translated by John Lambert
Every Monday between September 2021 and June 2022, the French writer Emmanuel Carrère would file 1,500 words for the Paris-based magazine L’Obs (now Le Nouvel Obs). He was part of the magazine’s three-member team covering the trial of 20 men accused of involvement in the ghastly 2015 Paris terrorist attacks, but while his colleagues were court reporters who cranked out daily dispatches on the proceedings, Carrère’s interest in the case—purportedly France’s most expensive trial—was, in his own words, “only authorized by his desire.”
Carrère knew he’d signed up for something long and emotionally grueling: the roster included close to 1,800 plaintiffs, represented by more than 300 lawyers, with each plaintiff allotted a minimum of 30 minutes to testify. And yet he showed up most afternoons in a windowless room at the Palais de Justice, not because he or anyone he knew was affected by the attacks but because “I think that between the time we first enter the courtroom and when we leave it for good, something in us will have shifted ground.”
The mystical undertone is par for the course for Carrère, who went through an obsessive Catholic phase for a few years in his 30s. He has written about court cases before, most notably in his 2000 best-seller, The Adversary, where he put himself in the shoes of one of France’s most notorious killers, but in V13, an expanded version of his L’Obs columns—the title is shorthand for Vendredi 13, or Friday the 13th, the day of the attacks—his voice is oddly impersonal.
Gone are the outrageously meandering sentences from The Adversary, at once an account of a terrible crime and a triumph of tone, or even the nervy asides of Yoga (2022), in which he tracked his midlife slump into depression. What you notice instead is a dignified sobriety as he recounts the sequence of events on November 13, 2015, when nine men affiliated with the Islamic State killed 130 people at the Stade de France, the Bataclan concert hall, and on the café terraces in the eastern district.
Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving member of the group that carried out the attacks, was supposed to blow himself up in a bar in the 18th Arrondissement; during the trial, he claimed he decided not to detonate his belt of explosives “out of humanity, not fear.” The court, however, ruled that the belt was defective, and Abdeslam was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.
Carrère is clinically attuned to the spectacle of the courtroom—Albert Camus is apparently quoted by French lawyers “to the point of nausea”—as well as to the grief of the survivors. We meet Nadia, the anguished mother of one of the victims, who nevertheless encourages the defense lawyers to do their jobs in the spirit of a fair trial.
We hear from Azdyne Amimour, the liberal, 70-ish father of one of the Bataclan attackers, palpably horrified by his son’s crimes. Amimour reaches out to Georges Salines, whose daughter was killed at the Bataclan, and together they author a book in French where two bereaved (and betrayed) parents attempt to understand each other. Then there is Marilyn, a television reporter who always carries with her a plastic tube containing the little nut that knocked her unconscious in the blast outside the Stade de France, just so “she remembers what everyone else forgets.”
While outlining a brief history of the formation of the Islamic State, Carrère has time to dwell on the excitement in the courtroom when François Hollande, the president of France at the time of the attacks, turns up to testify. Daunted by the prospect of listening to the closing statements of more than 100 lawyers for the victims, Carrère wonders if he can turn up on the more interesting days—“like at the French Open tennis tournament.”
With the accused men, Carrère is focused less on the extent of their guilt and more on what he dubs “the logistics of terror”: the suicide bombers’ chosen aliases, their travel routes from Syria to France, the movies they watched prior to the attacks (Robert Hossein’s 1982 adaptation of Les Misérables, a couple of black-and-white French comedies). Now and again, Carrère issues a dodgy remark—Abdeslam is described at one point as having a “Salafist beard”—but he makes up for it with the astute observation that the lawyers, journalists, and plaintiffs who show up every day are predominantly white, that the only Arab and North African faces in the courtroom are of those on trial.
The book loses steam in the final pages, when Carrère shifts his attention to the finer points of French jurisprudence. The idea of the witness box as a “modern church” where “something sacred” had taken place, the valiant backstories of the defense lawyers—chapter after chapter is written in the third person plural, in a tone that appears to be straining for significance.
I’d have preferred Carrère to throw in the towel, to stop visiting the court for a brief period, because that might have rendered the story more personal, more ironic. At one point, he writes that those who’d witnessed the trial over nine months had been through something “too strong, incommunicable, no one will understand who wasn’t there.” Why write a book, then?
Abhrajyoti Chakraborty is a New Delhi–based writer and critic
