Judgment Without Appeal: The Bataclan Trial between Counter Terrorism Policy, Law, and Restorative Justice

On the evening of 13 November 2015, coordinated attacks carried out by the Islamic State killed 130 people across eight locations in Paris and in nearby Saint‑Denis. On 29 June 2022, twenty men were convicted, and 2,318 individuals were formally recognised as victims—a verdict that, unusually, went unchallenged. This lecture offers a collective analysis of the ten‑month trial, departing from prevailing narratives that portrayed it as the judgment of “religion‑driven monsters” turned into “killing machines.” Testimony in court revealed that terrorism arises from far more complex factors.

 

Although the trial was presented as a form of restorative justice for the victims and for the nation, victims were largely encouraged to recount their trauma rather than to explore the conditions that had made the attacks possible. By examining the trial through the intersecting lenses of counter‑terrorism policy, legal procedure, and national rituals of solidarity, the social sciences shed light on the workings of contemporary anti‑terrorist justice.

 

Sandrine Lefranc is Director of Research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and a member of the Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics at Sciences Po Paris. She is currently a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Ottawa and Montreal. Her research focuses on memory politics and on mechanisms of justice in the aftermath of mass violence. She is the author, with Sarah Gensburger, of Beyond Memory. Can We Really Learn From the Past? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), and of Comment sortir de la violence ? : enjeux et limites de la justice transitionnelle (CNRS Éditions, 2022). Her most recent book, Un Verdict sans appel. Enquête sur les attentats de novembre 2015 (Actes Sud), co‑authored with Pauline Jarroux, Antoine Mégie, and Anne Wyvekens, examines the judicial and political dimensions of the trial that followed the November 2015 attacks in Paris.