In the midst of the trial, the commemoration of the eagerly awaited November 13 attacks

Published on : 11/13/2021 – 10:39Modified : 11/13/2021 – 10:46

Six years after the horror, the commemoration of November 13 organized on Saturday promises to be more symbolic than ever, at a time when the historic trial currently underway is testing the victims and shaping the collective memory of these attacks.

The pandemic had prevented victims from assembling in 2020, with a ceremony reduced to a minimum during containment. This year’s tribute is marked by the ordeal of the trial, which since September has revived in great detail the memory of the deadliest terrorist attack ever committed in France.

“The trial has brought us all closer together and there is a very strong desire to meet in a commemorative setting”, told AFP Arthur Dénouveaux, the president of the association of victims Life for Paris. “The commemoration will crystallize a strengthening of the bonds between the victims.”

Accompanied in particular by the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, Prime Minister Jean Castex must go to the Bataclan, in front of the Stade de France and on cafe terraces in Paris, where commandos remotely controlled by the Islamic State (IS) group had killed 130 people and more than 350 injured in 2015, sowing fear in the country.

>> To read also: “Attacks of November 13: ‘I would do exactly the same thing today’, assures François Hollande”

This series of tributes, which will end with a minute of silence just before the France – Kazakhstan football match (8:45 p.m.) at the Parc des Princes, comes barely two weeks after the end of the first phase of the trial, where more than 350 civil parties retraced at the helm the course of this apocalyptic evening.

Post-traumatic stress, guilt of the survivor, persistent gap with the rest of society … For a month, the testimonies of the victims and their relatives revealed the indelible scars and the extent of the psychological damage of these attacks on hundreds of broken lives.

To face the rest of the audience, which must continue until the end of May, “people feel that we have to stick together,” summarizes Arthur Dénouveaux. “Sharing all these experiences at the helm also increased the feeling of belonging to a community that makes sense.”

“Solidarity”

Hence an even stronger need to participate in commemorations, “the only time when a collective catharsis can take place”, adds this survivor of the Bataclan.

This year, his association registers about fifty additional participants in the ceremony it organizes at the town hall of 11^e arrondissement, after the various tributes.

“It will do us good to meet again and do a little ‘calinotherapy'”, advances Stéphanie Zarev, another survivor of the Bataclan.

“The trial undoubtedly reinforced the need to be together”, confirms Philippe Duperron, president of the other association of victims, 13onze15 Fraternité et Truth. “In the courtroom, there were looks, outstretched hands, we felt a lot of solidarity.”

Her organization also has more registrants than usual for the lunch it is organizing after the official ceremony.

>> Testimony: “Trial of November 13th: ‘I don’t want the defendants to feed on my suffering'”

This year, “the commemoration is a marker of the great shared narrative that is currently being constructed at the trial”, observes historian Denis Peschanski, co-responsible for the 13-November Program, a vast research project that studies the evolution of the memory of attacks over ten years.

The audience and its transcription in the press “influence the collective memory of the French” and allowed “to complete the puzzle with pieces that we did not yet know”, he notes.

Its research, carried out with a representative sample of the French population, shows that beyond the carnage of the Bataclan, the trial has notably “brought back the places of November 13th in their entirety”, thanks in particular to the testimonies of the victims. the Stade de France and the terraces, which the general public gradually tended to forget.

Six years after these attacks, the terrorist threat remains very high in France, but is now taking new forms.

As shown by the assassinations of police officer Stéphanie Monfeture in April in Rambouillet (Yvelines), or of teacher Samuel Paty in October 2020, it is now carried by more “autonomous” assailants whose link with organizations terrorists, who no longer systematically claim their actions, has largely relaxed.

With AFP