The year of 2015 was a crisis both for France and for Emmanuel Carrère, France’s greatest living writer of non-fiction. On 7 January, jihadist gunmen murdered 12 people at the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine, among them a friend of Carrère’s, the economist Bernard Maris. Not long after Carrère delivered a eulogy at Maris’s funeral, the collapse of his marriage triggered a breakdown, a bipolar diagnosis and a four-month stay in a psychiatric clinic. Meanwhile, on 13 November, terrorists murdered 130 people in coordinated attacks across Paris, including 90 at the Bataclan theatre. The fallout from the killings helped bring down not just France’s president, François Hollande, but its two-party system. In the 2017 presidential election, held while the country was still under a state of emergency, a “republican front” was needed for Emmanuel Macron to beat Marine Le Pen, who won 34 per cent of the vote, a record for the hard right.
In Yoga (2020), a memoir about his breakdown, Carrère wondered what it would take to give the story a “good ending”: “Ending a book isn’t easy. What image, what idea of life do we want to leave the reader with? What meaning do we want to give the story we have just told?” Nobody writes more luminously about darkness, or more assuredly about doubt, than Carrère, but Yoga is a book that feels frantically in search of its own narrative thread. (It emerged that a legal challenge from his ex-wife obliged Carrère to cut the manuscript to ribbons in order to remove all references to her.) When, after 300 tortured pages, Carrère contrives an abrupt “good ending” by introducing a new love interest on the final page, the effect is unconvincing. “To live you need a story,” he writes, but Yoga is a tale that only half-believes its own telling.
Carrère’s new book is an attempt to tell a story with a good ending about France’s national crisis of 2015. V13, published in France in 2022 and now in English translation, collects the columns he filed for the French weekly L’Obs from the trial of 20 men accused of involvement in the November 2015 attacks. (The title is a French nickname for the attacks, which took place on Friday – vendredi – 13th.) The trial ran for ten months and inspired endless media commentary, but there was little consensus about what exactly it all meant. The ambiguity was, in large part, because it concerned a crime whose main perpetrators were absent, having been killed that night or shortly after, and where there was little doubt over the outcome (all defendants were found guilty, albeit a few of only minor crimes). Was it a moment of catharsis for a traumatised nation? An investigation into the social and religious roots of jihadist ideology? An assertion of French republicanism against Islamist nihilism?
The point on which virtually everyone agreed was that the purpose of the trial was, in some sense, to tell a story. Salah Abdeslam, the “star” defendant (he had been set to take part in the attacks until either he changed his mind or his suicide belt failed), argued from the stand that 13 November was like “the last page of a book” that cannot be understood unless it is read “from the start”. Meanwhile, one survivor spoke of the trial, with its five weeks of harrowing witness testimony, as a chance to fashion a “collective narrative”. Carrère, content to stay out of the frame and train the camera on his subjects, presents us with a kind of oral history. We hear from Maia, who watched her husband and two friends die before her eyes; from Aristide and Alice, who both insist the other saved their life in the chaos; from Nadia, who hopes that her daughter, killed on a date, spent her last evening “under the spell of first love”. Turning to the accused, Carrère judges Abdeslam, who keeps shiftily changing his story, a bitterly frustrating memoirist: “An abysmal void wrapped in lies, which one regrets with stunned amazement having spent so much time thinking about.” But he has compassion for several of the others, who clearly had little idea what they were getting mixed up in. He quotes with approval Spinoza’s precept: “Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.”
One bereaved father takes the stand to call for a crackdown on Muslims, saying it’s a pity there’s no death penalty for “vermin” like Abdeslam. But much more typical is the writer Antoine Leiris, the title of whose memoir about losing his wife at the Bataclan, You Will Not Have My Hate, became a slogan among the mostly young, metropolitan survivors. Carrère is moved when one bereaved mother ends her testimony with the words: “Now, defence lawyers, do your job. Do it well. I mean it.” For the trial to succeed, what matters most is that “law and justice have the last word”; that everybody, especially the defendants, is given a fair hearing; that guilt and innocence are determined impersonally. Carrère is passionate about the court as an institution, and heaps praise on the underpaid lawyers for the accused, who, he says, do their work “for the beauty of the gesture and the love of justice”. He finds the survivors of the attack heroic, but the real hero of his account is the French judicial system.
If the V13 trial as a whole is a kind of story, for Carrère it is a story about the defiant survival of France’s liberal values in the face of religious and xenophobic atavisms. Such values are only possible, he writes, in “a society that has lost its sense of the collective and History with a big H”. In our post-historical world, both victims and accused stand for nothing more nor less than their individual selves. At one point he presents us with a kind of humanist epiphany, a vision of the dead and dying after the attacks, in which he imagines them “each in their own particular, infinite pain, while the story of each one, the pain of each one, the soul of each one bursts in slow motion like bubbles of silence and light”.
