It's over for Bring the accused on France 2. The public channel broadcasts this Monday, February 24 at 11 p.m., the last of seven unpublished episodes of the story-telling program presented by Frédérique Lantieri since 2011. Fans of criminal narrative will be able to find Bring the accused on YouTube and on RMC Story: the chain of the group Altice rebroadcasts every Sunday evening since January 12, old numbers, and prepares unpublished for the re-entry 2020, which will be presented by Rachid M 'Barki, according to Le Parisien .
Christophe Hondelatte, the historic presenter of Make the Accused , found since 2016 on Europe 1 in Hondelatte Raconte , returns to the place of stories of criminal cases in the media.
Why are crime stories so popular with the public?
It is by no means certain that criminal cases are going so well. It is a subject that is quite popular, but not very popular. Crime is a niche. It is absolutely not a unifying subject, it is segmenting.
We cannot only hear crimes. A whole lot of people consider that it stinks, that it is unhealthy, that it agitates bad feelings. Telling the crime is always cutting yourself off from part of the population. My own parents never watched Bring the accused in , because for them the matter is beyond reproach.
Why, then, do they have a reputation for being popular?
We have equated crime with popular success, this is what made the success of the popular press, from Parisian to France-Soir . But in my opinion, it has not been proven. Since the late 1980s and the decline of France-Soir , the written press has hardly dealt with criminal cases, even Le Parisien . If it paid off, the print media would talk about it.
On the radio, there were great periods on Europe 1, today the contemporary crimes are little treated. And on television ... TF1 has not had any news program for a very long time, it stops on France 2, and there is no broadcast of criminal cases on M6. Today, the channels which deal with criminal cases are W9, TFX, C8 ... Challengers channels, which use the criminal case to seek court reservations, but which everyone knows are limited.
You yourself admitted that it was not a subject that interested you that much at the beginning ... Why did you change your mind?
I did not like criminal cases for the same reason as my parents, because it is a subject that has always been tainted by a hint of vulgarity. In practice, what interests me passionately is telling the story of the functioning of justice in France, at all times. People do not know how justice works, they have a lot of grievances and suspicions about it. In truth, it is a system that does not work so badly.
The second thing that I find interesting is that we see in criminal cases a truth about human beings, which is not described elsewhere. Ordinary people become killers, we see good people becoming bad guys or bad guys with some kindness in them. We see men of all shades of gray in a world where we like to classify people in black and white.
“A good story is a story whose end you could not have suspected. "
Is there a good way to tell about criminal cases?
I have long practiced only one way, that of Bring in the accused , which is a story of the investigation, from the discovery of the corpse to the verdict, through the investigation, the police custody, the trial ... J have long believed it was the best way. I am not necessarily convinced of this today. I sometimes watch old episodes and say to myself: "How boring! "
What is also interesting are the psychological springs. A Bring in the accused , we knowingly kept away from him. Perhaps we were wrong. I think a sweet mix of the two is a bit ideal.
Do you approach criminal matters and other types of stories differently?
The first season of Hondelatte Raconte , these are only criminal cases: I have prowled my story mechanics. The oral requires a great clarity in the progression of the story, the flashback does not work, we can not make false openings ... This story mechanism that applied to crime, applies to any good story. A good story is a story whose end you could not have suspected. In truth, that is what pleases crime! This is just one good story among others.
How do you choose the stories you tell?
We try to alternate eras, genres ... Our material is books, documentaries, press reviews, etc. If a criminal case was not treated enough by a book, a documentary or the press of the time, it is lost. I cannot afford to go and search the departmental archives. To read a contemporary criminal record, it takes almost a month!
This was also an argument with France Televisions in an attempt to maintain Have the accused enter. Who will record the criminal history of the 2000s? There would be a duty of public service, contrary to what Delphine Ernotte seems to think. We are letting away billions of stories that we could tell in their legal fabrication, which TNT broadcasts do not do because they do not have the means. These are very expensive processes.
“The difficulty on television is to convince people to speak in front of the camera. "
What difference do you see between the story of criminal cases on radio and television?
It is much more complicated to make a television documentary on a crime than to do what I do, to tell by making all the voices. The difficulty on television is to convince people to speak in front of the camera. When parents have lost their child, it's hard to tell them five years later that we would like them to tell us everything from the start. The first Bring the accused in , we had a terrible time!
If you look today what will distinguish it from many DTT broadcasts, which on the whole are rather well done and faithful to the substance, it is that they do not have the interlocutors. They tell the stories with journalists and lawyers. There is only Bring in the accused who happened to have the head of investigation, the magistrates, the experts ... In certain cases we had all the actors in history.
The genre of true crime has many fans across the Atlantic. Do you watch American productions?
I looked at some of them. What they do is strictly unfeasible in France, because we don't have the images of the interior. There, the confession is not a report, it is the guy who confesses. We have the pleadings, the interrogation, the testimony ... The TV filming everything in the United States, the prosecutors making deals with the channels to tell them everything, we have documents of a force that we will never have in France . We will never get to that point in the intrusion of cameras into the legal process, and I understand that.
The Netflix series on the Grégory case [a French production, editor's note] was remarkable. For the first time, we saw almost all of the rushes of the case, made by televisions. You can see that in the 1980s, television followed the news. When an accused arrived at the courthouse, in the prison, we saw him arrive. You don't have that anymore. And where usually we only saw excerpts, even in the Bring in the accused , here we have the whole picture of the Grégory case from its beginning to its end.
Criminal cases find their audience in podcasts, in streaming… Is it precisely because crime is a niche?
Yes, in the current system, which means that we only watch or listen to things if we want to, podcasting and replay, or platforms like Netflix, are very suitable for the consumption of criminal cases. The subjects are available, but there is no obligation to watch them. I would talk less about crime if there were no podcast. If I continue to commit crimes, it is because I know that in podcast they have an extraordinary life.
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