On Friday 13 November 2015 France suffered the deadliest terrorist attack in its history. In quick succession, gunmen and suicide bombers struck the outer concourse of Paris’s Stade de France; then the pretty canal-side cafés and restaurants of the tenth arrondissement; then, most notoriously, the Bataclan theatre, where the doors were blocked and, over the course of an hour, 90 people massacred.
The subsequent trial was not just a gargantuan administrative undertaking (20 defendants faced around 2,000 plaintiffs, and the proceedings occupied the purpose-built courtroom for the best part of a year); it was a cultural phenomenon. The judicial reckoning with ‘V13’, as the Paris atrocities soon became known, has spawned columns, podcasts, discussion panels and even a Netflix feature that picked through the carnage with all the prurience of a true-crime documentary. It will doubtless generate many literary responses in France, where high culture has always been unusually alert to current events.
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