For two years, Florence Aubenas did not cross the limits of the Paris ring road. And then, after two years, she wanted to know. If she could go back. If she could continue to practice her profession, despite everything. Despite that. So, in 2007, the former hostage in Baghdad proposed to her editors to cover a deployment of French troops in Afghanistan.
Florence Aubenas packed her suitcase “trembling to be afraid”. What would she do with her backpacking life if she couldn’t? If the memory of her captivity caught up with her as soon as she left the plane and nailed her to the spot? She warned her editors: “If, putting my foot on the ground, I have the impression that my sole is burning, if I have to get back on the plane right now, don’t make fun of me… »
To his relief, it didn’t. And for our greatest happiness. Florence Aubenas continued to do what she had always done so well: field journalism. Real real. With, as a bonus, a precise and agile pen that conveys his reports in The world for as many literary short stories, writing jewels imbued with humanity.
We meet at the Brûlerie du Quai, facing Chaleur Bay, where we both take part in the first edition of the Carleton-sur-Mer International Journalism Festival. Three days earlier, Florence Aubenas was still dragging her boots in the muddy trenches of Ukraine. This is her sixth stay there since the Russian invasion. At its very first in Quebec. The day before, at the Dixie Lee, someone insisted on introducing him to the local specialty: a dish of fries and cheese drowned in gravy. “I almost fainted,” she laughs.
The great lady of French journalism is capable of taking it, but there are still limits…
***
After Iraq and Afghanistan, Florence Aubenas covered the war in Syria, at a time when a real kidnapping business had developed there. How does she do it? When my newspaper sends me to cover the trouble spots of this world, I can at least make myself believe that such misadventures only happen to other people. In Florence Aubenas, for example.
PHOTO RÉGIS LEBLANC, SPECIAL COLLABORATION
Florence Aubenas
The journalist laughs, again: this is the argument we serve our families every time! On her very recent return from Ukraine, her relatives reproached her for having ventured near the front. She reassured them: for her, it was not the same, she was careful… And then, saying it, she realized that she had served them the same soup before her calamitous trip to Iraq…
Suddenly his gaze darkened. “I’m a little clever with you on the terrace with a latte. But at the moment, we are not laughing at all… ”
We can easily imagine it. For 157 days, there was no terrace, no latte, no sea view for her. No food, except bits of bread. No shower. No talking. No daylight. And, more often than not, no hope.
Her captors kept telling her that her government had forgotten her and that they would cut her throat the next day. She spent five months, blindfolded and hands tied, in a suffocating cellar crowded with hostages. “We were tight against each other. When one moved, the others had to move. No one was helping each other. On the contrary. “The first bastard is the one who kidnapped you. But you still have to be careful of your neighbor in misery…”
The only woman among twenty hostages, Florence Aubenas was being punished on purpose so that her captors put her in iron handcuffs – a question, for her, of being able to hit her companions in misfortune when the need arose.
We can imagine the horror, therefore. However, Florence Aubenas speaks of her kidnapping with detachment. It was, she said, nothing more than a “professional accident.” A journalist can be kidnapped like a roofer can fall from a roof; we don’t want it, of course, but it’s part of the risks of the job. It’s not even what marked her the most in her career.
What shocked her the most was waking up in a hotel room one morning, unable to remember where she was. She knew she was there to tell a story, but no longer knew which one. She was ashamed of it.
PHOTO RÉGIS LEBLANC, SPECIAL COLLABORATION
Florence Aubenas
At the time, she lived in her suitcases, always running after conflicts. Leave. To come back. To share out. Again and again. This confused awakening pushed her to change her ways. Not to chain missions so much. “For me, it’s important to first tell about a country and then tell what happens there. There’s nothing that pains me more than someone who turns on the TV, sees soldiers in the desert and says, “This is terrible… where is it again? “It’s a very strong professional failure: we didn’t know how to make the issues understood, we just transmitted the violence. »
When the mists of sleep had completely evaporated that morning in the hotel room, Florence Aubenas remembered that she was in Bujumbura, Burundi.
