To be in Paris on the night of 13 November 2015, when 130 people were killed by an Islamist commando group, who within a few hours launched attacks on the Stade de France, the café terraces of the Right Bank and the Bataclan theatre, was to live through a night of unspeakable terror. Like most residents of the city, I watched the slaughter unfold in real-time on television. There was a stuttering commentary as French news presenters tried, and failed, to understand what was happening – the gunfire, the dead bodies, and the low, keening agony of survivors. All of this was taking place in familiar streets a mile or so from where I lived.
Five days after the massacre, the Islamic State, which by now had claimed proud responsibility for the attacks, published its own account of what had happened. Its official online propaganda magazine Dabiq produced a collage of images, mainly of the dead or dying in the streets of Paris, which were too disturbing to be reproduced in the Western media. Among these was a picture of a semi-naked corpse of a young woman, still dressed in clothes for a Friday night. In the photograph her legs were splayed out and her body ripped open by bullets. Still the editors of Dabiq had blanked out her breasts, genital area and her feet in high-heeled shoes. The Islamists could not lose their neurotic fear of female sexuality even in death, a marker of just how severe and alien their morality was to the Western mind.
Equally jarring was the front cover’s headline, “Just Terror”. This had a dual meaning. One was a callous half-joke, a play on “simply terror”. The other was more important and sinister: the murders were “justified terror”. This was a new slant on the terrorists’ intent, which went largely unnoticed at the time, in the fear and confusion of the immediate aftermath. Islamic State was, however, announcing here that indiscriminate murder – “terrorism” – was now not only to be used as a weapon of war, but also as a form of justice.
In doing so, they were issuing a direct challenge to both Western morality and the West’s conception of justice, based as it is on secular, rational and utilitarian principles. This was the legal and philosophical conflict that lay at the heart of the ten-month trial, which took place in Paris from September 2021 to June 2022, of 20 men charged with involvement in the attacks.
This was the longest criminal trial in modern French history – more than 300 lawyers represented 2,500 plaintiffs and the defendants. It was greater in scale even than the 1987 trial of Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo officer nicknamed the “Butcher of Lyon” for his crimes against humanity during the Second World War. The French writer Emmanuel Carrère begins his book by remarking on the “colossal” ambition of the trial, which sought “to unfold over a period of nine months, from every angle, from the point of view of everyone involved, what happened that night”. The title of the book, V13, derives from “Vendredi 13”, a moniker given to the trial by lawyers and journalists in an attempt to reduce its size, as if truncating it to a single code name would diminish its capacity to overwhelm.
This was, of course, impossible. Carrère has, however, forged an extremely readable story out of a dizzying amount of information. He was there for nearly all of the trial’s 148 days, sending regular, forensically documented despatches to Le Nouvel Obs magazine, which form the basis of the book. For Carrère, the trial was often boring in length and confusing in detail. Dealing with such intricacies, ambiguities and complexities is home territory for Carrère, an author of fiction, non-fiction and memoir. He has partly made his name by writing about the extremes of the human mind, most notably with The Adversary, which tells the real story of Jean-Claude Romand, who killed his wife, children and parents after years of deceit. In Carrère’s hands the V13 trial becomes a human drama of the lives destroyed in the name of God’s law.
The trial began with the testimony of the plaintiffs, those who had lost children or lovers, or who had survived but with life-changing injuries. This was a long process and Carrère admits that he was occasionally ground down by the rambling, repetitive nature of some of the accounts, and he felt guilty about this, even sometimes doubting shaky testimony or suspecting grifters seeking easy compensation. At the same time, he was often either moved to tears or driven into black despair by the inhumanity described.
Among the stories Carrère singles out is that of Maia, a young architect who was sitting at the terrace of the café Le Carillon with her friends and her husband, Amine, who was Moroccan. Within moments of the attack, as her friends and husband lie dead in front of her, their bodies shattered by bullets, Maia is shocked by the silence that came so quickly and heavily after the gunshots stopped. Then she hears a noise. It is the gasping and wheezing of a young man she does not know, who is leaning on her, squeezing out his last breath. It is a crushingly intimate moment. Maia will never know his name.
There are disturbing images in all the stories. Another survivor, Edith, who was trapped in the mosh pit of the Bataclan theatre, where the living were either buried under or trampling the dead (a source of guilt and anguish to those who survived). She is convinced that she too will die and remembers that “there is no milk in the fridge and I haven’t paid my daughter’s lunch fees”. She remembers the suicide of one of the assassins, with a troubling literary flourish, as “a confetti of flesh everywhere”. The horrible image of “human confetti” recurs throughout the book.
The defendants seemed mostly unable to understand what they have been a part of. The principal defendant, Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving member of the group that directly carried out the attacks, begins the trial by stating that he doesn’t recognise the court and that he was a soldier of the Islamic State. Abdeslam’s main role in the attacks was as a gofer, fetching fellow jihadists from Hungary or Germany, buying arms and explosives or sorting out hiding places. Abdelsam was supposed to blow himself up that night, like his older brother Brahim, and the reasons he didn’t never become clear, as he persists in answering questions cryptically. Perhaps he never knew why he backed out. Humanity? Cowardice? Or both?
Even Abdelsam’s bravado breaks down, however, as the trial progresses and a story of a loose fraternity of young men hanging round a café called Les Béguines in the banlieue of Molenbeek in Brussels emerges. (The café was owned and run by the brothers as a private headquarters before they sold it.) Most of their time is spent smoking or selling dope, or engaged in other forms of petty crime. In the café’s basement, Brahim revels in showing Islamic State propaganda videos on a loop. The gang’s knowledge of Islam is thin, but they are disaffiliated from the outside world and delight in the daring and anti-Western provocations of the videos, especially when one of their former mates, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who has gone to join the Islamic State in Syria, can be seen gleefully towing the corpses of hostages from a pick-up, “laughing with his psychopathic little gremlin’s face, inviting viewers to come and join the fun”.
W hen the sentences are finally handed down, there is a sense, as Carrère reports it, of something unresolved. There are celebrations with lawyers and the media delights in the judgement’s severity. But Carrère worries whether justice has been done. None of the defendants were truly fanatics. Neither are they victims – they have mostly been too crafty, too aware of what is being planned and what they are being roped into. There was nothing innocent about the roles they played as fixers, drivers, intelligence gatherers and forgers. Yet they are being punished for the scale of the attacks and the meanings accrued in the aftermath – things they are not fully responsible for. Finally, Carrère argues, it is the crime itself that’s being punished and not the defendants.
This is why, Carrère says, the sentences – a full-life sentence without parole for Abdeslam, and between 18 and 30 years for some of the accomplices – are not “scandalous”. They were inevitable, he reasons, as the stakes were so high. This trial could never simply have been about elevating justice over terror. Rather, it was always going to be about the clash between civilisation and its opposite. This is why this book is so unsettling: the trial may be over, but the conflict is far from finished, Carrère concludes darkly. And, as his account of the trial shows, it is never clear who is really winning.
Andrew Hussey is the author of “The French Intifada: The Long War Between France and Its Arabs” (Granta)
V13: Chronicle of a Trial
Emmanuel Carrère
Fern Press, 3200pp, £20
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This article appears in the 07 Nov 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Trump takes America