting beneath strobe lights. Perhaps on other nights it looks like that.

Our reporter saw a gloomy, three-floor knocking shop whose several darkened rooms were nauseatingly redolent of sex.

In one, on the second floor, a man invited allcomers to take his wife as she lay naked on a circular bed. ‘Who wants to **** her?’ he leered. Three of the eight men who surrounded her took up the invitation.

From the groans emanating from other chambers and alcoves, it was evident that similarly grim scenarios were being acted out.

The mantra about women being respected had been trotted out to our reporter again as he arrived. Nobody was to be touched without their consent, he was told. However, he left with the impression that – at least on Thursdays – Club Aphrodite was a ‘sordid, smelly’ place where ‘a bunch of horny men engaged in sex with women who may well have been paid to pretend they were liking it’.

Since the club is so close to the court – which has become a feminist shrine that attracts women’s rights campaigners from all over France and beyond – surely it should have been shut down, at least for the duration of the trial.

However, when we put this to the mayor of Avignon, a supposed bastion of Christianity with a 14th century papal palace, we got no response.

Libertinism dates back to Roman times, with the emperor Caligula among early participants. However, it enjoyed a revival in 16th century France and has been espoused (and enthusiastically practised) by French intellectuals and the upper classes ever since.

There are estimated to be more than 500 libertine clubs in France, and they are to be found in almost every small and medium-sized town, operating openly alongside the local tabac and boulangerie.

While group sex with submissive strangers might be an accepted pastime enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of French men and women, it becomes altogether more sinister in the context of the Pelicot case.

In the dossier compiled by the investigating magistrate in the Pelicot case, the word ‘libertinism’ features more than 50 times, for under interrogation the defendants repeatedly trotted it out to mitigate their behaviour.

Among those who claimed to have believed that the Pelicots were ‘a libertine couple’ when he visited their home at dead of night and crept upon the sleeping Gisele was serving soldier Joan Kawai, at 23 the youngest defendant.

He insists that he believed it was all a game in which she was complicit – an excuse repeated by the oldest of the accused, retiree Jacques Cubeau, aged 72.

Then there was Mahdi Daoudi, who told the court he wasn’t shocked when Gisele ‘appeared’ to be unconscious because he was accustomed to libertine encounters where couples acted out somnambulant fantasies.

At least six others gave similar explanations. Pelicot dismissed these claims, insisting all the men were fully aware he had drugged his wife.

Yet the spectre of libertinism surfaced again when he attempted to explain what drove him to betray Gisele.

He told investigators his sexual demands grew stronger in his 60s, when he retired and moved with his wife from Paris to Mazan – the Provencal town whose chateau was, surely by macabre coincidence, once the ancestral seat of the Marquis de Sade, an arch-exponent of libertinism in its most brutal, misogynistic form.

Pelicot claimed he had persuaded his wife to join him at a swingers’ club with another couple, but to his frustration she had ‘got stuck’ and they had left without taking part. Since Mazan is only 30 minutes’ drive from Avignon, we might wonder whether the Aphrodite was the club to which he took Gisele.

Whatever the truth, Elisa Labouret, of the French group Dare To Be A Feminist, says the accuseds’ lawyers are cynically using libertinism as a defence strategy.

‘The concept, the word itself, it’s French… and they have tried to make out that this was all just a game: ‘Oh, this is the French thing. You French, you are libertines, you have more sex. You have more infidelity.’

‘But that is just a cliche. Violence against women is not uniquely French. When you look at it, it’s just them trying to find excuses in our culture.’

Their ploy is unlikely to hold sway with the judges. Nonetheless libertinism remains surprisingly commonplace in France, particularly among older generations.

In provincial towns such as Avignon, ‘les echangistes’ (swingers) may include prominent local politicians and businessmen; in Paris libertine clubs are a chic establishment stop-off after the opera and dinner.

The decor may be classier and the champagne of a better vintage in the capital, but they are no less seedy. A few years ago, when investigating the clandestine decadence of disgraced International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, I descended into his favourite swinging haunt, Les Chandelles, accompanied by a female reporter.

After being issued with sequinned masks, we stood at the bar sipping fizz as my colleague brushed off the pawing advances of middle-aged sleazes trying to lure her in to a side room.

The sickening spectacle we saw as we passed its open door while making our exit still haunts me: on what looked like an altar a young woman sacrificing herself to countless grunting, out-of-shape old men.

The owners of these clubs will always vouch that their female clients participate with equal enthusiasm, and in many instances that may be true.

However, in another recent French sex scandal I reported on, a former mistress of champagne magnate Pierre-Emmanuel Taittinger claimed he took her to Les Chandelles, and the Paris libertine club 2plus2 against her will.

The glamorous accountant, Samira, alleged in court that Taittinger got his kicks by seeing her having sex with multiple men and that, desperate to please him, she at first agreed.

But she called a halt when he persuaded her to allow 20 men to make love to her in a single night, choreographing the proceedings ‘like a film director’ as she was passed between them ‘like a piece of meat’.

In statements to police, the club owners refuted her allegations, claiming she was an enthusiastic participant.

The saga unfolded after the vengeful Samira received a suspended prison sentence for taking a knife to Taittinger’s mansion in Reims and threatening to cut off his ‘zizi’.

Such sordid stories haven’t stalled the French appetite for libertinism. According to recent estimates, Britain may now have as many as 50 swingers’ clubs, though they are so anonymous that people living nearby wouldn’t know they existed. France has more than ten times that number.

The most recent survey – taken eight years ago – suggested that two million French people (the great majority of them men) also visit libertine websites. The swinging industry was then reckoned to be worth £1billion, but it has since grown.

The French seem largely sanguine about this, though last month, when the latest ‘gang-bang club’ opened in a residential building in Paris, female residents complained of feeling threatened by the ‘endless procession’ of men.

Many French people will no doubt shrug in Gallic fashion on reading this article, dismissing it as British prudery. They may reject any link between the self-declared libertines who raped Gisele and the everyday licentiousness nonchalantly woven into the fabric of French life.

But a word of warning comes from Professor Daniel Welzer-Lang, an expert in masculine sexuality and domination at the University of Toulouse-Le-Mirail.

‘At these clubs, they’ll say, ‘Women are the queens here. We need to revere them and protect them.’ [But] these places are controlled by men and mostly frequented by men.

‘Plus, they come with a cost. For women these clubs are often free – but they are paying in a different way.’ Indeed, they are.

And if this shameful case really is to bring about the societal changes that the admirable Gisele Pelicot is fighting for, France should surely wake up to the realisation that, in 2024, there can be no place for ‘Gang Bang Nights’.