The end: the last installment of the chronicles of Emmanuel Carrère since the trial for the Paris attacks

Chapter 38

1. In the judicial auction room

The sentence will be known at 5:00 p.m., no one doubts that it will be later, some think that late at night.

Even more people than the first day, more gendarmes, more noise.

We don't want to get away, we go around, chocolate bars and rumors circulate.

As on the first day, in the room there is only one seat for each media outlet, this time Mathieu Delahousse occupies that of the

.

Violette Lazard and I, in the broadcasting room of the judicial auctions, she secured the corner of a bank, I a piece of step in the middle of two hundred journalists who came from all over the world and most of whom we have never seen.

The court makes its entrance at 8:30 p.m., we feared worse.

The president announces that the complete sentence contains 120 pages, it will be available at some time of the night, now only a summary will be read.

"No one objects?"

He laughs at his joke, you can tell he's hypertensive, everyone is.

Here we go.

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Except for the defendant Farid Kharkhach, the judges answer yes to all the questions raised by the prosecutors.

Except for the defendant Kharkhach, all are found guilty of all the crimes for which they appear here.

Kharkhach is that lunatic character who made false papers without knowing with absolute certainty neither for whom nor for what, and when his children go to see him in the locutory he makes them believe that he is a jailer.

We're happy for him, but if he's the only one acquitted, that means everyone else has been convicted.

This is what the three minor defendants understand, Chouaa, Attou and Oulkadi, who throughout the entire trial have appeared free in their folding seats in front of the bench and who bury their heads in their hands and begin to sob.

I remember Chouaa's last words, the day before: "I am afraid, I am very afraid that they will make a mistake."

These are the two great uncertainties of the sentence: the fate of the "second-rankers" (will they be released?) and that of the biggest fish, Abdeslam: will they impose the famous, and for many shocking, irreducible life sentence that the prosecution?

When we come to him in the reading of the sentences, it is not very clear either, because after pronouncing the word "perpetual", which does not surprise anyone, the president adds that they will not be able to apply any of the measures provided for in article 132-23 of the Penal Code.

It is understood that this is not good news for Abdeslam, he himself seems disconcerted, he questions his lawyers with his eyes, who do not have everything with them,

but the president has not uttered the word “irreducible” and the question runs through the banks: “What has he said?

But what does article 132-23 say?

Salah Abdeslam, on the right, along with the other 13 defendants. BENOIT PEYRUCQ (AFP)

Journalists from all over the world have to send or record or tweet their papers within half an hour: they make it difficult for them.

The president continues his reading.

This man, usually placid, gets stuck with words, he gets tongue-tied, his slips abound and the most spectacular is calling Mohammed Amri Mohammed Henri, which for a magistrate of his age is not a trivial slip when we remember that the murderer of a child whom Badinter managed to save from the guillotine, at the same time that he achieved the abolition of the death penalty, was called Patrick Henry.

And right after this, Mohammed Henri, suddenly the image freezes on the screen.

The president's jaw drops, there is no sound, the broadcast has been interrupted.

Computer error.

2. The Stuttering General

A problem two thirds of the sentence, in the middle of the reading of the sentences, at the most dramatic moment of the trial.

It's not possible.

We remain in suspense waiting for the image to return.

It doesn't come back.

We do not know what to do.

Some remain petrified, others go out into the lobby.

I go.

We crowded in front of the audience room.

Ruled out entering, of course, it is crowded.

But, we stammered, are they going to suspend the hearing while they solve the problem?

No, says Julien Quéré, whom I am going to talk about in a moment.

The trial continues.

General dismay.

I share it until the following story breaks into my memory.

In 1849 Dostoevsky is 28 years old, he has been arrested for having participated in a terrorist plot and sentenced to death.

They have taken him, along with the other conspirators, to the place of execution.

They put a hood on them, tie them to posts while the platoon loads their rifles.

An instant before they order the firing, an emissary from the Tsar arrives and notifies them of the pardon.

