In Paris, a trial is taking place concerning the 14 July 2016 attack in Nice when a man drove a truck into a crowd of families attending a firework display. The three-month trial, due to end in early December, is of eight associates of Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel accused of assisting him in the attack, when a 19-tonne cargo truck was deliberately driven into people celebrating Bastille Day on the Promenade des Anglais. A total of 86 people were killed, including 15 children. More than 450 were injured. You’d think it would be a big deal. You would be wrong.
I’ve been reporting on the trial for the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. In the church-like Palais de Justice, where the public can watch the trial on large screens, the average attendance is around six. One afternoon there were only two of us, me and a sweet-faced old lady whispering a melancholy but urgent commentary to herself.
The Nice tragedy is the wallflower of terrorist attacks in France, the ugly cousin.
The January 2015 attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Hypercacher supermarket in Paris shocked millions internationally into marching the streets in protest. The November 2015 attacks on the Stade de France, several cafes and the Bataclan concert hall killed 130 and sent France into a six-month depression. But no one remembers much of anything about Nice.
Why? Well, the Nice attack is like Apollo 12. No one remembers the names of anyone involved. It’s bad to be second or third. Also, the French are rather snooty about the provinces generally but Nice in particular. It’s hard for Brits to realise, because we think the south of France is hugely glamorous, but Parisians think of Nice as Stoke or Belfast with sunshine. It’s everywhere you look. Those Niçois yokels, they vote right wing and are almost Italian, so you’re allowed to disdain them.
But in the end, I think, it’s about all the children. No one wants to hear about dead kids. Dead kids are really bad box office.
For three years, French justice has been an insane jurisprudential factory. It has conducted enormous, interminable trials like something out of a Dickens novel.
There are Parisian barristers who have been working exclusively on terrorism trials for the past eight or nine years. It’s an assembly line.
The Nice affair began with everyone pre-exhausted. Additionally, it’s a process inventing itself as it goes along. Throughout the multi-year progress of these inquiries, increasing space has been given to the plaintiffs to speak (there are nearly 2,500 for the Nice trial). Often at the end of a witness testimony, Laurent Raviot, the président de la cour (chief judge), rather pleadingly asks the witness: “What are you expecting of this trial, what are you hoping for?” It’s almost like he’s asking for ideas.
Nearly 280 plaintiffs have spoken since the trial opened in September. There has been horror, of course, how could there not be horror? Lots of stuff like policewomen slipping on exposed brains. Then there was the young man who had just finished chatting to an old lady, turning back to see her literally sliced in two. Or the traumatised witness who spoke of stumbling across a distraught mother with a dead child in her arms. “Help me find his head,” she said. “Please, help me find his head.”
But the main event has been several hundred people speaking of their dead parents, brothers, sisters, partners and children. I listened to the man who spent the night lying on the road beside the body of his dead two-year-old daughter, just to be with her one last time. I listened to the man who lost six (yes, six) members of his family in one instant and then saw people robbing their bodies within seconds. They were profoundly ordinary people, all luminously eloquent in their pain and loss. They were an unforgettable lesson in what it is to be human. I hadn’t expected to report on a murder trial and learn almost everything there is to learn about love. And perhaps to learn the ballistic specifics of what happens when love meets its opposite.
All were heartbreakingly unanimous in how deeply corroded they were by guilt. The guilt of surviving, of not saving loved ones, of not sufficiently helping the injured or dying. All alike burned in its fire. The saddest of them were like broken toys, halting, bereft, devastating.
There was one day of big box office. The ex-president François Hollande testified. After a month of humble guilt and shame from the innocent, we had a day of absolute blamelessness. “When there is an attack, it follows that there has been failure,” said Hollande. But the failure was not his. He had been impeccable throughout. It is doubtless naive of me to expect anything from a politician, but the moral contrast with the victims was vertiginous and nauseating.
My low point was the testimony of Margaux, the young mother of Léana, the murdered two-year-old I mentioned earlier. Margaux had written a heartbroken letter to her dead child. “I’ll never know if he saw you, and in seeing you, if he turned the steering wheel in your direction. In any case, his goal was to kill you and that’s what he did.”
But then she read out the worst thing I’ve ever heard. “Did you see it, that big lorry, coming towards you? Were you frightened?” Unbearable words, filled with the weight of this little life lost and the infinite torture of maternal love.
It’s an ugly truth that pity has a hierarchy and all tragedy competes with all other tragedy. No one is to blame. Our compassion is not limitless, we can’t spend all day crying over dead people we never met. Our empathy is like a popular provincial hotel, overbooked and strictly scheduled. But ever since I heard that mother say: “As-tu eu peur?” I can’t get it out of my head. Which is why I have put it in yours.
Robert McLiam Wilson is an award-winning writer. His novel Eureka Street is published by Secker & Warburg
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