V13: Chronicle of a Trial by Emmanuel Carrère, translated from the French by John Lambert; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pp., $29
The spasm of terror that shook France nearly a decade ago began with the attack on the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, leaving a dozen dead, and subsided 18 months later, after the slaughter of 86 people on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. But the most devastating massacre, exceeding the others in its logistical sophistication and lethality, came in between. On Friday, November 13, 2015, as they enjoyed a football match, a dinner out with friends, and a rock concert, 130 people died at the hands of a radicalized jihadist “commando.” Emmanuel Carrère’s V13 (short for vendredi treize, Friday the 13th) is an earnest effort to bring sequence, context, motive, and some kind of moral clarity to that horrifying night in Paris.
The initial attack, at a Germany vs. France soccer match at the Stade de France north of Paris, was botched; the terrorists arrived too late to get in and blew themselves up at the entrance gates, killing a bystander. A multipronged assault minutes later on several open-air cafés in east-central Paris left 39 dead. Most of the nightmarish killing happened not far away, at the Bataclan concert hall, during a performance of the American rock band Eagles of Death Metal that drew more than 1,000 fans. A Dictaphone was left on throughout, from the last notes played by the band to the arrival of the police. The recording ticks through two hours and 38 minutes of shooting, reloading, shooting (258 shots in all), crashing, shouting, screaming, and the eerie chorus of ringtones while hundreds of cellphones go unanswered. Loved ones had begun to get the first news bulletins and posts on social media.
Carrère’s retelling of these events, factual and cool-headed as it can be, is not for the faint. From the eyewitness testimony, he reports what happened to the Bataclan concertgoers: “Laceration, dismemberment, poly-perforation caused by the nuts, bolts, and screws padded into the suicide vests. … Those fleeing necessarily trampled on others. … Among the ones who got out alive, one woman said that for her the worst thing was being trampled. Others said that for them the worst thing was doing the trampling. … When we started to evacuate the bodies they were so soaked in blood, so heavy, that it took four of us to lift just one.”
Carrère is one of France’s leading literary lights, best known as a novelist but with credibility as a reporter and an essayist, too. Reading his probing, reflective account of this horror, I thought of Norman Mailer’s brilliant pivots to nonfiction. Carrère here describes himself, with characteristic erudition, as a writer “who, as the Lacanian psychoanalysts say, is only authorized by his desire.”
V13 had its genesis in weekly 1,500-word dispatches that Carrère filed to the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur during the course of the nine-month trial in 2021–22. Carrère attended each of the 149 day-long sessions and befriended some of the families of the dead. Nearly everyone who perished that day was young, as were all the killers and their confederates.
As for the 14 defendants who were tried, they were by definition “second stringers, since those who did the killing are dead.” Sitting together in the huge prefab courtroom in track suits, they “come across as good kids who’re somewhat lost, moderately religious … big smokers of weed … who go in and out of prison to a steady beat of petty offenses.” Significantly, half were Belgians, born and raised in the majority-Muslim Molenbeek quarter of Brussels. Long before any of the terrorists were born, Carrère explains,
the Belgian government got the idea of entrusting the management of the Muslim faith to a “neutral” power that had the funds to finance it: Saudi Arabia. Under the authority of this petroleum monarchy which was both monstrously rich and monstrously backward, Belgium—and in particular Molenbeek—became a breeding ground for Islamists where, in the next generation, seven of the defendants in the box and three dead members of the commando grew up.
Carrère pays consistent attention to one defendant, a “feckless second fiddle” named Salah Abdeslam and the only member of the original “commando”—the perpetrators, rather than their accomplices and drivers—to survive. Abdeslam’s job was “to kill and be killed,” Carrère writes. “He did neither.” Instead, he drove off and left his collaborators to do the wet work. His presence and his eventual punishment—the steepest of the lot, an “incompressible” life sentence—is also a reminder, for Carrère, that “we don’t have the real criminals on hand, so he’s being made to pay for them.” The author returns again and again to Abdeslam’s “profound, startling sentence explaining what’s wrong with this trial”: that it is like “reading the last page of a book; what you should do is read the book from the start.”
In the audiotape from the Bataclan, one of the shooters is heard to declare, between bursts of gunfire, “You can thank your president François Hollande. If we kill you, it’s his fault. He started this when he bombed our wives and children.” That is to say, according to the attackers, “their attacks were a legitimate response to the state terrorism practiced by France first in Iraq and then in Syria.” This puts Carrère in mind of the trial 40 years ago of Klaus Barbie, the so-called Butcher of Lyon, France’s most celebrated modern reckoning of its collaborative past under Nazi occupation. The French lawyer who made his name defending Barbie relied on an argument “similar to the one Abdeslam is now making: your justice is worthless and I do not recognize it. Yes, the Gestapo tortured in France, but France tortured in Algeria and nobody thinks of putting it on trial. … Put your own house in order first.”
Carrère is flummoxed by the whataboutism inherent in read the book from the start. “What would count as the beginning? The end of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. … The retreat of the Ottoman armies from Vienna in 1683?” Yet he seems to give it credence just the same. After repeating Abdeslam’s phrase, Carrère writes, “Well put.”