A relative pardon: Dostoevsky served four years of hard labor in Siberia, from where he will return as the man he will describe later in

, the hustle and bustle of hallucinated cockroaches that is a terrorist cell.

The sublime detail, the one that biographers never tire of mentioning, is that, by chance or pure sadism, the emissary in charge of reading the pardon letter was a

.

I can imagine what happened the minute after the broadcast was interrupted in the judicial auction room.

They notified the president and he had to decide on the spot: either suspend the hearing until the fault was restored, because he couldn't do that to the two hundred journalists who had come from all over the world, or, since the reading had already begun, continue to the end because you couldn't do that to the accused.

In my previous chronicle, I deplored that the president, due to long deliberations, cared about everyone except the latter.

He has rectified in a brilliant way.

He has said: we continue.

He has refused to be the stuttering general.

(At this point: they say that a psychoanalysis is fully revealed in the first session; the same thing happens with a first hearing of a criminal trial. Interrogation of marital status. Abdeslam, profession? "Fighter of the Islamic State". Périès consults his notes and says: "I see here: temporary worker”. This retort turned into legend could not be premeditated, the president enunciated it without a hint of humor or sarcasm. He established his authority for the entire trial. From the first session to 49: serves as a tribute to Périès).

3. At the top of the ladder

Now we're at the top of the courthouse steps, and Marie Dosé is grumbling.

Along with Judith Lévy, Marie is also Ali Oulkadi's lawyer and they both have reason to be happy that Oulkadi and the other two are finally going to be released.

It takes more to please Marie Dosé, who is a passionate, headstrong, cantankerous advocate;

I adore her

This sentence, she says, is a botch.

It is from a legal point of view.

They have called for Oulkadi's acquittal.

He has been found guilty of everything, of being a terrorist association of criminals, of being an accomplice for terrorists, of extremely serious things for which he is sentenced to what?

Two years in prison that he has already served, that is, what falls to a thief when he is immediately brought before the judge for the theft of a bag.

What does this mean?

It means that we know very well that there is nothing terrible to reproach him for, but instead of acquitting him or endorsing him for two years for a simple cover-up, which would be the absolute truth, they want, to establish jurisprudence, that nothing escapes the ATM, the famous terrorist association of malefactors that was already, emphasizes Judith Lévy, a crime-garbage but that is becoming a crime-dump.

Passers-by in Paris walk past plaques commemorating the victims of the November 2015 attack. Abdulmonam Eassa (Getty Images)

The full meaning of the sentence, they explain to me (I like it when Marie and Judith explain things to me, they have often done so during the trial), is to avoid the appeal.

Above all, prevent them from recurring.

A priori they are not going to appeal in the Oulkadi case.

The decision is aberrational, he will keep the terrorist label stuck on his forehead all his life, but he is released and this is the essential thing.

The same goes for Chouaa and Attou.

In general, they have imposed on all defendants

that what the prosecution was requesting —the subliminal message is: they can hit their teeth, and if they resort, rest assured that they will aggravate the sentence— to concentrate everything on the back of Abdeslam, the absolute, definitive and terminal terrorist, in jail until death comes, so everyone will be happy.

Well, everyone: public opinion, to which the message is conveyed that we are and always will be ruthless in terms of terrorism.

Certainly not everyone among my peers on trial, including the civil parties, most of whom are uncomfortable with this ruling handed down only four times in a quarter of a century.

For two reasons, one of common sense, the other legal.

The first: if instead of dead, the nine assassins of the commando were now in the dock, they would have deservedly sentenced them to irreducible life imprisonment.

And Abdeslam, then?

What would they have sentenced him to, the frightened comparsa?

Not to the same penalty, for sure.

Since we don't have the real criminals, he pays for them.

The legal reason: the sentence rests on a twisted legal construction.

(Joke that circulated in Mitterrand's time: the president has two lawyers, Robert Badinter for the right path, Roland Dumas for the crooked path).

