Not everyone subscribes to the French magazine The Obs in Quebec, so it is a very good idea that the chronicles of Emmanuel Carrère, who covered for the weekly the gigantic trial of the attacks of November 13, 2015 in Paris, are brought together in a book: V13. Because when the writer becomes a journalist, it often gives something unique to literature.
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It is also through this mixture of genres that he became a famous author with the adversary, published in 2000, which was inspired by the trial of the murderer Jean-Claude Romand, with whom he had created a link. We find this documentary aspect linked to its subjectivity in Limonov Where Other lives than mine. I would add that The adversary is one of those very rare books that I often recommend, knowing with certainty that it will be read to the end, even by those who do not like to read, and that Other lives than mine is another one of those rare books that brought me to tears once I turned the last page.
A trial can be long and painful to follow, especially when it is one of the biggest ever organized in France, at the height of the worst terrorist attack in the country’s history: “14 defendants, 1,800 civil parties, 350 lawyers, a file 53 meters high ”summarizes the writer, who followed the case for nine months, whose code name is V13, which gives its title to the book, since the attacks occurred on Friday the 13th. The result is an extremely moving summary that mixes the worst and the best of the human being, in the eye of the witness that is Carrère.
Why did he offer his services as a columnist, and what attracted him to this trial? “What interested me a priori is that, as an object of justice, it was something huge and unprecedented, explains Emmanuel Carrère, reached by telephone in September. As I am interested in justice – I wrote about an assize trial in The adversary and on the small justice of proximity in Other lives than mine – it was an event. Besides, I’m still quite interested in religions and their pathological mutations, so all that made me want to go see. »
Personally, I was a little scared to go see while reading V13, because I was there when it happened. I had just landed as a correspondent in Paris for The Pressa four-month mandate, and the apartment we rented for the journalists was located a five-minute walk from the Bataclan, in the heart of 11e borough where the terraces were targeted.
Impossible to forget this night of horror, but it is nothing compared to what the survivors told during the trial. V13 is divided into three parts, “the victims, the defendants, the court”, and all the emotional charge is concentrated in the first part where the victims speak.
“Some fairly numerous testimonies from victims seemed to me to be of exemplary dignity, nobility and simplicity. We see naked human beings… stripped bare by tragedy. There is something admirable in seeing that. »
For the publication of the book, Emmanuel Carrère supplemented his texts with many notes that he had to put aside because, like all journalists, he had to respect space constraints. “I still modified them quite a bit, edited them and amended them, he says, so as to make them something that has the consistency of a book, but which retains the kind of immediacy of a newspaper, after all. more faithful to the reality of experience. »
And for the writer, this experience was of great humanity, which made community, described as a crossing. You don’t spend almost a year with everyone there without forging very strong ties. In passing, he scratches a statement from Manuel Valls who said that “to explain is already to want to excuse a little”. “I think that’s a dumb comment. [rires]. In a trial, we are there to explain and to condemn, because convictions have taken place and the sentences have been heavy, but we are there to try to understand, of course. And that obviously goes for when you write books. Except that, when one writes books, one is not compelled to condemn or even inclined to do so. »
Because the particularity of this trial is that the defendants were practically all people peripheral to the attacks, since the terrorists are all dead, except Salah Abdeslam, the star of the trial, who was to blow himself up at the Comptoir Voltaire café and who renounced the last moment. A volte-face that remains mysterious, even after weeks of trial. “The importance that we gave to Salah Abdeslam was that, even if he did not kill, he had to be part of the commando”, notes Carrère.
A Bataclan survivor, Pierre-Sylvain, launched a sentence that resonated with the writer: “I expect what happened to us to become a collective story. »
“We often asked ‘what do you expect from the trial?’, remembers Emmanuel Carrère. When he said that, all of a sudden, it seemed obvious to me, but something he was formulating for the first time. So there, I was really very moved and very passionate to witness the birth of this story. It was for me the strongest thing of this trial. His ambition and his virtue were to take months to unfold what happened in a few terrible hours of that night of November 13. We listened to the victims, the accused, the defense lawyers, and despite everything, it was done in a certain serenity. »
V13 reads like a detective novel with the difference that there are always details that can only belong to the most ordinary reality, even in an extraordinary case. We learn a lot of things about the traumas and the issue of reparation for the victims, about the solidarity between the bereaved and the somewhat lost life of some defendants, the complexity of the judicial system and the ramifications of the terrorist nebulae in Belgium and in France. We are far from spectacular, but it is a dive into the human soul, and into the means that a society gives itself to try to understand and do justice, and this from the pen of an observer who has done his proofs. I ask him if this experience will inspire the novelist that he is. “I thought about it, but for now I’ve given up on that idea for two reasons. First, I realized that this book was not an appetizer and besides, I don’t want to spend two more years of my life with jihadists, honestly. But we must not insult the future. We never know. »
V13
Emmanuel Carrere
POL
363 pages