However, beyond the gates of the Palais de Justice, other kinds of stories have been in circulation. One of Carrère’s last acts of 2014 was to file a rave review of a novel that by no means lacked a sense of the collective and big-H History. Michel Houellebecq’s Submission was released on 7 January 2015, by diabolical coincidence the same day as the Charlie Hebdo attacks. Submission, which in his review Carrère compared favourably with Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, imagines a Muslim takeover of France via a 2022 presidential election in which the left forms an alliance with Islamists to block the far right. Most of the book’s action comprises a series of lengthy discussions in which its characters, a group of middle-aged Parisian intellectuals, explain to each other how the demoralising effects of liberalism and feminism have led to a collapse in Western birth rates and made “Muslim domination” a “foregone conclusion”. The twist Houellebecq gives the dystopia genre is that, when sharia law finally arrives, it turns out to be much more preferable than the misery of Western individualism it replaces.
Submission wasn’t the first time Houellebecq imagined a conflict between Islam and the West. When Michel, the protagonist of 2001’s Platform, loses his partner in a jihadist attack on a resort in Thailand, his response is a far cry from You Will Not Have My Hate: “Every time I heard that a Palestinian terrorist, or a pregnant Palestinian woman or a Palestinian child, had been gunned down in the Gaza Strip, I felt a quiver of enthusiasm at the thought that it meant one less Muslim.” After the November 2015 attacks Houellebecq dispensed with fictional alter egos in an op-ed where he placed the blame squarely on Muslim immigration (most of the attackers were French- or Belgian-born men of North African descent), a political class that views borders as “an outdated absurdity”, and the “preachings of the ‘moral left’ on the reception of refugees and migrants”.
Carrère’s praise for Houellebecq’s writing, in his Submission review and elsewhere, contains no endorsement of his politics. For Carrère, an exemplary pluralist, Houellebecq is just one more voice worth hearing, an awesomely gifted writer – and, besides, some of his ideas are worth considering. In the same vein, Carrère is happy to call his old friend Renaud Camus – the originator of the “Great Replacement” theory who is namechecked in Submission – an “exceptional writer” and a “man of integrity” while dismissing his more “delirious convictions”. Ideological combat isn’t Carrère’s style; he says he has little interest in politics (he cast a ballot for Macron in 2017, admitting candidly that his was a “class vote: it was normal for privileged people to vote for Macron”), and that he shies away from sociological explanations of events.
Carrère’s best work emerges from his sometimes queasy identification with individual men and women – the murderer Jean-Claude Romand in The Adversary (2000), the humanitarian lawyers Patrice and Juliette in Other Lives But Mine (2009), the eponymous poet and adventurer in Limonov (2011) – and a fascination with the psychic recesses that motivate their actions, good or evil. The paradox of his writing is that he is as frequently accused of solipsism as he is praised for his spooky perceptiveness about other people; it’s as though, since other humans barely exist for him, every time he meets one it’s an unforgettable encounter with an alien species. It’s instructive to contrast Carrère with the author of another book about a violent crime that raises questions about trauma, storytelling and migration. In 2016’s History of Violence the young leftist writer Édouard Louis describes his rape at the hands of a man of Algerian descent. Louis attempts to understand his attacker’s actions by tracing his story backwards, placing it in a context of French colonialism and racism. Carrère and Louis, two generations apart, share a habit of compulsive introspection, but nothing could be more alien to Carrère than Louis’s broad structural vision.
V13 concludes with a joyful set piece: after the verdicts are handed down, everyone flocks from the courthouse to a nearby brasserie to celebrate the end of the trial. There are toasts, embraces. The plaintiffs’ lawyers send over champagne to the counsel for the defence. Visibly disabled survivors weep in each other’s arms, and even take selfies with three stunned-looking defendants who were found guilty of only minor offences and released. (“I got more kisses tonight than at my wedding,” says one.) The scene resembles the last heady night of a theatre run; the story has been told, the various actors have played their parts well, the reviews are in. Justice has been done, the spectres of vengeance and collective identity have been banished, and everyone can go home to their individual lives. But does Carrère believe in his story’s “good ending”? When another reporter asks him if he will attend the trial of the 2016 Nice truck attack, which killed 86 Bastille Day revellers, he says no: he has heard enough horror and, besides, the demographic profile of the Nice victims means nobody is expecting another festival of tolerance.
As the V13 trial was drawing to a close, another presidential election took place in France. Islamists did not take over the country in 2022, but the result was hardly a resounding victory for liberalism, with Marine Le Pen winning 41.5 per cent of the vote. The “republican front” had held, just about; but the “centrist” parties, lacking any structural analysis to make sense of the appeal of Islamism or nativism, had begun to discover that some of the hard right’s ideas were worth considering. The centre-right candidate Valérie Pécresse used the term “great replacement” at a campaign rally, and ministers in Macron’s government warned darkly of the threat of “Islamo-leftism” in French institutions. In July this year a hard-right victory in the National Assembly elections was only narrowly averted, leading to the appointment of anti-immigration hardliner Michel Barnier as prime minister. To live you need a story; and for now, at least, it was still possible to tell the story of France’s liberal democracy with a good ending.
[See also: Can Michel Barnier save Emmanuel Macron?]
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