Following a reflective Yoga experience that earned him recognition at the FIL in Guadalajara, and just before being named a laureate of the Princess of Asturias Award for Letters in 2021, Emmanuel Carrère wrote a letter to the head of Le Nouvel Observateur Culture, expressing a desire to report to him again. In the nineties, he had penned judicial chronicles for the same publication, covering the case against Jean-Claude Romand, a fraudulent doctor who lived a double life for decades and ultimately killed his family. Those chronicles became the seed for his novel The Enemy. Hence, taking on a historic case such as the Bataclan attacks and the shootings on Paris’s terraces on Friday, November 13, 2015, on a weekly basis aligned with Carrère’s concerns and narrative arc.
V13 highlights two remarks that went largely unnoticed during the trial but clearly appear as asterisks in Carrère’s notebooks. The first comes from Salah Abdeslam, a principal operative in the terrorist network: “Everything you say about us and our jihadists reads as if you’re turning the last page of a book. You must read the book from the beginning.” The second remark was made by Pierre Sylvain, a Bataclan survivor: “I hope what happened to us becomes a collective story.” Crafting this story and reading the book from the start are ambitious goals that exceed the capacity of a single person, yet Carrère imposes this challenge on himself by spending nine months in the Palace from September 2021 to June 2022. Paris Justice seeks to understand and to gauge the criminal temperament, to scrutinize lives and to locate the moment where truth teeters and crime begins. Civil statements are emotionally exhausting; they resist a straightforward rejection of the stance urged by the then Prime Minister Manuel Valls: “To understand is to apologize.” Carrère rejects this sentiment and leans on Spinoza’s principle: do not judge, do not worry, do not anger—simply try to understand. This approach threads through The Enemy, The Lives of Others, and Limonov when addressing others’ experiences, and through The Kingdom and Yoga when reflecting on one’s own. Ultimately, it is a human endeavor that demands genuine care for others, especially when detailing individuals like Jean-Claude Romand, Limonov, or the Paris attackers. Moreover, the trial, with its global resonance, aims to present the events of that Friday night from multiple angles and from all participants’ perspectives, over a span of nine months.
To accommodate such breadth, the work’s architecture folds the trial into sections that resemble a novel: personality, radicalization, Syria, the buildup to the assault, the moment of impact, and the aftermath, organized around a clean “them and us” framework. In Carrère’s formulation, peaceful democrats are depicted as decent people whose society is shaped by a formidable judiciary that forges bonds, creates belonging, and shapes collective identity. Those who are different or unknown are set in opposition. In keeping with this structure, the book divides into three parts: victims, defendant, and court.
In the first section, the massacre’s chronology is told through the testimonies of civilians, tracing the journeys of survivors. The accounts reveal the brutality and the hell endured by young concert-goers at the Bataclan and on Paris’s terraces on a sunlit Friday afternoon, framed by a sense of the weekend at hand. Carrère adds a notable point in the summary: Patrick Jardin’s testimony. While civilization aspires to replace vengeance with justice, to convert retaliation into reconciliation, it must also acknowledge an archaic anger that resides within the human heart and must be learned to transcend. The unanimous, righteous plea of the victims that “you will not accept my hatred” stands as admirable, yet it might also silence the Patrick Jardin impulse inside us all, the hurt and confession voiced at least once on a public stage. Even among two hundred and fifty voices, one among them declares a controversial stance: some may be labeled far right, and yet the question remains whether a daughter’s death is less consequential in such a framing.
In the second part, after the harrowing testimonies of the survivors, the focus shifts to fourteen men in tracksuits who linger behind reflective glass, waiting for the night to unfold. One among them contemplates whether they would address those damaged by the attacks pursued by international forces in Iraq and Syria since 2014, remarking, “We did not come into this world with a Kalashnikov.” Carrère makes a rigorous effort to read the book from its origins, analyzing the long historical process that culminated in this pathological mutation of Islam. Throughout his literary career, he has shown that it is essential to distinguish between a person and an action. This discernment helps to frame the narrative with precision, avoiding simplistic judgments while still addressing the gravity of crimes and the people connected to them. [Cite]