The Light That Only a Trial Can Shed

Emmanuel Carrère’s V13: Chronicle of a Trial takes its name from vendredi 13, Friday the 13th, or, more specifically, November 13, 2015. That evening, scores of young adults—friends and lovers—took advantage of unseasonably mild weather to sit outside on the terraces of Parisian restaurants and bistros, like Le Comptoir Voltaire, Le Petit Cambodge, La Belle Équipe, and Le Carillon. Others flocked to pack the 1,498-person capacity Bataclan nightclub, to see a California band with the kitschy name of Eagles of Death Metal. At the same time, 80,000 soccer fans—including then-French president François Hollande—attended a match at the stadium known as Stade de France.

Ten terrorists of the Islamic State, all wearing suicide vests, chose that propitious evening to mount a coordinated attack on all three sites. Blessedly, they botched the stadium bombing. Two Iraqi assassins arrived too late to get inside and were relegated to blowing themselves up outside the gates, killing only one non-terrorist. But eight compadres—including three Belgians trained in Syria—were more effective. At about 9:30 pm, using Kalashnikov assault rifles, three of them sprayed the restaurant terraces with 7.62 millimeter bullets, killing 39, before detonating their vests, which spewed a lethal payload of nuts, bolts, and screws in all directions. Three other members of the terrorist “commando,” as they are referred to at trial, gained entry to the Bataclan nightclub and did the same, murdering 90, though in a more drawn-out ordeal that lasted more than two hours. Hundreds at both locales were left with grievous, gaping wounds—many maimed for life.

The total death toll is usually given as 130, though Carrère adds a young man who physically escaped the Bataclan but never managed to cope with his memories of that night. He suffered from nightmares, depression, insomnia, and delirious hypochondria until, just slightly over a year later, he hanged himself in an insane asylum.

Beginning in September 2021, fourteen men were tried for their alleged involvement in the attacks in a proceeding that lasted more than nine months. The French weekly L’Obs commissioned Carrère, an eminent French journalist, novelist, and screenwriter, to attend the trial and furnish 1,400 words of copy each week. In 2022, an edited and enhanced version of his chronicle was published as a book in France, and in late 2024 it came out in English translation. I read both for this review.

This is the best trial coverage I can recall reading. One gets to know the victims and their loved ones; the murderers and one of their loved ones; the defendants (who, for the most part, aren’t the murderers, since the murderers died when they detonated their suicide vests); and the attorneys. Through the expert witnesses who testified, including Princeton professor Hugo Micheron, one also learns valuable historical background that helps place the crimes in context.

Through Carrère the reader re-lives the trial. And when a trial goes on for months and is handled, as was the case here, by outstanding attorneys and a thoughtful jurist, it becomes a phenomenon in itself. (I covered the four-month Proud Boys and two-month Oath Keepers seditious conspiracy trials for Lawfare.) Journalists, attorneys, and magistrates came to refer to this case as the “V13 Liner,” Carrère tells us—as if it were a massive, plodding vessel, with its own momentum and logic. It’s a shared experience that brings some healing to victims, some knowledge to those who seek it, some justice to those who deserve it, and some catharsis for a nation.

One victim, who lost her husband and a portion of one leg in the attacks, remarks at the end of her testimony: “I wish I didn’t need to be here but I do. . . . It won’t change anything for me, but it’s good that this trial is taking place. That’s all. Thank you for listening.”

As it happens, the trial played out in a locale so iconically Parisian that a novelist might have been ashamed to script it. It unfolds at the Palais de Justice on the Île de la Cité, between, as Carrère notes, “the Sainte-Chapelle built by St. Louis in the thirteenth century and the Quai des Orfèvres, where the shadow of Simenon’s Inspector Maigret still lurks.”

Due to the special burdens of a crime so extensive, a bespoke courtroom accommodating 600 people was constructed of plywood in the courthouse’s lobby. Eleven incarcerated defendants sat in a glass box in front, while three lesser accused, who were out on bail, sat in folding chairs in front of them. The latter are alleged to have played logistical roles so peripheral that it’s not clear if they knew what they were assisting. One was summoned after the crimes by a participant, Salah Abdeslam, to drive him from Paris to Brussels. Another, the next day, drove Abdeslam from one part of Brussels to another. How much did they know, and when did they know it? (We will get verdicts, but not necessarily answers.)

Abdeslam is the top defendant. His brother, Brahim Abdeslam, was a “commando” member who murdered diners on the terraces before self-detonating at Le Comptoire Voltaire. Salah, too, wore a suicide belt that evening, but it either failed to function or he chose not to detonate it. That, at least, was the state of knowledge at the outset of the trial. By the end, we know more.  

The victims testify first. They are called parties civiles, which the translator renders as “plaintiffs.” In American criminal cases, there are no “plaintiffs” and victims have no right to participate (except at the sentencing stage) unless they are called as witnesses by the prosecutors or defendants. Following French law, however, the victims’ attorneys can and do participate in the V13 trial and their clients, as victims of a terror attack, will eventually be able to seek compensation from the state, though at a different proceeding before a different tribunal.

There are at least 1,800 of these victims, including wounded survivors and the immediate families of the dead. More than 200 choose to testify during the first five weeks of the proceeding. This does lead to some redundancy, Carrère abashedly admits, though he spares the reader from the repetition. Also, the format might spur a callous American lawyer to ask: Does this not lead to “undue prejudice,” at least as to the lesser defendants, who maintain that they knew nothing of the horrible attacks to which they proved to be accessories, either before or after the fact?

But any chance of undue prejudice is mitigated by the fact that, unlike most French criminal trials, this one will have no lay jurors. Because of the danger of reprisals at terror trials, French law provides that only professionals will be subjected to that risk. Accordingly, the presiding judge and four magistrates adjudicate this case. In the end, the decision to let all victims speak who wish to is clearly the right one: humane, restorative, and, certainly for those reading Carrère’s account of the trial—well, unforgettable.

Maia was at Le Carillon. Then 27, she was with her husband, and three friends, all 29. When she heard the shots and smelled the gunpowder, she dove into the street.

I felt the shocks in my body. Terrible, wrenching shocks, I didn’t know then that it was expanding bullets lacerating my legs. ... I didn’t feel the pain, not yet. At one point I felt death behind me. There’s a guy right up close, pressed against my back. I hear him gasp and wheeze. ... I know that I’m experiencing the last moments of his life. It’s something very intimate, perhaps the most intimate thing you can share with someone. I can’t see him, he’s behind me, but I feel his breath, I hear him. I’m the only witness to his death. I will never know his name.

Later, she sees her husband’s vacant eyes and knows he’s gone. The only surviving member of her party then tells her that she needs help. She finally looks down. “I see blood running down my legs and I see that parts of my legs are missing. I reach down and try to stick my left calf back where it belongs.”

When the shots began at the Bataclan, nearly a thousand people were in “the pit” near the stage.

When they hurled themselves to the ground to avoid the first bursts of gunfire, they didn’t fall next to each other, but on top of each other. Voluntarily or involuntarily, those above protected those below. Several who were underneath described the warm, sticky liquid that oozed over them without their immediately understanding that it was blood. One survivor ... says that when the killers stopped to reload, she pushed on the floor to try to get up and escape. But the floor was soft: she wasn’t pushing on the floor but on people, and they were no longer people but bodies.

One victim describes the resulting terrain as “human mud.” An investigator testifies: “When we started to evacuate the bodies they were so soaked in blood, so heavy, that it took four of us to lift just one.”

Investigators recovered a Dictaphone at the Bataclan. One reveler had been recording the concert that night, and the device captured the audio of the whole massacre. From the first burst of gunfire to the final police assault, the siege lasted two hours, 38 minutes, and 47 seconds.

The judge decides that this recording will be too much for the victims to bear. It’s a controversial decision. Some victims lament to Carrère that it must be played. But the judge allows just the first 22 seconds, until “gunshots blend in with the drums” and the “[f]eedback screeches.” From there, instead, the judge permits a police investigator to recount the whole tape orally, reading from a transcript, which notes every shot. The voice of the 20-year veteran of the crime brigade trembles as he does this, Carrère tells us. The transcript reveals that there were “258 shots in burst fire and then shot by shot for the first thirty-two minutes,” he testifies.

Reading from the transcript, the detective recounts the words of one of the murderers:

“ ... You can blame your president François Hollande . . . He’s playing the cowboy, like in a western, bombing our brothers in Syria and Iraq, we’re here to pay you back ...” 
“We soldiers of the caliphate are everywhere in the world. We’ll strike everywhere ...” 
“Hey, you don’t move.” 
A shot. 
“I said, don’t move.”

