Arthur Denouveaux is a survivor of the Bataclan. He is also president of the victims’ association. Life for Paris. Suffice to say that the trial of November 13, he had been waiting for years. But now the day before the opening of the debates, his companion begins to have contractions. Life appears when we were about to talk about the dead. An omen of the next ten months.
In And we talked to each other, it is about the humanity that can go through a trial over which 131 dead hover. The book is not the first nor the last to tell behind the scenes of this river audience but its richness is to show how worlds separated by terror can come together. Three voices complement each other. That of Arthur Dénouveaux therefore, of Xavier Noguerasone of the lawyers of Mohammed Amri, one of the main defendants, and Charlotte Piretjournalist at France Inter.
She had the idea. Tested by the coverage of the trial of the January 2015 attacks, she says to herself that she will need “a valve” to cross the “V13” tunnel – the name given to the trial of November 13, 2015. Why not exchange voice messages, a rapid process with a “therapeutic aim”? She talks about it to Arthur Dénouveaux. She talks about it to Me Nogueras, a lawyer in numerous terrorist trials, including that of Jawad Bendaoud. “She came to me saying to me: you are two guys from the same generation, you both like rock, you are going to love each other, remembers Me Nogueras. So we got to know each other without seeing each other. By voice. When I meet him for the first time, I already love him. »
Dealer of victims
This diary for three takes the form of short impressions balanced on a simple WhatsApp group. Often delivered in the evening, on the steps of the courthouse, in the RER, once the dress has been removed and after having put down a vinyl by Francis Cabrel for Xavier Nogueras. For him, the exercise is perilous. How to confide in a civil party while defending an accused? Still, he doesn’t hold back. Perhaps because the project was not originally intended to be made public. “I didn’t even know if it would be interesting,” says Charlotte Piret. From this exercise, she will still draw 19 hours of recording, transformed into a series of podcasts, now adapted into a book.
Inside, hot reactions. Position statements on the debates that agitated the trial: on the remuneration of defense lawyers, whether François Hollande should be called to the bar, whether certain victims could testify anonymously or on the place of civil parties… And then also doubts, many, specific to each one. Charlotte Piret, wonders if “after a year and a half of Covid”, she will not “add horror to the ambient doldrums”. Arthur Dénouveaux notices how his speech becomes smooth, professional, by dint of media solicitations: “Journalists called me to help them find a good-level guest for a show. I became a victim dealer, it’s special. Me Nogueras evokes him the anguish of the pleading to come, the need to leave Paris to find a frame, the mixture of stress and euphoria which assail him.