November 13, 2015: jihadist commandos kill 130 and wounded 413 in attacks outside the Stade de France in Saint-Denis, on terraces in the 10th and 11th arrondissements of Paris and at the Bataclan.

Faced with the extent of the trauma, many research programs have emerged in an attempt to construct the historical account of this event which plunged France into astonishment.

One of the most ambitious is soberly called "November 13": a transdisciplinary research which should be completed in 2028 with the aim of studying the construction and evolution of the memory of the attacks.

The collective has just published "November 13th. Testimonies, a story" (ed. Odile Jacob), a book which brings together more than 360 testimonies collected in the summer of 2016 from people of the "first circle", that is that is, directly exposed to the attacks: the victims, their relatives or even the police.

A colossal job which required 1,431 hours of audiovisual recordings.

"The advantage of having so much material is that we have three, four, ten people telling us the same thing", explains historian Denis Peschanski, specialist in World War II behind the program. "November 13" research with neuropsychologist Francis Eustache.

"We therefore have enough testimonies to reconstitute the fabric of the event, with the singularity of the emotional charge of the testimony. The scientific challenge is to provide a reference account (…), the truth of the event."

"I hope he is not dead"

Among the most striking testimonies, Denis Peschanski notably retains the "hero figures", such as the police officers who entered 12 minutes after the terrorists in the Bataclan and who shot an assailant armed with an assault rifle at more than 25 meters, or even these "front-line caregivers", these neighbors who, at La Belle Équipe for example, will immediately come to the aid of the injured.

The story of parents without news of their children, the interminable wait and the distress of the relatives of the victims in the days following the attacks are also poignant moments in this book.

Like this mother of a family who must announce to her children the death of their father: "On the 14th, we had to… We had to explain to the children why papa was not there, without knowing myself why he was not. So to my big… I said, listen, something happened to Daddy, she said, 'Oh my, I hope he hasn't broken his leg.'

(…) And… And then, she said to me: 'I hope he is not dead.' "

For those researchers who are working on November 13, the task is far from over.

This work of testimonies is indeed only the first step in a more global project.

It is a question of widening the circle to the people indirectly affected by the attacks but also to understand how the memory of these witnesses will evolve over time, thanks to interviews of the same people carried out two years later, then in 2021 and finally in 2026.

"With these first testimonies from 2016, the mechanisms of memory reconstruction are much less sensitive than five, ten or 50 years later, analyzes Denis Peschanski. Because the more time passes, the stronger the interaction with collective memory."

Ephemeral memorials

Beyond the testimonies on the attacks, the researchers were also interested in the traces left by the events.

The collective work entitled "Les Mémoriaux du 13-Novembre" (ed. Of the EHESS) tells in texts and images the history of these ephemeral memorials which flourished in France, mainly in Paris at the scene of the attacks.

“The first function of these memorials is that of collective mourning. People can come together in their diversity, explains sociologist Sarah Gensburger, who edited the book with Gérôme Truc. These messages show that we are together. identifies first as a Parisian but these Parisians can have multiple origins. There are indeed many messages written in a foreign language, English first and then German and Arabic afterwards. "

The result of an unprecedented collaboration between historians and archivists, the book returns to the epic of the collection and conservation of these ephemeral memorials.

In total, some 7,700 documents were dried, disinfected, cleaned, classified and inventoried before being the subject of a digitization campaign.

At the time of the attacks, the two authors of the book had also alerted the City of Paris on the importance of creating these citizen archives after the missed meeting of January 2015. It is the University of Harvard, which then proposed to bring together the remains of the "Je suis Charlie" movement without eliciting any reactions from the public authorities.

Through this book, the authors seek to tell "a story from below" of the attacks.

"With the commemoration of the five years, we realize that we are entering a new phase with the creation of a museum of societies facing terrorism. There will be a phase of institutionalization of memory, assures Sarah Gensburger As soon as a more official discourse is going to be constructed, it is important to show that at the level of citizens, there can be different relationships with memory, not necessarily contradictory or conflicting, but it is this plurality that we wanted to highlight. "

A memorial museum in the Paris region

Announced by the President of the Republic during the annual ceremony of homage to the victims of terrorism on September 19, 2018, the memorial museum project is taking shape.

The so-called "operational" phase will begin.

It includes in particular the drafting of specifications and the choice of a location, a priori in the Paris region to be easily accessible to all visitors, especially foreigners.

It is the historian Henry Rousso, specialist in memorial issues, who has been entrusted with the mission of prefiguring this establishment.

In spring 2022, he will hand over the museum's scientific and cultural program.

"We have started locating objects that belonged to victims and at the same time we will refer to collections that already exist, such as those at the Archives de Paris, through loans and deposits. The image will also play a role. very important. INA will be one of our privileged partners. The big question will be how to use these images and avoid voyeurism ", explains Henry Rousso.

Unlike other comparable sites such as the September 11 Memorial, the French project will not concern a single attack or a single type of terrorism but will cover all French victims of terrorist acts in France and abroad.

"The idea is to offer, based on the question of terrorism, a museum of history and society on the major contemporary problems: the place of the victim, the question of resilience, of memory but also how terrorism has transformed our daily lives, "reveals the historian, who cites the inflation of security measures at airports as an example.

"What terrorists have in common is that they prevent us from thinking," said Henry Rousso. "This museum should make us think despite fear, despite bewilderment."

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