That November day, known as V13 in France (for “Friday the 13th”), Islamic State militants drove into the center of Paris and killed 131 people. Three attackers blew themselves up outside the Stade de France. Others fired on café terraces, and three gunmen massacred 90 people at a rock concert at the Bataclan theater. The nine men who’d done the killing are all dead, and so the 14 men whose trial Carrère attended were accused of varying degrees of involvement. There was Salah Abdeslam, whose suicide belt never detonated; Mohamed Abrini, who drove with the attackers into the city; and several avowed Islamic State militants. There were also some whose complicity was in question: Did the man who made the attackers fake IDs know what they were up to? Did the guys who drove Abdeslam back to Belgium after the attacks realize what he’d done?
Carrère’s novels and nonfiction works are self-referential, climbing out of one another like an Escher staircase, so it wasn’t a surprise to come across a bit of Yoga in V13: Two of the defendants had come through Leros a year before Carrère was there. He wonders if he would have seen them for what they were, or if he could have written about them with compassion as he had the refugees he encountered. But the new book doesn’t engage in the relentless self-exposure that characterizes so much of his work. There’s no highly personal answer to the question he poses at the opening: “Why inflict this on myself?” Why spend a year locked in a courtroom with this grim material? He’s interested in justice, he says, and religions and “their pathological mutations.” But the main reason is he wants to hear “day in, day out” about “extreme experiences of death and life.” He believes that “between the time we first enter this courtroom and when we leave it for good, something in all of us will have shifted ground.”
Reading V13, I couldn’t help but think about another trial known simply by its the 9/11 case at Guantánamo. The comparison is apt because of the level of national trauma involved, even at very different scales; because of the historical line linking Al Qaeda and ISIS and the foreign policy of Western powers like France and the United States; and because of the question of what kind of threat Islamic terrorism poses and what reaction to it is warranted. In both cases, the justice reached for is slightly aslant—the primary perpetrators of mass murder are dead. V13 amounts to an argument that a criminal court proceeding can indeed offer healing, maybe even closure. At Guantánamo, we might never get that far.
Carrère, being there every day, picks which of the hundreds of plaintiffs and lawyers and tangential characters he’ll follow—the ones that make “good copy,” as one of his media colleagues puts it. There’s the woman whose first thought when the killing started was “this is crazy, I’m going to die in a small concert hall where I came to hear a group of nice but not very good Californian rednecks,” and there’s one of said Californian rednecks, the lead singer of the Eagles of Death Metal, who in the courtroom embraces his fans one by one like “Napoleon pulling his soldiers’ ears.” There are the Roman Catholics from Normandy who convert to Islam and go to Syria en famille, with the two brothers becoming ISIS propagandists cranking out jihadist chants; and there’s Nadia Mondeguer, a French Egyptian woman who teaches Arabic and was listening to nasheeds for her research into Salafism when her daughter was gunned down in a café a few blocks away. We hear from a brother and sister, a professional rugby player and acrobat, respectively; they were shot together, and both severely disabled.
The defense lawyers propose that the French state bears some responsibility for the violence of that day. Not for failing to stop the plot (the authorities’ fumbles in that regard are a different story), but because, they argue, the Syrian war and France’s involvement in it are a source of “political indignation.” Former President François Hollande is called to the witness box; someone says the case really should be retried as a war crime. Carrère admits that the community that forms around V13 is one of “us and them”; peaceful democrats who look alike and understand one another versus “opaque young men” who “want us dead.” It seems like an admission that, although the caliphate may have collapsed, the inequality, colonial history, and racism that divides Arab and Muslim France from the rest of it persists. The trial won’t change that. Carrère delves only briefly into geopolitical context and sociological studies of contemporary jihadism, via expert witnesses at the trial, sticking mainly to his scrutiny of individuals (and this is probably for the best, as, aside from a brief mention of notorious orientalist Bernard Lewis, he steers clear of totalizing narratives about Islam). But he takes up the whataboutism trap, observing that one could look at V13 like this: “we make of our 131 dead a world event … we hold a trial of historic proportions, shoot films, write books like this one. But 131 Syrians or Iraqis killed by American bombs (or by Bashar or Putin for that matter)? Nobody cares.”
What resulted from the trial? Convictions and major sentences for most of the accused, and no time (though the stain of a terror conviction) for the three hapless “minor defendants,” who had become underdogs of a sort—they were kissed and congratulated and posed with for selfies at the bar after the verdict. Carrère writes that the monthslong trial introduced few new facts to public understanding of events; most of those could already be gleaned from the 378-page indictment that was available at the start. Salah Abdeslam’s state of mind remains “a poor mystery: an abysmal void wrapped in lies, which one regrets with stunned amazement having spent so much time thinking about at all.” But one lawyer sums up why it was a relief for many victims to give their depositions, “precisely because they felt they were depositing something, letting it go. A suffering, a burden, something the court could take in. Many of them came out lightened, if only by a little. If the trial had only served this purpose, it would not have been in vain.”
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