Death of a Traveller. Didier Fassin
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women. They give a succinct account of the tragic death of a thirty-seven-year-old man, the brother of one of them. He was killed by officers from the GIGN, Groupe d’intervention de la gendarmerie nationale, a special unit of the gendarmerie dedicated to terrorist attacks and hostage situations, who had come to arrest him as he was deemed to have absconded because he had not returned to prison following home leave. The three women tell the sociologist that they have read some of his books, and they would like to invite him to participate in a panel discussion focused on ending state violence, as their press release puts it. Moved by the man’s story, sympathetic to the collective’s campaign, and baffled by the implausibility of the official version of the events – all factors that echo other cases in which he has taken an interest – the sociologist nevertheless replies that, unfortunately, as he is not in France, he must decline their invitation. A few moments later, however, he follows up with a postscript proposing to write a short text that they could read at the event if they wish. They accept with enthusiasm. He therefore sends them a few pages in which he reflects on the machinery of law enforcement, penal structures and the prison system in France, where recent developments have led to tragedies such as the one in which this man died. Indeed, this tragic event sits at the intersection of ethnographic research he has been conducting for some fifteen years on the police, courts and prisons. The deceased man’s sister writes a brief message to say that she was touched when she read the text, as since her brother’s death she has been feeling a powerful need to articulate these things but knows that, when spoken by Travellers, they go unheard. She adds that she shared the text with her father, who himself experienced prison from the age of thirteen: after listening attentively he told her that he approved of what it said. The short address is therefore included in the program for the event. A slightly amended version is published a few weeks later on the first anniversary of the tragedy, as an opinion column in a national daily newspaper.
Over the following months, the sociologist continues to receive the collective’s regular press releases. He is thus kept informed about the judicial process, the hopes raised when those who fired the shots are placed under investigation and then dashed when the case is dismissed. He learns also of the marches in memory of the victim and in support of his family, held in the nearby administrative town where the case is to be decided as well as in other places where similar tragedies have taken place. After several email exchanges, he eventually goes to meet with the Traveller’s sister and other members of his family, including his parents, in their village. Spending the day with them, he takes note of the wound that remains open, the anger at a justice system that did not listen to them, the grieving that cannot begin until their words have been heard. Thus is germinated the idea for a book that would respect their version of the tragedy they have lived, and are still living through. The proposal is still unformed, and the support not guaranteed, as he explains to them. But they accept the idea without hesitation. He tells them too that he cannot simply reproduce their view, that he will have to include accounts from other perspectives. And he speaks to them of his scruples about questioning them on such painful events, causing them to relive this traumatic recent past. It hurts to talk about it, they say, but it does us good all the same. In any case, we talk about it with each other every day. Every day we talk about it. A few weeks later, the sociologist writes to the family to tell them that his publisher is willing to publish the book. It is such a poignant day for us to receive that news, replies the Traveller’s sister. Today would have been his fortieth birthday.
Thus begins an investigation, or rather a counter-investigation, that leads the sociologist to interrupt all his other projects for several months. The man’s death and the ensuing criminal inquiry take a forceful hold on him – a sort of ethical urgency that cannot be put off. For, ultimately, this story is a tragic illustration of what has formed the substance of his two most recent books: the will to punish and the inequality of lives. He must once again return to examine the circumstances of this tragic event and the legal proceedings in order to understand what has played out here at both the specific and the generic level. He therefore conducts twelve interviews with the protagonists in the case, explaining his project clearly to each person so as to avoid any misunderstanding. The deceased’s relatives and those involved either closely or more distantly in the events and its aftermath agree readily, as do the judges and lawyers, save one. Conversely, repeated approaches to the gendarmes, both individually and via their institution, both locally and at the national level, yield no result. Likewise multiple requests to some of the indirect witnesses, such as the emergency doctor, and to others having taken part in the story, such as the journalist. Thanks in particular to the diligence of the family and of the public prosecutor’s office, documents are assembled: the five handwritten accounts by the parents, uncle, brother and sister-in-law, made just after the tragedy; the twenty-seven statements of witness depositions; the autopsy and ballistics reports, that of weapon examination, the toxicology and forensic analyses; the record of the reconstruction of the events and of the visit to the scene; the public prosecution’s charges and the defense lawyers’ responses; the ruling that dismissed the case and its upholding on appeal; the fourteen press releases from the support committee and the twenty-eight articles in the regional press. The pieces of the jigsaw gradually come together. Yet gaps remain, owing to questions that were not asked by the investigators, contradictions that were not brought up during the criminal investigation, points of vagueness and approximations in the various versions of the facts, silences and refusals to be interviewed. Thus, a rich but incomplete fabric is woven, in which the record of a deposition can partially fill in for the missing interview with the witnesses concerned.
But the point of this project is not to substitute the authority of the words written by the sociologist for the authority of the words spoken by the judge. The aim is first to do justice to all the versions of the events and then, on the basis of evidence collected, to formulate a plausible interpretation unfettered by the judicial decision. The relationships between the work of judge and that of historian have long been scrutinized, with the aim either of demonstrating the similarities between them or, on the contrary, to warn against a historiography that sets itself up as public prosecutor or defender of characters or events. Some historians have even gone so far as to re-examine court decisions in cases from their own times. In the present instance, there is something of a potential dialogue between the judge and the ethnographer, in which the ethnographer takes the liberty of investigating the judge’s interpretation. A new form therefore needs to be essayed in order to produce accounts that keep as closely as possible to the facts as they emerge over the course of interviews, depositions, field observations and the assembly of other documentary traces, all the while embedding them in descriptions and narratives through a process of re-creation. Composing the text becomes an operation akin to jointing a brickwork of empirical data, using the cement of reasoning and imagination, so as to generate a novel structure of what might be termed an augmented reality. This augmented reality first places readers as close as possible to the experience of the protagonists and then draws them into the counter-investigative work of the sociologist.
But, in order to craft this masonry, the facts need to be tracked down to the smallest detail. Creative freedom is to some extent restricted by the commitment to truth-telling. Thus, when the text says that the officer thinks you never know with Travellers, and that he believes that his was the fatal shot, it is because during his deposition he states that Travellers represent a difficult community for them and, later, that he was probably the one who killed the man. When the text notes that the father thinks the evacuation of the officer was staged to make it look as if he was injured, and imagines that the shots could have led his oxygen bottles to explode and thus transformed his son into a terrorist, these are points made in one of the interviews. Many more examples could be cited, almost line by line. Similarly, the terms employed in the text reproduce as far as possible the words used by the speakers. The gendarmes call their victim the target (la cible), the objective (l’objectif), the individual or the man; they say that they want to neutralize (neutraliser) him, which means to kill him, and euphemistically talk of handling (prendre en compte) his father and his brother when they pin them down and handcuff them. The family uses expressions typically belonging to the language of the Roma to speak of the gendarmes (schmitts, clistés, cagoulés), translated here as cops, whose semi-automatic weapons are Tommy guns (mitraillettes); the lean-to of the house is named a shed (cabouin) or a barn (grange). When referring