Last week Paris celebrated the tenth anniversary of the tragic night of November 13, 2015. A night that shook the city and the whole world with the terrible news of the terrorist attacks that took place in the streets of Paris, outside the Stade de France and in the Bataclan concert hall.
Last Thursday, the city of Paris gathered in front of the locations of the attacks to commemorate the victims and pay homage to them. Flowers and candles were left in front of the bars of the XI arrondissement, while the special forces of the French police who intervened that night collected in front of the Bataclan. The Eiffel Tower was lit with the colors of the French flag, and President Emmanuel Macron delivered a speech for the inauguration of a memorial garden in honor of the victims. The garden is situated in Saint-Gervais square, in front of the Municipality of Paris, which the associations of the victims have chosen as a neutral location to avoid any “imbalance” between them. One of those associations, Life for Paris, which has been a point of reference for the survivors of the attacks and for those who lost a relative or a friend, decided to interrupt its activities on the tenth anniversary of the tragedy: its members explained this decision by stating that they didn’t want to “lock themselves” in the status of victims.
The trial for the attacks, which took place between September 2021 and June 2022, was defined by French newspapers as “the trial of the century”. It was reported by Emmanuele Carrère, French journalist and writer, who wrote about it at first in a weekly column of the newspaper L’Obs, then in a book titled V13, published in 2022. For 10 months, Carrère followed almost every day of the trial sitting on a bench, and he was one of the few who stayed until the end. He was aware of the magnitude of this event and wanted to experience it and be part of it; but, most of all, he wanted to write an account for everyone, conscious that reading it would change people forever. Indeed, reading V13 does change you, and that is why I would recommend it to everyone.
The book is divided into three parts: the victims, the accused, and the court. As can be easily imagined, the first part is the most touching, and probably the hardest to read: I had to stop myself and close the book a couple of times, because with his candid tone and his pungent writing Carrère managed to perfectly convey the sense of guilt and the pain of those who survived, along with the immense grief of those who lost one of their loved ones on that night. The attacks caused a total of 132 deaths, and more than 350 people were injured. Among them, many were young people in their 20s, people like us who went to grab a beer on a terrace on a nice Parisian evening, or to a concert on a Friday night at the Bataclan to listen to their favorite music genre. Reading the testimonies of those who survived allows us to perceive on the flesh the rundown of hours of that same absolute fear, as if we were surrounded by death. Reliving this scenario is no less devastating than realizing the state of anxiety that the parents of the victims experienced when they learned about what was happening in the city, knowing that their son or daughter was out that night.
V13 is much more than a “chronicle of a trial”- as the subtitle states; it’s a chronicle of humanity, and Carrère perfectly delivers its essence. He manages to capture the extreme circumstances, the horror and the pity, but also, with extreme care, the irony of some situations and discourses. He is not just delivering information in an impersonal way: he is trying to report the voices and the sufferings of the victims and their families. He is an active witness to the trial, aware of the limits of his work, but even more of the importance of carrying it on. Indeed, in times like these, when we experience violence in many forms every day, reading V13 is essential to acknowledge that behind every headline there is a human being who deserves our attention and compassion.
I’m a second-year student in BEMACC and I’m interested in everything that concerns the arts, especially music and cinema. I love to see how every artistic form tells us a lot about the humankind.