Victims recount the terror of the individualized shootings.  “They stopped to reload and after that they slowed down: bullet by bullet, taking aim,” recounts one. “A shout a shot, a sob a shot, a ringtone a shot.”

Victims played dead and did what they could to avoid making noise. “I put my right hand into my mouth,” recounts one, “to pull out my teeth so that I wouldn’t choke on them, because otherwise I could gag and attract the terrorists’ attention.”

After the victims have spoken, the trial shifts toward the roles of the individual defendants. Officers present the evidence against them and, after that, prosecutors and the judge are permitted to question them. The defendants have a right to remain silent, but—unlike in an American criminal trial—their silence can be used against them. Some speak, some don’t.

With a crime as heinous as this one, it takes a certain amount of courage to even want to understand the motivations of the perpetrators. Then-prime minister Manuel Valls disdained doing so at the time, saying: “Understanding is justifying.”

Carrère disagrees. He tries to follow Spinoza’s “great precept,” he writes: “Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.” It’s a tall order, and I don’t know if I am up to the task. But I admire Carrère for trying.

To understand the case, we must learn a bit about Molenbeek, a 95-percent Islamic enclave in Brussels.  Belgian investigating judge Isabelle Panou testifies—offering a jaundiced view, no doubt—about that community. Carrère summarizes:

In 1969, Panou explains, in an effort to oversee its immigrant population, most of whom were Moroccan, the Belgian government got the idea of entrusting the management of the Muslim faith to a ‘neutral’ power that had the funds to finance it: Saudi Arabia. Not a good idea. Under the authority of this petroleum monarchy which was both monstrously rich and monstrously backward, Belgium—and in particular Molenbeek—became a breeding ground for Islamists where, in the next generation, seven of the defendants in the box and three dead members of the commando grew up.

One key figure in the story, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, grew up in Molenbeek, and was a close friend of Salah Abdeslam. Abaaoud was a planner of the attacks, ordered others to carry them out, and participated in them. He’s not a V13 defendant, however. Although he survived the attacks, he died a few days later when a colleague detonated a suicide vest as police closed in on them at a hideout.

Though I had assumed that the worst players in this event would have grown up in desperate circumstances, perhaps in refugee camps, that’s not the case with Abaaoud. Abaaoud’s father owned “not one but several clothing shops,” Carrère informs us, and was comfortable enough to send his son to one of the best Catholic schools in Brussels. But Abaaoud became a petty crook anyway, and was convicted of two burglaries. Then, Carrére explains, “his father hit on an idea. . . . Sincerely believing he was putting the turbulent young man back on track, he sent him to study for a year at a Quranic school in Cairo. ... After leaving Belgium as a secular thug, he returns as a Salafist thug.”

Soon Abaaoud travels to Syria—or al-Sham, as jihadists call it—to join the Islamic State. He will eventually produce and star in one of the group’s first notorious recruitment videos.

Sitting behind the wheel of a four-by-four, he turns to the camera and says with a smirk: ‘Before, we used to haul jet skis, quads, motocross bikes or trailers full of holiday gifts. Now we haul kuffar [that is, nonbelievers].’ He pulls away, and behind the truck we see metal cables dragging seven or eight bodies in the dust. Cut, and there he is again, still grinning, playing football with a severed head. ‘Shoot, brother,’ he cries, ‘kill the kuffar, look at this one with the head of a Smurf!’

What are the defenses? Well, for the lesser defendants, like a forger who provided false identifications to the attackers, it’s that they didn’t know what their minor offenses were facilitating. But among those who are in too deep to claim lack of knowledge, some invoke a variant of what Carrère refers to as the “defense of rupture.” He draws that term from the trial strategy used by a famed French attorney, Jaques Vergès. In 1987, Vergès defended Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, who had tortured prisoners in Lyon. Vergès drew attention to France’s own use of torture in Algeria in the 1960s. The message was, basically, that the French state had done the same things, so it had no right to condemn the defendant.

At the V13 trial, some defense attorneys argue that the events at the Bataclan and the terraces were not terrorism but, rather, acts of war, and should not be the subject of civilian proceedings like these. Other attorneys draw attention—at least as a mitigating factor—to the horrific barbarities of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, whom many idealistic young Muslims took up arms to overthrow. This led some, misguidedly, to sign up with the Islamic State.

