Death of a Traveller. Didier Fassin
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of the events as they might plausibly have unfolded. My aim therefore is to open up the black box of the functioning of the state, more specifically its law-enforcement mechanisms, the police and the justice system, rather than adopting the position habitually taken by the social sciences on the outside. To put it another way, my aim is to investigate the investigation, and to do so by revealing what the judges caused to disappear. This is a delicate process and a risky endeavor, though. The judicial investigation is indeed legally protected by judicial confidentiality that may be lifted only by the public prosecutor. By dismissing the case, and consequently preventing a trial from being held, the examining magistrate removed the case from public view. By reopening the file, I make the various elements in it accessible to readers.
The field of research in which I present my proposition thus sits on the boundary between history and literature, between law and journalism. It is not a new one, but it is one that I invite readers to explore afresh. Michel Foucault recounts how, when he discovered the story of an early nineteenth-century parricide whose astonishing memoir describes how he committed a triple murder in his own family, he and the students in his seminar fell under the spell of both the case and the text. The story immediately aroused his interest, but it also moved him. It enthralled him, in the strong sense of the word, on both these levels. It was only later that he decided, with his young colleagues, to publish I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister and My Brother …, gathering together the extant documents, including the famous memoir, and adding a series of notes that effectively represent the reflections of the researchers in this little group. The aim, one of them later noted, was to make all the material in the case file available to the public. I think I can say that my relationship to Angelo’s story followed the same course. The circumstances of his death attracted my attention, while the courage and determination demonstrated by his sister aroused my sympathy. The idea of making it the subject of research and of a book came to me only a year later, here too in order to enable a broad audience to form their own view of what really happened in the lean-to that day, and what could possibly explain the great disproportionality between the crimes with which the young man was reproached and his eventual fate. Unlike the collective of authors at the Collège de France, I have not published the documents themselves, which would have been against the law, but I have integrated them into the accounts I have put together and the counter-investigation I have conducted.
The published archive therefore comprises not raw material but, rather, narratives and analyses drawn from it. As far as the narratives are concerned, the reconstitution of the various versions is akin to the literary form of the non-fiction novel, and the reference that immediately comes to mind is In Cold Blood, in which Truman Capote recounts a quadruple murder that took place in a small town in Kansas. Asserting that everything contained in this account derives from his own observations, his interviews and official records, he usually adopts the position of omniscient narrator, producing a third-person account that alternates the points of view of the murderers, the victims, the police and others related to the crime and criminals. Since the crime has been solved, the perpetrators having confessed, he is able to construct a coherent narrative. For my own part, while I draw on similar kinds of empirical material and alternate the viewpoints of eight individuals more or less directly involved in the events, I do not pass over the inconsistencies in these versions, which, at least as far as Angelo’s death is concerned, are irreconcilable. Since the circumstances in which the gendarmes were led to open fire were never fully elucidated, I give readers the opportunity to follow the trail and grasp the experience of each of the protagonists as they describe it, without prejudging the veracity of their account. What I am writing is not a novel but an investigation. As far as the analysis is concerned, the exploration of the various modalities of truth, the deconstruction of the rationales for lying among the police, the flaws in the investigation and the justifications for the dismissal of the case resemble the means in a work of detection, similar to the method by which Carlo Ginzburg proceeds in The Judge and the Historian. His book was written in defense of his friend Adriano Sofri, who was accused of having organized, sixteen years earlier, the execution of a police chief himself suspected of being responsible for the death of an anarchist. To this end, Ginzburg points out the implausibilities and contradictions in the suspect avowals of the informer who accused three of his former Lotta Continua comrades in exchange for a suspension of sentence for his own involvement, and he discusses the question of evidence and proofs, which are necessarily treated in different ways depending on whether one is conducting a trial or undertaking research, as the title of the book suggests. Although the event under consideration and the judicial process are very different in my case, I proceed similarly to a counter-investigation. However, I do so not having decided in advance that the gendarmes did not fire in legitimate self-defense but by systematically taking up each piece of evidence the judges drew on or, conversely, ignored in their process of establishing what they call judicial truth. It is what ultimately leads me to propose another interpretation of the facts, one that pays more attention to the improbabilities and contradictions in the official version and that aligns better with the existing evidence and proofs.
What fascinated Foucault and his fellow researchers in the story of Pierre Rivière was the process of veridiction at work, among the doctors, judges and the murderer himself, in a case that combined crime and madness, criminal responsibility and mental health. What drove Capote’s investigation and Ginzburg’s counter-investigation was the possibility of drawing out a truth, in the first case through literature, in the second in the name of justice. These, then, are two distinct projects with regard to the question of truth-telling: for Foucault and his colleagues it is the interplay of utterances of truth that interests them; for Capote and Ginzburg it is the truth itself that is at stake. The present book moves progressively from the former to the latter, from the operation of veridiction toward the search for truth. This truth, which I have called ethnographic truth, is independent of the relations of power and knowledge underlying the production of judicial truth. It has no argument to make apart from the fact that it arises out of the twofold decision to give all accounts the same credit and to rely solely on assessment of the evidence. Deliberately limited in its ambition, this version, unlike the judicial truth, has no bearing on recognition of the guilt or innocence of those accused. But it has weight for those to whom truth is habitually denied, for it restores some part of their dignity and even offers them a glimpse of the hope of justice. While it has no impact in the courts, it partakes of an ethical concern.
This concern is a live one. It articulates a matter of urgency. While the death of men in interactions with the police is a frequent occurrence generally fostered by the exoneration of the alleged perpetrators, it is rare to have access to all the evidence in one of these cases, and even exceptional when the case has been dismissed because it is then subject to judicial confidentiality, breach of which is punishable in France by one year’s imprisonment and a fine of €15,000. Having been granted authorization to consult the documents in the case concerning Angelo’s death, I have therefore felt an obligation to put this privilege to good use by seeing this work through. Apart from the singularity of the case, starting with the fact that it concerns a Traveller, with all the marginality, suspicion and ostracism implied by that identity, it seemed to me that, both in the method of intervention chosen to effect the young man’s arrest and in the logic of the judicial process that culminated in the absolution of the two men who fired the fatal shots, there were a number of features that could be identified or inferred in many other cases throughout the world. The details of these cases may vary, but they are tragically alike in their dénouement: the loss of a life and the impunity of those responsible. In this respect the simple story of the death of Angelo, extended through his sister’s fight for justice and truth, acquires if not a universal then at least an exemplary significance.
D.F., August 2020
Terminological Note
The organization of law enforcement and the operation of the judicial system is specific to each country, and even sometimes to each jurisdiction within a given country, as in the United States. Some explanations are therefore in order so as to make the account that follows clear for readers unfamiliar with the French systems.
In France there are two main law-enforcement