Legally, Abdeslam can be prosecuted for everything of which he has been admitted guilty, but this does not allow him to be sentenced to this penalty, the maximum of the maximum.

Whichever way you look, the account does not come out.

What would help him get out would be if he had shot at the police officers at the Bataclan.

Well, not only did he not shoot anyone, but he was not in the Bataclan.

That does not change anything, says the prosecution, we are going to consider all the scenes of the attack as a single scene.

Not having shot in a café in the 18th district is equivalent to having shot in a concert hall in the 11th district. This is called “interchangeability” of scenarios, it is the territorial transposition of the proverb “if it is not you then it was your brother”, that is the great argument of the ATM and that, despite my great appreciation for the prosecutors, leaves me perplexed.

Not only me, but many of my comrades, but honestly it cannot be said that this perplexity obsesses us tonight.

It's not tonight, when the hashtag is going to launch

Well, not only didn't he shoot anyone, but he wasn't at the Bataclan.

That does not change anything, says the prosecution, we are going to consider all the scenes of the attack as a single scene.

Not having shot in a café in the 18th district is equivalent to having shot in a concert hall in the 11th district. This is called “interchangeability” of scenarios, it is the territorial transposition of the proverb “if it is not you then it was your brother”, that is the great argument of the ATM and that, despite my great appreciation for the prosecutors, leaves me perplexed.

Not only me, but many of my comrades, but honestly it cannot be said that this perplexity obsesses us tonight.

It's not tonight, when the hashtag is going to launch

Well, not only didn't he shoot anyone, but he wasn't at the Bataclan.

That does not change anything, says the prosecution, we are going to consider all the scenes of the attack as a single scene.

Not having shot in a café in the 18th district is equivalent to having shot in a concert hall in the 11th district. This is called “interchangeability” of scenarios, it is the territorial transposition of the proverb “if it is not you then it was your brother”, that is the great argument of the ATM and that, despite my great appreciation for the prosecutors, leaves me perplexed.

Not only me, but many of my comrades, but honestly it cannot be said that this perplexity obsesses us tonight.

It's not tonight, when the hashtag is going to launch

We are going to consider all the scenes of the attack as a single scene.

Not having shot in a café in the 18th district is equivalent to having shot in a concert hall in the 11th district. This is called “interchangeability” of scenarios, it is the territorial transposition of the proverb “if it is not you then it was your brother”, that is the great argument of the ATM and that, despite my great appreciation for the prosecutors, leaves me perplexed.

Not only me, but many of my comrades, but honestly it cannot be said that this perplexity obsesses us tonight.

It's not tonight, when the hashtag is going to launch

We are going to consider all the scenes of the attack as a single scene.

Not having shot in a café in the 18th district is equivalent to having shot in a concert hall in the 11th district. This is called “interchangeability” of scenarios, it is the territorial transposition of the proverb “if it is not you then it was your brother”, that is the great argument of the ATM and that, despite my great appreciation for the prosecutors, leaves me perplexed.

Not only me, but many of my comrades, but honestly it cannot be said that this perplexity obsesses us tonight.

It's not tonight, when the hashtag is going to launch

This is called "interchangeability" of the scenarios, it is the territorial transposition of the proverb "if it is not you then it was your brother", which is the great argument of the ATM and which, despite my great appreciation for the prosecutors, leaves me perplexed.

Not only me, but many of my comrades, but honestly it cannot be said that this perplexity obsesses us tonight.

It's not tonight, when the hashtag is going to launch

This is called "interchangeability" of the scenarios, it is the territorial transposition of the proverb "if it is not you then it was your brother", which is the great argument of the ATM and which, despite my great appreciation for the prosecutors, leaves me perplexed.

Not only me, but many of my comrades, but honestly it cannot be said that this perplexity obsesses us tonight.

It's not tonight, when the hashtag is going to launch

Half an hour after the sentence, which is debatable but not scandalous, we move on to something else.

Half an hour after the sentence, which is debatable but not scandalous, we move on to something else.

