In May 2021, the French writer Emmanuel Carrère approached the newsmagazine L’Obs with a proposal to cover the trial concerning the terror attacks that occurred in Paris on November 13, 2015. He told his editor that he would “go to court, every day, the way other people go to work.” He wrote a column every week for 10 months, work that has been collected and expanded into a book, V13: Chronicle of a Trial, published in France in 2022 and now out in an English translation by John Lambert.
That November day, known as V13 in France (for “Friday the 13th”), Islamic State militants drove into the center of Paris and killed 131 people. Three attackers blew themselves up outside the Stade de France. Others fired on café terraces, and three gunmen massacred 90 people at a rock concert at the Bataclan theater. The nine men who’d done the killing are all dead, and so the 14 men whose trial Carrère attended were accused of varying degrees of involvement. There was Salah Abdeslam, whose suicide belt never detonated; Mohamed Abrini, who drove with the attackers into the city; and several avowed Islamic State militants. There were also some whose complicity was in question: Did the man who made the attackers fake IDs know what they were up to? Did the guys who drove Abdeslam back to Belgium after the attacks realize what he’d done?
It was billed as the trial of the century and understood as a way of reckoning with the drumbeat attacks by ISIS militants that rocked Europe in the mid-2010s. One such attack had touched Carrère’s life personally, as he described in Yoga, a book he published not long before the V13 trial. In the book, reflections on his longtime meditation practices crash into the failure of his marriage and the death of his friend in the attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine—a collision from which he recovered first in a psych ward and then at a refugee camp on the Greek island of Leros, teaching writing to a group of Afghan teens.
Carrère’s novels and nonfiction works are self-referential, climbing out of one another like an Escher staircase, so it wasn’t a surprise to come across a bit of Yoga in V13: Two of the defendants had come through Leros a year before Carrère was there. He wonders if he would have seen them for what they were, or if he could have written about them with compassion as he had the refugees he encountered. But the new book doesn’t engage in the relentless self-exposure that characterizes so much of his work. There’s no highly personal answer to the question he poses at the opening: “Why inflict this on myself?” Why spend a year locked in a courtroom with this grim material? He’s interested in justice, he says, and religions and “their pathological mutations.” But the main reason is he wants to hear “day in, day out” about “extreme experiences of death and life.” He believes that “between the time we first enter this courtroom and when we leave it for good, something in all of us will have shifted ground.”
One can see traces of Yoga, too, in the methodology Carrère brings to V13. Over the course of that book, he came up with a number of definitions for meditation: It “is seeing things as they are”; “is diving and settling into what is bothersome in life”; “is observing the points of contact between what is oneself and what is not oneself”; “is being aware that others exist.” These are not bad mantras for a court reporter—you might say Carrère treats the whole massive, complicated, high-stakes trial like one organism drawing breath. His famous ego is quiet. He observes, allowing thoughts and emotions to rise up, examining them, then letting them drift off to be replaced by the next sensation. The many dimensions of the trial are gathered as episodes under wry headings, a carousel of characters and quotes and anecdotes that circles the brutal violence, seeing it from here, from there, and accumulating into something profound.
Reading V13, I couldn’t help but think about another trial known simply by its date: the 9/11 case at Guantánamo. The comparison is apt because of the level of national trauma involved, even at very different scales; because of the historical line linking Al Qaeda and ISIS and the foreign policy of Western powers like France and the United States; and because of the question of what kind of threat Islamic terrorism poses and what reaction to it is warranted. In both cases, the justice reached for is slightly aslant—the primary perpetrators of mass murder are dead. V13 amounts to an argument that a criminal court proceeding can indeed offer healing, maybe even closure. At Guantánamo, we might never get that far.
Most of V13 is drawn from testimonies, which Carrère recounts in a mix of quotation and paraphrase so seamless that, while the action takes place within the white box—a windowless plywood temporary courtroom set up in the lobby of the Palais de Justice to hold hundreds of plaintiffs, lawyers, and media—you do not feel confined to courtroom drama. Carrère’s lively and often devastating summaries also take us to the brasserie afterward to debrief a defense attorney over a glass of wine; to a crawl space one woman pushed into to hide during the attacks, inspired by a scene in GoldenEye; to the bushes in the roundabout where one of the attackers hid afterward; to the stairwell of a housing project where Abdeslam waits and chats with some kids after he didn’t blow himself up (whether by accident or because—as he tries to argue in his defense—he looked at the young people around him and he couldn’t do it); to the garden shed where two of the not-jailed sad-sack defendants sometimes share a plate of pasta; to the Kurdish camps where children of ISIS fighters languish.
Carrère, being there every day, picks which of the hundreds of plaintiffs and lawyers and tangential characters he’ll follow—the ones that make “good copy,” as one of his media colleagues puts it. There’s the woman whose first thought when the killing started was “this is crazy, I’m going to die in a small concert hall where I came to hear a group of nice but not very good Californian rednecks,” and there’s one of said Californian rednecks, the lead singer of the Eagles of Death Metal, who in the courtroom embraces his fans one by one like “Napoleon pulling his soldiers’ ears.” There are the Roman Catholics from Normandy who convert to Islam and go to Syria en famille, with the two brothers becoming ISIS propagandists cranking out jihadist chants; and there’s Nadia Mondeguer, a French Egyptian woman who teaches Arabic and was listening to nasheeds for her research into Salafism when her daughter was gunned down in a café a few blocks away. We hear from a brother and sister, a professional rugby player and acrobat, respectively; they were shot together, and both severely disabled.
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.”