One defendant, Sofien Ayari, presents a variant of this narrative—though he’s not exactly offering it as a defense. He explains to the court that he is moved to speak by something that a victim’s mother, Nadia Mondeguer, had said in passing earlier in the trial, during her own testimony. Mondeguer’s daughter, Lamia, was murdered, along with her boyfriend, at the Belle Équipe. Mondeguer—who is ethnically Egyptian, teaches Arabic, and has studied Arab culture extensively—had wondered aloud during her testimony: What could have happened to these children—the dead “commando” members and the living defendants—to make them turn out as they had?

Explicitly alluding to Mondeguer’s question, Ayari attempts to furnish an answer. He has little to lose, since he’s already been sentenced to 20 years in Belgium for shooting at the police officers who came to arrest him in Brussels shortly after the March 2016 terror attacks.

Ayari testifies for six hours. Carrère summarizes:

He described a loving, well-off family in Tunisia. A good education ... And then, at the end of 2010 ... the Arab Spring. Immense hopes, tremendous disappointments. The Tunisian youths who not so long ago were trying to leave for Europe ... are now leaving for Syria. Explaining how he came to join the Islamic State (in 2014, at twenty-one), Ayari evokes a political rather than a religious choice. He could have led a quiet, selfish life on the right side of society, if it weren’t for the ‘feelings of solidarity and anger’ that give the Islamic State ‘a certain legitimacy’. He goes to fight in Syria, first against Bashar’s troops, but then things get more confusing. He’s wounded in Homs, four jaw operations. In Raqqa he discovers the chaos. ... ‘[W]hen you see people who’ve never hurt anyone fleeing in panic, their faces marked by humiliation, you feel powerless. The things I felt when I saw that weren’t easy to digest, so the day I was told: We’re going to need you elsewhere, I went.’ ... Prodded by the presiding judge, Ayari consents to say that he condemns the attacks, on the condition that the violence on both sides be condemned: that of François Hollande as much as that of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. His comrades killed innocent people in France, yes, but the Westerners killed many more in Iraq and Syria, and in a much more cowardly way. Between dropping bombs from a plane without running the slightest risk and killing and braving death, which is more courageous? He acknowledges that he’s made bad decisions, without disavowing them. ‘The context wasn’t conducive to lucidity. Intentions and actions aren’t always compatible.’

Nadia Mondeguer happens to be present for the testimony and speaks to Carrère about it later. “He spoke excellently, and what he said was top-notch,” she says. “I loved it.”

To me, Ayari’s testimony fell short of a defense of either the Islamic State or of his participation in it. But who is better credentialed to assess it than Mondeguer? In any event, Carrère has kept his pact with Spinoza.

As for defendant Salah Abdeslam, the top defendant, he ends up disappointing both Carrère and the reader with his vacuousness. We do learn that he chose not to detonate his suicide belt. He testifies that when he saw all the young people so like himself, he felt a deep empathy and couldn’t go through with it. But Abdeslam is not a credible witness—one of his lawyers describes his brain as “an empty ashtray”—and may also have just decided that he wasn’t quite ready to die. Carrère writes:

[O]ne is struck by his lightness, the inconsistency, the recklessness of this boy whom everyone describes as a nice guy—and maybe he is—but who nevertheless took part in the massacre of 131 people. . . . He seems more like a sap caught up in his own contradictions: a rigorous Muslim partygoer, a fanatic attached to his cushy life, a cowardly terrorist who assures the court that he pledged allegiance to the Islamic State forty-eight hours before the attacks, no, after the attacks, no, before: we’re lost, and no doubt so is he.

From start to finish, the book demonstrates and exudes the extraordinary level of illumination that a well-run trial can bring to the understanding of a contested event. It’s likely that only a trial can shed as much light on such an event. The charging document in this case was 378 pages long, and, Carrère tells us, “summarizes a legal brief comprising 542 volumes which, they say, would be 53 meters high if stacked one on top of the other.” Add to that the contributions of 14 defendants and their capable counsel. Finally, consider that every assertion made in court can be subjected to the adversarial crucible of cross-examination. France is fortunate to have had the attorneys and judges capable of carrying out such a proceeding, and a chronicler like Carrère to make so many of that trial’s revelations accessible to all.

At the same time, it’s impossible to read this book without profound chagrin. It’s the sorrow that comes from thinking about the authoritatively informative and cathartic trials that our own country has been deprived of: the trials relating to the federal indictments against former and current President Donald Trump and, most of all, the trial relating to his role in the events leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on our Capitol. That it was the justices of our own U.S. Supreme Court who contrived to ensure that that trial would never take place is infinitely dispiriting.