It is buried in the fog of memory for most of us in North America, I suspect—lost in a haze of those anni horribles 2015-2016 that includes Charlie Hebdo and a truck careening down the Promenade des Anglais, mowing down strollers and children. It is the “Bataclan massacre” to many of us; but for the French it is 13 novembre: coordinated shootings and suicide-bombings at the Stade de France, the terraces of bars in the 10th arrondissement, and a violent occupation of the Bataclan auditorium that trapped an entire audience for 10 horrifying minutes of shooting capped by suicide bomb detonations that, Emmanuel Carrère reports, rained “human confetti” down upon a mass of trampled bodies in a rising sea of blood.
I can’t imagine I would have read a book about the ensuing trial—known as “V13”—if it wasn’t written by Carrère, one of the most incisive prose writers working today. I read his Yoga a couple of years ago while visiting France. It is a beguiling, undefinable book that lives off Carrère’s singular voice. To read it is a spiritual experience. It also made me a committed reader of Carrère.
V13: Chronicle of a Trial began as a series of weekly columns for a French magazine. Carrère attended the trial nearly every day for 10 months, alongside a number of the plaintiffs (victims of the attack, including family of those killed) and, of course, the accused. The trial—which happened years after the attacks, from September 2021 to July 2022—was a national reckoning (of sorts). Reading about this from my location in the United States, I was struck by the absence of anything like this in our own experience of 9/11. Alleged plotters languished in Guantanamo Bay, never facing “the law” in public. Instead of a public trial we got the 9/11 “Commission” and its gargantuan report. Meanwhile W and his neocon cronies “took justice” to the enemy—which is to say, we swapped judicial reckoning for congressionally-endorsed war crimes.
Whereas in France, in the V13 trial, the nation took a risk: attackers would face both the law and their victims. This also meant the public had to look these men in the eye. Even if the verdicts were assured in advance, what Carrère documents is the unsettling humanity of everyone in the room.
Don’t confuse this with some flattening “both-sides”-ism. If sympathy is distributed in Carrère’s account, it is not equally so. The ordeal endured by those at the Bataclan, the lives snuffed out on the terraces, it’s all brought to life by vivid, heart-rending testimony. And Carrère doesn’t flinch from reminding us that even the petty gangsters caught up as unwitting accomplices in this terrorist action felt at home in the cellar of the Belgian bar where friends played ISIS beheading videos on loop.
But Carrère organizes his reporting around a phrase uttered by one of the defendants, who protests the very conditions of the trial.
“It’s like reading the last page of the book,” Salah Abdeslam says; “what you should do is the read the book from the start.”
This, I think, is what Carrère endeavors to do: to read through the lines of the trial to try to read the jihadist book from the start. This, too, is risky, since lazy readers will confuse curiosity with justification. Carrère is willing to listen to the heartbroken confusion of a defendant’s parent as much as the tortured mourning of a victim’s mother.
He is also willing, if only fleetingly, to say the unsaid—that “terrorism” is when terror visits European soil. Otherwise we happily live with the terror inflicted on innocents by U.S. bombs, French missiles, and Israeli rockets because they are elsewhere or “justified” or, simply, because we conclude—either consciously or apathetically—that such human beings are expendable, a mass of souls prey to the slaughterhouse of history from which we (“we”) imagine ourselves immune. “They” are subject to the grinding machinations of History; “we” are “free” to live our individual lives documented on Instagram. When our TikTok-ed, plastic lives are disrupted, that’s “terror.” But to read the book from the start is to risk actually seeing what was happening in Syria and Palestine, to see the terror before the terror. A Princeton expert at the trial describes this as “the jihadisation of the rebellion.” 13 novembre or 9/11 were events in which a global war (“History”) had the audacity and gall to pierce our post-historic security.
I couldn’t help thinking of an apposite scene recounted by Augustine in City of God. A pirate is captured and dragged before Alexander the Great. The emperor asks him, “What is your idea, in infesting the sea?” “And the pirate answered with uninhibited insolence: ‘The same as yours, in infesting the earth! But because I do it with a tiny craft, I’m called a pirate; because you have a might navy, you’re called an emperor” (IV.5).