Since then, she tells about life and its nuances. She does this by hiding behind her story, to the point of making the reader doubt: is it really a report? It must be said that the journalist has become a master in the art of being forgotten. Like a fly on a wall, she is there, discreet, listening to everything, noting everything.
She has nothing against first-person journalism, which is very popular in the United States, but it’s not her style. “I would be afraid of taking up too much space. For me, journalism is telling stories. I try to disappear. »
During the Second World War, the great American journalist Ernie Pyle claimed to adopt, in the trenches, the point of view of the earthworm. “The fly on the wall you are telling me about evokes the same thing: it’s the insect that you can’t see. I claim the worm’s point of view. »
Me, I let myself be forgotten. And the interest of having time, that’s it. After a day or two, I stop asking questions. I just watch how it moves, how it lives, how it speaks. I am part of the scenery.
Florence Aubenas
She applied the formula with the gilets jaunes, which most of her Parisian colleagues tended to look down on. “When I wrote this paper, in my own editorial office, there was a little debate. We asked her what she was doing, exactly. A little more and he was accused of treason. All she wanted, though, was to listen. And understand.
It was easier said than done. She had to show humility by showing up one winter morning at a roundabout occupied by yellow vests. He was given a chair, far from the brazier around which the demonstrators were warming themselves. “Sit there,” they ordered him suspiciously. The spokesperson will arrive at 5 p.m. Until then, no one talks to you. We don’t talk to reporters. »
Florence Aubenas remained there, frozen in her chair. The yellow vests, hostile to the media, circled around her with their cell phones to film how much she would disguise their reality. She held on. “After a while, they got fed up. The ice broke and we started talking. »
She would have something to cheer about. His long-term reports are devoured like novels and are a hit in bookstores. The Ouistreham wharf, result of an immersive journalistic investigation during which she was hired as a cleaning lady on the ferries of this town in Normandy, was adapted to the cinema in 2021. Her role is played there by… Juliette Binoche.
Well, Juliette Binoche in a soft sweater, always disheveled and blowing her nose with the back of her hand, but Juliette Binoche all the same…
That does not impress Florence Aubenas. No matter the honors, this woman will never have a big head. She is eminently friendly. As soon as you meet her, you feel like you know her. This is undoubtedly the key to his journalistic success: this natural ease with people.
The other key, of course, is his formidable mastery of words. His great humanity, too. But, above all, his unalterable passion for the profession. “I love journalism, I love writing articles and I love the journalistic life. This way of throwing the bag over his shoulder and leaving, I’ve been doing this for a very long time. I am that kind of person who does not disentangle his professional life and his private life. I live alone, I don’t have children and it was not a renunciation. I love the life I lead. For me, it’s a form of freedom. »
Questionnaire without filter
1. Coffee and me: At home, I drink tea. On the other hand, outside, I drink coffee. I’m a tea fanatic, even though I drink any coffee, even very bad ones, even Nescafé on reportage…
2. Personalities, dead or alive, that I would like to bring together around a table: I admire people for what they’ve said, for what they’ve written, for the music they’ve played. It goes from Mandela to Bruce Springsteen, but I have no desire to put them around a table to discuss with them. What they did is enough for me.
3. On my bedside table: I read frantically. I just finished the book everyone is talking about in Paris: Splinters, by Bret Easton Ellis. And because I’m obsessed with Ukraine, I read life and destiny, by Vasily Grossman.
Who is Florence Aubenas?
- Born February 6, 1961 in Brussels to French parents. She spent the first 18 years of her life in Belgium.
- She studied literature at the University of Paris Nanterre, before branching out into journalism. Graduated from the Paris Journalists Training Center in 1984.
- Hired at Release in 1986, where she spent most of her career as a reporter. In 2006, she was recruited by The new observer, then by The world in 2012.
- Among his publications: The Misunderstanding: The Outreau Affair in 2005 ; Ouistreham wharf in 2010 ; The stranger of the post office in 2021