I remember following the aftermath and investigation into the Paris attacks. I did so with professional interest, since at the time I was a reporter on the national security beat, concerned about counterterrorism and its overreactions, about surveillance of Muslim communities, and about civilian casualties in the largely unquestioned bombing campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. I also remember the attacks feeling like one in a blurred chain of violence with U.S. mass shootings: Charleston, Paris, San Bernardino, Nice, Orlando, Dallas, Barcelona. Place names that for a while became metonyms for terror, violence capable of eclipsing a whole city. The common denominator being mostly young, angry men and spectacular, sudden gore, and a dreadful sense of foreboding among the citizenries.
V13 might be an exceptional response to such horror. Reading about the well-spoken, well-dressed attorneys in Carrère’s account, I kept picturing the lawyers debating autofiction in the cross-examination scene in Anatomy of a Fall. I’m sure there’s another book out there that can disabuse me of this elevated image of French justice—Carrère has probably written one. His reporter friends at the trial ask him, will you be back for Nice? It’ll be more awful, they promise, because children were killed in their prams, but in a snobbish aside someone adds, “it’s not exactly the same profile as the terraces or the Bataclan. It’ll be a far cry from ‘you will not have my hate,’” the title of a book by a man whose wife was killed in the Bataclan, which became a slogan for many of the bereaved. Carrère’s elegant definition of the purpose of a trial—“at the beginning suffering is deposited, at the end justice is rendered”—is in fact a tall order.
America’s drawn-out proceedings at the military commissions at Guantánamo Bay show just how tall. It has taken over 20 years for the United States to bring five men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks to justice. There has not yet even been a “beginning” to the trial; the case has been stuck in over a decade of pretrial hearings. (Carrère’s feat of stamina at the Palais de Justice is nothing compared to the endurance at Guantánamo of Carol Rosenberg, who has been reporting from there since the first detainees arrived in 2002, first for the Miami Herald and now for The New York Times.) If you’ve followed the war court at Guantánamo even a little, it’s hard to read the victims’ voices Carrère collects, the context about the accused, the trial rendered as a collective mourning, a forging of community, and not to shake your head. Because absolutely no one would describe the 9/11 case like that.
A major difference is that France got court proceedings underway relatively quickly: You can imagine the trial we might have had in 2010, a mere nine years after the event, if Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other Al Qaeda suspects had been brought to federal court in New York as planned. Maybe we’d be reading a beautiful, nuanced book like V13 if politicians hadn’t freaked out at the idea of these mythologized ur-terrorists ever touching U.S. soil. The intervening years have instead seen parents of people who were killed that day pass away themselves without seeing justice, and the children of the victims—some of whom were one or two years old in 2001—grow up and start the complicated routine of flying alongside Pentagon escorts to Cuba for intermittent hearings.
This August, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin revoked plea deals that had been reached with Mohammed, alleged mastermind of the attacks, and two other defendants. The guilty pleas to an array of murder and conspiracy charges were in exchange for life sentences and would have come with a promise that the defendants would answer questions from the family members of people killed on September 11 about “their roles and reasons” for the attacks. This is something that many victims’ family members—or VFMs, in Gitmo parlance—have wanted desperately. My recent knowledge of all this comes from working as a reporter on the latest season of the podcast Serial, about Guantánamo. In the final episode, a woman whose brother died in the World Trade Center tells co-host Sarah Koenig, “You want to know how this happened, who this person was, what went on, and have people be held accountable.” She adds, “This sounds ridiculous that I’m saying this to you right now, 22 years later.”
Because of the extreme classification regime at Guantánamo, the defendants have never been heard from directly, and basic facts are still official secrets. All that secrecy is mostly at the behest of the CIA, whose operatives tortured the defendants in black sites in the months and years after 9/11.
The torture is fundamental. It’s not the only thing that is screwed up about the war court, but it’s the main thing. The plea deals were an attempt to end the legal morass that promised to stretch on indefinitely over questions about what evidence was derived from torture and what damage that torture had done to the defendants. There’s a moment in V13 when Abdeslam’s lawyer complains that his client is under 24-hour surveillance in prison, and someone writes in to say that their daughter-in-law, too, is under 24-hour surveillance, in a coma in the hospital. You hear a lot of that in the 9/11 proceedings, too—oh, your client was tortured? Well, the people in the towers are dead. But it is not immaterial to be presented with a man who has had rectal reconstruction surgery because the CIA sodomized him. One of the former defendants, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, was declared unfit for trial after military doctors decided that CIA abuse had rendered him psychotic. Al-Shibh believes that he is being tormented by invisible weapons and had insisted that his defense lawyers focus on making them stop.
The plaintiffs in V13, at least in Carrère’s milieu, are perturbed by the fact that Abdeslam got an “incompressible” life sentence, that is, life without parole, a sentence handed down only four times in the last 30 years. If he gets the absolute maximum, what would the actual killers have gotten? Meanwhile, it’s believed one reason the Biden administration called off plea deals is that such deals would have taken the death penalty off the table.
When covering the abuses at Guantánamo, I used to get an earful from prosecutors and intelligence officers and some VFMs, who’d say that the press and the human rights groups are on the “side” of the accused, that “nobody” cares about the Americans who died. Objectively false as that statement is, it gets at the truth that everything that happened after—the torture, the wars, the mass surveillance, the wholesale reordering of American society—has eclipsed the pain of the day. Only a small number of VFMs regularly show up at Guantánamo or in the press. They’re used interchangeably, they’re for the death penalty or against, for closing the prison or keeping it open, but their ordeal doesn’t mean much to anyone anymore. We don’t see their particular, infinite pain.
Carrère doesn’t go in for a lot of national psychology. He sticks to his sample of plaintiffs. But in the case of 9/11, it’s hard to resist. We have never metabolized—the word used by one of Carrère’s plaintiffs to describe her experience with the trial—the event. It remains, as Susan Faludi has written, “the shard of memory stuck in our throats.” Nothing in all of us has shifted ground.
