The long shadow of the Paris terrorist attacks of 2015

V13. By Emmanuel Carrère. Translated by John Lambert. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 320 pages; $29. Fern Press; £20
A convoy of three rental cars left Charleroi, Belgium, and crossed into France, heading towards Paris. They carried ten jihadists on a mission to spread terror throughout the French capital—and capture the attention of the world. On Friday November 13th 2015, wearing suicide jackets and heavily armed, they murdered 130 people and wounded hundreds more at three sites in Paris: the Bataclan music venue, nearby terrace cafés and outside the national stadium, Stade de France. It was the deadliest attack on French soil since the second world war.
Nine years on, the scars of the French capital are, in many ways, hard to discern. The City of Light, consumed for months by darkness and fear, is once again a place of insouciant revelry and simple pleasures. On a recent weekday evening on Boulevard Voltaire, youngsters queued for a gig at the Bataclan, its name now lit up in electric blue. At La Belle Équipe café, where 21 people were murdered in the attacks, a young couple sipped cocktails quietly at a pavement table. Nobody flinched when a police car tore by with its siren wailing, a sound that haunted the city that night.
Yet the trauma of November 13th lingers: in lives ended, families broken, spaces shrunk. In 2017 a survivor of the Bataclan massacre, then in a psychiatric ward, took his own life. A recent follow-up study of 502 survivors showed that respondents continued to suffer from anxiety, depression, hyper-vigilance and other problems. Over the past couple of years French writers and film-makers have tried to unpack the horror, and its legacy, with works such as “Un An, une Nuit” (“One Year, One Night”), “Novembre” (“November”) and “Revoir Paris” (“Paris Memories”).
One new book is “V13”—for Vendredi (Friday) the 13th—by Emmanuel Carrère, a French writer of novels and literary non-fiction. For nine months in 2021-22 he sat on a bench in a specially built courtroom for the trial of Salah Abdeslam, the only survivor among the band of killers, and of 19 people linked to the attacks. The case was the largest ever in France and involved 2,400 plaintiffs, 350 lawyers and a 542-volume legal brief. Survivors’ testimonies were heard at a rate of around 15 a day.
The resulting book is a curious but compelling mix of dramatic reconstruction, psychological deliberation and personal reflection. Mr Carrère, known for his sometimes intrusive first-person narratives, looks horror in the eye. A survivor of the Bataclan massacre, in which 90 people were murdered at a rock concert, tells the court: “I saw that my cheek had been ripped off and was hanging down beside my face. I put my right hand into my mouth to pull out my teeth so that I wouldn’t choke on them.” Another had described crawling to safety through a “human mud” of flesh and bloody remains.
The perpetrators, Mr Carrère notes, were not wayward dropouts or welfare cases. Mr Abdeslam, who drove one of the convoy cars but never activated his own suicide belt, passed his technological baccalauréat school-leaving exam. Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who trained for jihad in the Syrian city of Raqqa and gunned down drinkers at the Paris terrace cafés, came from a comfortable family of shop-owners in Belgium. The other terrorists were, rather, weed-smoking petty criminals and wheeler-dealers, radicalised by Islamic State, online or in Syria.
Mr Carrère has an eye for unexpected discomfort, including his own. During most of the trial Mr Abdeslam, at one point France’s most-wanted man, was by turns silent, evasive and contradictory, handing the public “a tissue of incoherences and unlikelihoods”. In the final days of questioning, though, the accused “manages to move us”, sniffing back “a convincing sob” and asking for forgiveness.
Ultimately, Mr Carrère concludes that worrying about the accused’s sincerity matters little. Mr Abdeslam’s state of mind is “an abysmal void wrapped in lies, which one regrets with stunned amazement having spent so much time thinking about”.
The quest for justice was quite another matter. The court convicted Mr Abdeslam of acts of terrorism and sentenced him to life without parole. The trial allowed suffering to be heard, shared and recorded. And in time Parisians have returned to normal. It is the same bustling, convivial city as before, but for those with memories of that horrific night, forever different.
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