After Terror Attacks, France’s Reckoning—and America’s Delayed Justice

These characters are good copy, and something more than that, because we have also read Carrère’s diaristic asides about how the plaintiffs’ horrific ordeals have started to sound repetitive, his meta-commentary about the international press rushing in for the highlights, or the inside jokes among the trial aficionados. As anyone who has spent extended time in a courtroom knows, when you’re in the thick of all the routine cynicism and clichés, it’s all the more moving to be genuinely startled: to feel, as Carrère makes you feel, like the man, a photographer, who was shot at a café and remembers it as “a series of flashes: seeing all of these dead, wounded and living people he didn’t know, he saw them individually, each in their own particular, infinite pain.”

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.”