But for the most part the story of V13 does not operate at this scale. The trial is assiduously focused on specific, concrete plaintiffs and defendants—stories more particular and intimate, with names and faces, parents and partners. Faces and eyes figured prominently—what French philosophers since Sartre have spoken of as le regard, the gaze. The existential experience of being seen: that meeting of infinites when one human being encounters another. It’s no surprise that Carrère invokes the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas whose body of work was an extended meditation on the “the Face” of “the Other.” Something like this is considered as a way to explain why Salah Abdeslam didn’t detonate his suicide vest in a café on the corner in the 18th arrondissement. “He parks the car. Goes to the counter. Orders a drink. It’s the first time he’s been alone since he left Charleroi the day before. He looks around him. Young people, very young, having fun. Some are dancing. With a nice shirt and some scent behind his ears, he could be one of them. It’s clear, he can’t go through with it.” Then the echo of Levinas: “Once you’ve stopped, once you’ve looked at people, you can forget it.”
Or consider the testimony of Yann, hit by bullet on the terrace in the 10th. Like Merton on that enchanted street corner in Louisville, Yann bears witness to an epiphany in the midst of the horror:
The wounded were moaning, the rescue workers were carrying away the bodies, and Yann, who’s a photographer, had a series of flashes: seeing all of these dead, wounded and living people he didn’t know, he saw them individually, each in their own particular, infinite pain, while the story of each one burst in slow motion like bubbles of silence and light before his eyes.
This is a very French book about a very French trial reckoning with a distinctly European and post-colonial experience. France’s legal system is recognizable from another liberal democracy but has its own idiosyncrasies. For example, who but the French, home of existentialism, would create the legal concept of “the anguish of imminent death?”1 Sein-zum-Tode as juridical category. And it is almost jarring how remarkably literary—I don’t know how else to put it—the plaintiffs’ testimony can sometimes be. Heart-achingly poetic, at times. When Lamia’s mother, Nadia, gives her testimony, she imagines Lamia and her boyfriend meeting on the bar’s terrace, oblivious. “They have thirty-five minutes left to live, and Nadia likes to think that they lived these thirty-five minutes under the spell of the first moments of love.”
Another exceptional feature of this French reckoning: even the victims and plaintiffs are uncomfortable when a true, “whole” (i.e., “incompressible”) life sentence is handed down for a lead plotter of the attacks. They who have lost dear ones, who still wake at night wondering what they endured in the minutes before their death, are nonetheless uncomfortable with a “life” sentence. This is so jarring compared to the U.S., where the death penalty remains a federal punishment and bloodthirstiness is still the order of the day.
A huge part of Carrère’s excellence as a reporter is the novelist’s sensibility for scene-setting—an ear for the anecdote or simile that compresses much into little, an eye for the scene in which a larger drama plays out on a microcosmic stage.
The trial took place in a site constructed especially for V13. Several times Carrère describes it as “a white box” that “resembles a modern church.” This is not an accident, he recognizes. They are participants in a collective ritual, enacting a litany that is doing something beyond entering evidence and rendering judgment. One of the prosecutors says that a “deposition” is not just putting something on the record; it is an opportunity for someone to leave something, to deposit something—an opportunity to lay something down, maybe even begin to let it go. In the end, Carrère sees this church-like venue as fitting: “something sacred had been taking place there,” he concludes. It was not the grand judicial reckoning some might have expected. Looking back on 10 months of his days spent in this space, his commitment to the ritual never flagged:
Not once did I want to say goodbye to the white box. I knew, we knew, that what we were experiencing was anything but the grand historical event, the vain, colossal judicial spectacle that we all had good reason to fear at the beginning. No: this was something else: a unique experience of horror, pity, proximity, and presence.
He then recounts a reflection from Aurélie, whose partner was killed at the Bataclan, after the verdict was handed down: “We were given a place, and time, all the time we needed, to do something with the pain. Transform it, metabolise it. And it worked. It happened. We departed, we made this long, long crossing, and now the ship is coming into port. It’s time to disembark.”
This is what makes the Bataclan killings “more than” murder; the attackers are guilty of “having participated not only in the death of 131 people, but also in the terror which most of them endured when faced with imminent death.”