We are at the top of the ladder where we have spent so many hours talking, smoking, crying over hearing suspensions.

On the boulevard, below, there are thirty CRS trucks (

, riot police).

They will leave in a few hours and you will be able to freely cross l´Île de la Cité, which has been blocked for almost a year.

I don't know how many times this year friends have told me, "You've got us to the shit with that traffic-blocking judgment of yours."

Me

trial, yes.

We all realize tonight, even those like me who have been mere observers, that it has been

trial and that it is over.

4. We go down the steps

Down the steps with Aurélie, who lost her husband, Matthieu, at the Bataclan.

I have not talked about it in these chronicles, it is the law of ephemeral communities, there are people with whom you only become friends at the end.

She tells me: on November 14, 2015, her sister turned off the television and said: "Now you don't watch anything anymore, you don't listen to anything, and you don't deal with this anymore, you concentrate on your life."

The beautiful book that Aurélie has written,

(

) (1), talks about Matthieu, their children, mourning, intimacy, life, but not about this.

She refuses to be invaded by this.

Not to mention going to trial and even less to testify.

On September 8, 2021, a friend from the Bataclan insists that she accompany him: it is a historic moment, at least come and see.

Commemorative plaque for the victims of the 2015 attacks. Abdulmonam Eassa (Getty Images)

She drags her feet, determined to stop at the Place Dauphine, before the first police checkpoint.

Now that she is in the area she is tempted to enter, which is obviously impossible because she has no accreditation or

, not even an identity document.

A thin and nervous guy appears to whom she and her friend explain the problem and he tells the gendarmes to let her pass, and the next day they give him a badge.

The thin and nervous man is called Julien Quéré, he is the magistrate who has been responsible for the entire organization of the trial and it is important to write his name because almost everyone has a similar story and Julien solves the problems with supernatural tact and efficiency. more tangled situations.

He was the head of this organization, all his subordinates acted just like him and I think that no one, no one among the civil parties, but in general among the people who have followed the trial from whatever position they were, has felt treated as someone insignificant.

Pascale Robert-Diard, the great judicial chronicler of

, has written an article that has caused quite a stir by saying that the attention to the victims was fine but that it was a bit exaggerated, that they made them live in cotton wool.

It is the kind of attitude with which I spontaneously agree, but in reality that dedication in the treatment has been precious, everyone has liked being treated that way.

Everyone has appreciated it.

Everyone says: It's amazing how well everything has gone.

Aurélie, at the end, is in the room.

She discovers it.

The dock is far away to the left.

She does not want to see them, but around her she discovers the survivors, those who dress in mourning, her fellow men, whose lives have been torn in two.

A few days later the president evokes ghosts,

the names of the 130 dead echo in the silence that closes them all, and she feels in her body, like a wave, the collective dimension of what happens there, a story bigger than herself and in which she understands that she is going to take part.

At first she comes from time to time and then more and more frequently.

At first she sits on the benches in the back and then she approaches.

She at first she doesn't look to the left, towards the bench, and then she starts looking towards him, towards the dangerous area that emits radiation.

It is a border for the victims who come to testify on the stand: some, at a given moment, turn to the left, look at them, address them;

and others would not do it for the world.

The day of her own testimony arrives, which shocks her.

It is reproduced by newspaper headlines:

Start going to Les Deux Palais.

Meet other people.

The sequence of the Belgian researchers, at the beginning of winter, is really the low tide of Friday the 13th, we are bored as mushrooms but she is not put off.

Georges Salines, whose daughter died in the Bataclan and who is not afraid of words, speaks directly of addiction.

All the people I have interviewed say the same thing.

They hooked them up, it was fascinating even when it was boring, as soon as they got on board no one got off in motion.

My personal experience has less weight, but at the beginning I also said to myself: we'll see.

In principle I cover the entire trial, but if after three months I am fed up I will tell my friends at

that I am retiring, it will be a small disappointment for them and for me, but we will say goodbye as good friends.

