Was André Chénier complicit in rape culture when he rewrote an idyll attributed to Theocritus ? Despite its anachronism, the recent concept of “rape culture” is a welcomed invitation to take rape out of the invisibility in which many literary representations of the past and their subsequent commentaries held it. But it also runs the risk of blocking our historical imagination, and making other legacies impossible — legacies which, thrown into history against all likelihood, must nonetheless have produced noticeable effects. The aim of this article is to analyze and follow the timelines that obscure our relationship with history. In particular, we’ll be looking at Campion’s Memoirs, written in the mid-seventeenth century : he addresses to his descendants (and hence to us) a life experience from which emerges a masculinity singularly open to the feminine. At the end of this journey, the imaginary reader of this same poem by Chénier invites us to challenge the original question without refuting the answer. Un poème de Chénier en procès