November 13 trial, week 7: overcoming "survivor's guilt" to tell
A commemorative plaque was installed near the Bataclan theater and café in Paris where jihadists attacked and killed 90 people on November 13, 2015. (Illustrative image from 09/3/2021) © AFP - THOMAS COEX
Text by: RFI Follow
4 min
A graduate in political communication at the University of Paris XII, Thibault Guichard, historian at the Institute for the History of Present Time (IHTP), is also a doctoral candidate at the University of Paris VIII.
For RFI, he follows the hearings of the trial of the attacks of November 13, 2015, and gives us every Monday his perspective on the progress of the hearings during the previous week.
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RFI: No doubt unexpectedly, seen from the outside, several victims of November 13 said they felt "
guilty
".
Guilty of having survived the attacks.
Why is this “
survivor's guilt
” more powerful here than in other criminal contexts?
Thibault Guichard
: The work of the Italian writer and chemist Primo Levi (1919-1987), deported in 1944 to the Auschwitz-Monowitz concentration and extermination camp, is often cited to explain this trauma.
In
The Castaways and the Survivors
(
I sommersi ei salvati
, 1986), Levi describes the guilty impression of being “
living in another's place
”.
We could therefore draw a parallel between the fates of the victims of a terrorist attack and those of a genocide, such as the Shoah.
These victims have indeed been exposed, albeit in very different circumstances and contexts, to what psychologists call a phenomenon of violent and mass death.
When an attack occurs, the death which strikes one or the other, is as sudden, brutal as it is inconceivable.
How can we also explain that some died when others survived?
The survival of some is as absurd as the death of others.
This observation of the survivors' incomprehension in the face of their exceptional fate may lead some to the guilty feeling of being still alive, as described by Primo Levi, and that also said Camille, a civil party at the November 13 trial, with this equally terrible sentence: "
I carry the guilt of being alive
".
Is the feeling of guilt the same for all victims?
We must indeed distinguish between several situations. The feeling of guilt is in fact polysemous. For example, survivors express the feeling of not having done enough, regret not having "
tried everything
" to "
protect
" or even "
save
" lives, when some explain their survival by the "
sacrifice
" of another. victim, she died.
What is called “survivor's guilt” is therefore the result of a fairly complex trauma, associating different types of affects, such as guilt but also mourning, in the case of the loss of a loved one, or even shame.
Victims present at the Bataclan, and who managed to escape from the concert hall quickly after the first shots, experienced before the court a feeling of "
imposture
", "
of illegitimacy
" to come and testify.
Here again, we find traces of this impression from the pen of Primo Levi: “
We, the survivors, are not the real witnesses
.
"
Can the trial help the victims pay off the heavy debt that some say they still have for all of the November 13 deaths?
Indeed, their speaking out, in an official and solemn context such as this trial, is a form of recognition of their legitimacy to recount the event. The participation of the survivors of November 13 in this trial also allows them to position themselves in relation to this event, to find their place there, which is on the side of the victims and not of the culprits. On the 30th day of the hearing, Caroline, another civil party, expressed her "
guilt for not having been able to prevent anything
", but immediately qualified this feeling with this other sentence: "
We are not on the bench. accused
”.
Participating in the trial also means becoming aware of the collective dimension of its reconstruction, in particular to overcome the feeling of guilt.
By coming to the bar, these survivors thus come to transmit to us a part of the memory of November 13, which they feel the heavy responsibility to carry.
Symbolically, their testimony can be understood as a gift, which would allow them to compensate the debt they would have paid to all the missing.
But rebuilding is also a personal process, especially when the guilt comes with a more intimate feeling like shame.
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