V13: Chronicle of a Trial by Emmanuel Carrère review – a humane and thoughtful testimony of terror and loss

“V13” was the code name used by those who attended the monumental court proceedings that followed the 2015 Paris terror attacks in which 130 people died and 350 were injured. V13 (vendredi 13) stands for Friday the 13th (of November). The date is engraved on our collective memory: on an unusually balmy autumn evening, carefree youth out celebrating the weekend ahead were massacred in a series of coordinated shootings claimed by Islamic State. The target, it has often been said, was a way of life, the insouciance of terrasse culture and rock concerts, just as the Charlie Hebdo massacre months earlier had been an attack on a way of thinking, on freedom of expression.

Amid the vast cultural production line that the deadly attacks spawned – memoirs, testimonies, documentaries, fiction, film, not to mention the new Museum and Memorial of Terrorism, scheduled to open in 2027 – Emmanuel Carrère’s V13 holds a special place. It chronicles the high-security trial that was unique in its scope and length. Opening on 8 September 2021, it unfolded over 10 months in a room within Paris’s Palais de Justice that was purpose-built to accommodate some 2,380 plaintiffs, 350 or so lawyers, and the media. An author, screenwriter and film-maker, Carrère sat on the uncomfortable press benches to cover it for French magazine L’Obs, and was one of the few who had the dedication and stamina to witness all sessions.

V13: Chronicle of a Trial is the full-length version of his weekly columns. The trial opened with the testimonies of those who lost a loved one, or an arm, a leg, their sleep, sanity or simply the will to live. Together with this litany of loss came a gruesome forensic examination of the shootings – the mud of splintered flesh; the deathly silence; the hellish four hours of those kept hostage in the Bataclan concert hall, with the constant fear of imminent death. Also the trembling voice of a seasoned policeman quoting the assailants’ justification: “You can blame your president, François Hollande. He’s bombing our brothers in Syria and Iraq, we’re here to pay you back.” But there are other stories of kindness, altruism and the strange intimacy of comforting a dying stranger. As victims take to the stand, we delve into their trauma or their unexpected resilience. “We live in a victim society, one which is happy to confuse the status of victim and hero,” Carrère reflects. And yet, he adds, all these young people strike him as heroes.

The killers all died – except for Salah Abdeslam, that is, who was recruited as a suicide bomber but bailed out at the last minute – so the 14 accused were mostly accomplices in the planning, facilitating and execution of the attacks. The trial only fleetingly addressed intelligence failings, acknowledged by the secret services themselves. Its ambition lay elsewhere: to acknowledge the traumatic memories of the victims and to scrutinise every detail that led to the massacre as well as the motives, personalities and routes of radicalisation of the accused. And “to form a collective narrative”, as one of the victims put it, when asked by the court about his expectations.

Among the victims were those who tried to understand the jihadists. Nadia Mondeguer, an Egyptian mother, who lost her daughter, Lamia, concluded her gripping testimony by addressing the defence lawyers: “Do your job, do it well. I mean it.” Georges Salines advocates for a restorative justice that seeks dialogue between victims and perpetrators. His daughter, Lola, died at the Bataclan, yet he found the strength to co-author a book with Azdyne Amimour, the father of one of the suicide bombers. Others, such as Antoine Leiris, a bereaved husband and author of the book Vous n’aurez pas ma haine (You Will Not Have My Hate), which then became a slogan, refused to look for vengeance, wanting only “a fair trial”.

So did the trial succeed in delivering restorative justice? Has it fostered any rapprochement or understanding between victims and perpetrators? The then prime minister, Manuel Valls, vented righteous indignation (“Understanding is already justifying”), to which Carrère responds by quoting philosopher Baruch Spinoza: “Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.” Carrère’s pared-down, forensic style reflects this fine balancing act between ordering facts and spinning them into a narrative, between empathy and critical thinking, engaging with an adversary’s stance and making moral judgments.

Matters turn more political when Hollande is called to the stand – a legal aberration incidentally, since he is neither victim nor accused. Carrère concedes the point made by defence lawyer Olivia Ronen when she addresses Hollande on an issue of chronology: he admits France struck Syria prior to the threats issued by Islamic State. Drawing an equivalence between terrorism and supposed state terrorism in this way forms a recognisable strategy – namely a “rupture defence”. But is it fair to call into question the authority of the justice system itself?

Defence lawyer Isa Gultaslar similarly argued that it is not fanaticism that pushed so many youths into the hands of the IS, but a legitimate anger against Assad’s regime and France’s military interventions in Syria. But can the attacks be requalified as war crimes rather than an act of terrorism? Carrère’s understanding stops short when Abdeslam, after deploring the fact that many Muslims were killed in the attacks, demands that dialogue be left open, a claim as embarrassing as Adolf Eichmann’s proposal for a reconciliation committee between Jewish survivors and Nazi perpetrators.

Hannah Arendt’s legacy hovers over V13. But “the banality of evil”, the notion she coined, doesn’t really apply to jihadism. For jihadism, evil is not to be silenced, nor responsibility dispersed in a faceless bureaucracy. Rather, it is about the glorification of sadism, as IS propaganda has sadly shown.

Carrère’s account adds to the commemorative dimension of the trial, its elegant prose bringing back to life those who died, often through an unexpected detail. When it attends to the victims’ suffering, the strength and humanity Carrère brings out makes for a reading experience that is at once humbling and invigorating.

With each historical crisis, the law and the judiciary need to reinvent themselves. Literature may contribute to that process. As Carrère compares the courtroom rituals with the liturgy of a “modern church”, where “something sacred” takes place, he adds a small piece to the puzzle. As one of the victims concludes, the trial and perhaps Carrère’s account too has given them “a place and time, all the time needed to to do something with the pain. Transform it, metabolise it” into a collective narrative: a space and time to work through, to remember, in the hope that history does not repeat itself.

Henriette Korthals Altes is an associate research fellow in the faculty of medieval and modern languages at Oxford University

• V13: Chronicle of a Trial by Emmanuel Carrère (translated by John Lambert) is published by Fern Press (£20). To support the Guardian and the Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply