- Published by Lattès, 8 kilometers from Bruno Masi looks back at the Cuers massacre in 1995, when a 16-year-old boy shot on sight in the village before committing suicide.
- The author brings a story to this forgotten drama, and more generally tries to understand why certain various facts pass to posterity, and others not.
Eleven hours and eight kilometers: this is the time and the distance it took Eric Borel, a 16-year-old adolescent, to kill three members of his family in Solliès-Pont, then twelve people in Cuers. Before finally killing themselves, this Sunday, September 24, 1995. Excluding the attacks, this shooting occurred in this village of Haut-Var, located about thirty kilometers from Toulon, is the deadliest mass killing in Europe, after Utoya in Norway. Yet who remembers it today? Even the village of Cuers has only had a commemorative plaque since 2009. With 8 kilometers, an investigation into the red lands of the Var , which reads like a thriller, the journalist and writer Bruno Masi challenges: why certain miscellaneous facts mark us- they more than others?
With this 8 km book, did you want to give a memory to the Cuers massacre?
It was the original intention. I wanted to find out why this killing had disappeared from memory, including people from the region. Why do certain events enter the collective memory, strike it, when others, just as tragic, are absorbed by amnesia? I never forgot. I was 20 years old during the Cuers massacre, I also lived in the region. He was 16 years old. Two youths, two trajectories. What happened to do this? I tried to understand.
You do the survey again. Do you have the feeling that the madness thesis was too quickly favored?
We said it was crazy. It was partial. How does a stroke of madness last eleven hours and 8 kilometers? The first three people Eric Borel kills (his mother, stepfather and 11-year-old half-brother) are assassinations. He had announced them. When he kills his family, I don't think he's mad. Things change with Alan, whom he considers his best friend: it is with him that he wants to run away. When he kills him, he is then won over by madness. He shoots everyone he meets in the village. Media coverage at the time was partial. This cold analysis work had not been done.
Why do you think this mass killing has gone into oblivion?
Several criteria must be met for an event to enter the collective memory. It must be shared by a fairly homogeneous human community, as was the case for example at Bataclan, or the population of a high school for Colombine. In Cuers, the only common denominator between the victims is that they were there at some point. The second criterion is that the state, the authorities take possession of the event and make a great account of it. It was not done at the time. No government representative came to Cuers, neither Prime Minister Alain Juppe, nor his Minister of the Interior, Jean-Louis Debré. The third criterion is its repetition. If we remember Colombine 20 years later, it is also that mass killing is part of American culture. There are 300 per year. Fortunately, this rarely happens in France.
Who was Eric Borel? You say that today he would be a teenager riveted to YouTube…
He was above all a deeply sad person, born in a very violent context. A kid who comes to a family who doesn't want it. It does not forgive anything. But it is not at all the disturbed boy as it was drawn. For Elisa Jadot, a journalist who has covered many miscellaneous facts, this affair was a black pit of sadness. The boy was plunged into a well of sadness. When he kills, he organizes his suicide.
You also make the link with the election, a month earlier, of the National Front in Toulon, and with the murder of Yann Piat….
I believe in the contamination of events. This does not mean that the National Front is responsible for the killing. I believe that it releases forces of violence in the region. This unlocks the intellectual ties that make it possible to express violence. Eric Borel grew up in a family of nationalists and in a region marked by political assassinations, the Mafia, banditry. It is not trivial that this killing takes place in this region. This book is also a look at violence.
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