Pascale Robert-Diard, legal columnist for WorldHe was 25 years old when he found himself covering the Klaus Barbie trial. Thirty-eight years later, the journalist has not left The world nor the courtrooms. For the festival, he recalls all those years spent in the courts and the journalistic and human lessons he learned from them.
Court reports fascinate readers. How do you explain this interest in trials and what appeal do you find in them?
Pascale Robert-Diard: First of all, I think it’s the label of “news” It attracts crowds. Look at how far human nature can go with all the prohibition and mystery that this entails. Personally, what interests me most is the crossing of the line, that is, the motives that push a being to change at a given moment. What are the locks that I have that he or she didn’t have? Learning from the process is also seeing that, often, it doesn’t cost us much to change; what’s more, the patterns to reach this point of no return are often similar.
Is there any test that has impacted you so much that you think about it frequently today?
PRD. : There are so many, too many in fact. In the hearings there is always a moment, a vertigo, in which the case emerges from the file to take shape and flesh and we cannot forget that. That is why I do not have any particular case to mention, but many moments, faces, scenes. Perhaps there is one, for a moment, that marked me to the point of writing a book called the deposition : The Agnelet-Le Roux affair, a murder committed in 1977 and finally judged in 2014. At the trial, Maurice Agnelet’s son accused his father in court. It was a very powerful moment, but even after the proceedings were over, I couldn’t get the scene out of my head or find any meaning in it. So I wrote a long letter to the accused’s son to tell him that he needed to understand, and that’s how my book was born.
Describing this complexity, and as legal chronicles demand, with style, is a complicated exercise. How to describe well, write well without ceasing to be fair?
PRD. : To write accurately is necessarily to write well. You have to choose each word as a painter would choose his colors. The court report is an exercise that raises this need very high. It is a universe of tragedy, a unity of time, place and action. Everything you want to convey violence and emotion will come through words. Especially since the courts are the only place where the written press remains queen. I have long had a writing rule established by Colette that can be translated as follows: “ Don’t tell me a conversation was funny, tell me the jokes. » In a trial, you should not say that a scene was moving, you should show the lost look of the mother, of the accused who collapses in the box, who does not dare to speak to her. The best way to write a legal chronicle, in my opinion, is not to label the moment before being able to describe it.