Never once have I thought of giving up.

I have never wanted to leave the room.

I knew, we knew that we were living together something completely different from the

pharaonic and useless judiciary that at the beginning we had good reason to fear.

Completely different: a unique experience of horror, pity, proximity, presence.

Only late did I realize that the courtroom resembles a modern church and that something sacred has developed in it.

Aurélie: “They have given us a place and time, all the time that was needed to transform, metabolize pain.

And it has worked.

Has happened.

We set sail, we have made this long, long journey and now the ship enters the port.

We disembarked."

We went out for a drink.

5. At Les deux Palais

Sorry if this sounds frivolous, it isn't.

The following evening was the most extraordinary I have ever spent, and probably will ever spend in my life.

Everyone present will tell you the same thing.

Little by little, all the people who have followed Friday the 13th descended the stairs and went to Les Deux Palais, this

Balzacnian, magical, in which judges, lawyers, journalists, defendants, couples who have just divorced and drink together, meet at all hours, for generations, with a rustle of black robes and often in the wake of tragedy, before each embark on their new life, a clumsy and sad coffee.

As the police control is still exercised for a few hours, you have to show the badge to access this little corner of l'Île de la Cité which is in fact privatized.

There is only us in Deux Palais, those of us who have spent so many hours on its dark sidewalks, this community of ours that is separated tonight.

We are all here, and among us a good third of civil parts, enough so that the others, those who have not suffered, those who like me are on the other side of the barrier,

may say that the strange gaiety of this evening is not something indecent.

Or if?

Is it indecent that Nif-Nif, Naf-Naf, Nuf-Nuf, the three second best who have narrowly escaped a good one, but who have nevertheless fulfilled their role in the service of death, are there, stunned, and that we congratulate them, kiss them and make ourselves

with them?

Only late did I realize that the courtroom resembles a modern church and that something sacred has developed in it.

Posed the question, the answers vary.

“I got more kisses today than on my wedding day,” says Ali Oulkadi.

The three of them are prohibited from residing in French territory for ten years, but well, we will say that the ten years start tomorrow, tonight even the prosecutors of the supreme contemplate their joy, touched, before their growing fan club.

Now the three prosecutors, so distant and almost intimidating in the hearings, and who never appear in the suspensions, look like friends with whom you have a few drinks and go hiking, a hobby of Nicolas Braconnay, whom you no longer imagine with a black robe, but with a Quechua fleece.

Camille Hennetier is wearing a sundress, and Olivia Ronen, who has defended Abdeslam along with Martin Vettes, and who has such a young, student-like air, tells me: “I had had enough of him,

No?

I don't know how many times you have written that I annoyed you."

I answer frankly, everyone tonight is sincere: “Yes, her aggressiveness annoyed me and her Salah here, Salah there, but I admired her.

Martin and you have fought like lions.

I think that the sentence was dictated in advance.

They couldn't do anything.

And at the end of your speech you were walking on water, Olivia, it was beautiful."

6.

We are here, we are together, we comment on the sentence, we shake hands and when we promise not to lose sight of each other, I know that in many cases it will be true.

What we have experienced together was too intense, incommunicable, no one who was not there will know.

Except for those who have settled down at a table, with their crew, many like me go from group to group.

You come across over and over again with those who do the same.

I have come across Yann a dozen times, a young man injured at the Petit Cambodge and who has attended the trial every day.

I say “young” (despite the fact that he is 48 years old and has gray hair) because of his youthful, slender air, with an attentive sweetness.

He is a photographer, I liked his testimony, he has become one of my companions on Friday the 13th. On the stand he described a very deep feeling of isolation at the moment the bullets hit him.

Everything went dark.

Her head sank into a serene, numb reverie, wrenched from her by the screams of her friend Gaëlle of her.

He understood that she could die, that this was real.

They crawled together to the kitchen where the three of them met—Yann's brother was there too—in the small kitchen of the Petit Cambodge where there was a telephone against the wall that kept ringing, and Yann began to answer it.

Salah Abdeslam's lawyer, Martin Vettes, during his closing argument. BENOIT PEYRUCQ (AFP)

First to someone who wanted

to go and to whom he told him that at that moment it was not possible, and then to terrified people who wanted to know what was happening, and he, stunned, repeated this absurd phrase: everything is fine, we have been shot, but everything is fine.

The wounded moaned, the emergency services transported bodies, and Yann experienced something like flashes: he saw individually each one of those dead, those wounded, those living whom he did not know, he saw them in their own particular and infinite pain, and the personal history of each one, their pain, their soul, burst before their eyes like bubbles of silence and light, in slow motion.

Yann says that in this same way “I got caught up in the judgment, which triggered these flashes, this physical sensation that everyone else was around me and I had a mysterious access to all of them.

I had this fantasy: to know exhaustively everything that had happened at the scene of my attack.

Then the perimeter was expanded.

I still belong to the Petit Cambodge, but little by little I have gotten to know the other communities, the other terraces, the Bataclan, the Stade de France and even Rue du Corbillon”.

Yann's last words on the stand: “I thank you for this trial.

I appreciate you going into the details.”

It is true, we have gone into the details and I remember something I thought last fall and it was a kind of

.

I thought that the ambition of Friday the 13th was insane, excessive and also novelistic: to unfold over ten months, from all angles, all points of view, going back as far as possible, what happened during those hours of horror.

It has been done to the extent that it was possible to do so.

Yann and I continue our journey, each on his own, but certain that we will cross paths again tonight.

Aren't you leaving yet?

No, I'm not leaving.

On Friday the 13th there was no need to make an appointment with the people you wanted to see.

We said: “See you tomorrow”.

It makes me sad to think of all those people to whom I am no longer going to say: “See you tomorrow”.

Half an hour later, I cross paths with Yann again and he says to me: "All this here, right now,

n't it seem like a hallucination?"

7. “It was fine”

We crowded at the counter, we no longer ordered glasses but bottles.

The lawyers for the civil parties order champagne for the defense lawyers.

I haven't had a drop of alcohol in four years, but tonight I'm drunk, we all are.

Glued to the bar, I lean in to listen to what a journalist friend tells me: “Are you going to do Nice?”.

Recurring question in the press: the trial for the terrible massacre perpetrated with a cargo truck that took place on July 14, 2016 on the Paseo de los Ingleses is going to open in September, in the same room.

I answer that no, of course not: if it's not your job, a year following a terrorist trial is enough for a lifetime.

“You're right, it's also going to be horrible.

The facts are even worse - the families, the children crushed in their prams -

and from the side of the civil parties it is not the sociology of the terraces or the Bataclan.

It won't be the mood of 'I'm not going to give you my hate'.

But anyway it's going to be held up there, in the room... Aren't you going to feel a pang of nostalgia?

Aren't you going to be tempted to come once or twice?

to ask for a

?

Court employees attend to some of the victims who had come to hear the verdict, on June 29 in Paris. CHRISTOPHE PETIT TESSON (EFE)

We laugh but he's right: when you've already seen what happens in there, in the room, how can you not be tempted to go back in if the door opens a crack again?

I elbow myself out onto the terrace where two drunken girls are flirting with the impassive bodyguards of the prosecutors.

A guy I don't recognize, he must not have come often, tells me: "Isn't it funny that all this ends up on a terrace?"

I nod, yes, it's funny.

“The terraces have won!” the guy bellows.

I walk away and bump into Aurélie, who is carrying a bottle and glasses over to her table.

I tell her what we all say to each other: “So it's over...” “Yes”, she says, “it's over...”.

A pause and then: “I was fine.

Now I can go home."

(1)

, by Aurélie Silvestre, JC Llatès, 2016.

Translation of Jaime Zulaika

This chronicle, written for Le Nouvel Observateur, is published in La Repubblica, El País and Le Temps.

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