Among the guilty: a France in mirrors by Philippe Brunel

Alain Delon's double

Philippe Brunels Le cercle des obligés (Grasset, 2025) is a hybrid form of roman vrai, journalistic research and autobiographical reflection. The starting point is the infamous Markovic affairIn 1968, Stefan Markovic, a Serb, shadowy figure, and Alain Delon's "doublure lumière," is found murdered—an episode in which cinema, politics, and the underworld intersect in a disturbing way. Twenty-five years later, an unnamed first-person narrator, formerly a reporter, picks up the trail of his mentor, Pierre Salberg. He returns to the locations of the past—Hyères, the Giens peninsula, the Var region—to continue an unfinished manuscript and, at the same time, to reconstruct himself.

In doing so, Brunel intertwines two movements: the search for an objective truth and the existential self-examination of the man who narrates: “I would start the investigations from the beginning, which he did not have the strength or the will to complete… and secretly take over his inheritance.” ¹ The inquiry becomes a metaphor for literary work itself – a work of memory that never possesses the past, but always only reimagines it.

Philippe Brunel (born 1952), originally a sports and reportage writer (e.g. Life and Death of Marco Pantani), uses its documentary accuracy here to measure the relationship between reality, media and fiction. Le cercle des obligés In this sense, it is less a crime novel than an epistemological novel: a meditation on the illusion of enlightenment, on the disappearance of reality in the name of its media reproduction.

France as a spectacle and illusion

The France of the novel is the country after 1968 – a country caught between political decadence and cultural splendor. Brunel portrays this period as permanent show, as a spectacle and illusion. The economic miracle years are over, and behind the facade of Gaullism, weariness, corruption, and moral decay are spreading. In Paris, “in the thirteenth arrondissement, accompanied by the plaintive screech of the elevated railway” ², the post-war generation lives in an urban shade of gray, while the myth of cinema – Delon, Melville, Bardot – offers a substitute religion.

The “unsightly and grey Paris” (“Paris insalubre et grisâtre”) contrasts with the French Riviera as a stage for illusion: sun, sea, film festivals, bars, "le Boston", "le Grillon". These two spaces – the gray north and the dazzling south – structure the novel as a moral order: between obscurity and glare.

Brunel depicts the emergence of a new pop culture, in which politics, show business, and crime intertwine. Alain Delon embodies "le héros absolu," but also the symbol of a generation that views beauty with suspicion. The novel quotes entire passages from interviews, newspaper articles, and police reports—a collage of the media surface. Popular figures (Melville, Bardot, Fallaci, Visconti, Aznavour) appear not as mere names, but as symbols of an aesthetic that transposes reality into the cinematic.

This era is permeated with images: "Bardot swimming naked in blue water... Redford's blondness, Sydney Pollack's New York autumn days". ³ Post-war French culture appears as a permanent split screen, in which the image replaces experience. Brunel presents this visual world not nostalgically, but as a critical matrix in which memory and history mutually absorb each other.

Text architecture and time levels

The novel itself is composed like a collage – a mosaic of minutesQuotations, newspaper clippings, personal notes, and inner monologues. The narrator reads transcripts, studies "les pages de Var-Matin," and quotes old reports. Thus, a text emerges from texts, an archive that lays bare its own instability. This polyphony is not merely documentary but poetological: each source contradicts the others, each voice is simultaneously evidence and masquerade. The language of the press, as concise as it is sensationalist, stands alongside the elegiac reflection of the narrator, who understands his writing as a moral duty: "J'avais une dette envers Salberg… ainsi nous serions liés à nouveau."

Brunel reconstructs the journalistic world of the 1970s with almost ethnographic precision: the smoky newsroom, the clatter of the machines, the "Underwood lourde et massive," the hierarchy of the "chefs de service." These scenes constitute a study of communication before the digital age: language as material, not as an interface. The forms of communication in the novel—conversation, letter, audio recording—are constantly threatened by failure and overwriting. Between the lines reigns a silence that structures everything. "You'll learn the whole story from each one of them in little bites... the real truth." ⁴ The motto states this programmatically. The fragmentary conversation becomes the model of knowledge itself.

Brunel constructs a multi-layered temporal architecture based on cinematic techniques: dissolves, flashbacks, parallel editing. Three levels—childhood (1968), reportage (1983), present (2023)—interpenetrate and dissolve chronology. The past appears as a picture within a picture: the narrator sees himself in the rearview mirror of memory, as a child in a stairwell, as a young reporter, as a middle-aged man at the empty port of Hyères. Time becomes a hall of mirrors, "un miroir sans tain," through which one can see without ever reaching what lies beyond.

The narrative technique is both analytical and lyrical: reportage-like in its detail, impressionistic in its perception. The montage of archival texts, conversations, and interior monologue transforms the novel into a second-order medium—a reflection on storytelling itself. The search for clues does not lead to the truth, but to an aesthetics of the trace, of traceThe recurrence of the motifs – cars, hotel rooms, harbor lights, cigarette smoke – creates a musical structure: memory like a refrain.

Doubling and reflection

At its heart lies the teacher-student relationship between Pierre Salberg and the narrator—a secular form of initiation. Salberg, “reporter de légende,” represents the ethos of traditional journalism: sincerity, precision, moral isolation. The student, “un être indéfini, en instance, à portée d'illusion,” seeks a father figure in him and finds a mirror. This constellation reiterates the structure of doubling that the novel stages throughout: Markovic as Delon's double, the narrator as Salberg's double, reality as a double of its media representation. “Je n'ai jamais su si c'était Delon ou son double fictif”—this sentence encapsulates the epistemological dilemma.

Female figures mostly appear as projections – Marseille beauties, nurses, sophisticated friends – bearers of loss, “noires de peau, au maillot rouge une pièce,” icons of a memory that survives only in images. Brunel works with a dense metaphor of reflection and light. The urban night is a “déluge de lumière pailletée,” the cars “véritables féeries urbaines.” This visual language evokes the aesthetics of film noir, of Samurai – that mixture of coldness, loneliness and style that defined Delon's generation.

Light represents both knowledge and deception: truth dazzles. Water, rain, and mirror motifs transform reality into a surface of reflection. The title also alludes to this circular movement: the cercle des obligés It is a social, moral, and aesthetic ring – a world in which everyone is bound by loyalty and guilt.

Culturally, Brunel blends the high and the popular spheres. His intertexts range from Borges ("Il ya deux hommes en un, le vrai c'est l'autre") through Rilke and Visconti to Sinatra, Morricone, and Aznavour. France appears as existential brief orchestrated by "the standards of Aznavour, Simon and Garfunkel, the hits of Gloria Gaynor." These pop textures lend the novel an auratic patina: history is remembered through music.

Aesthetics of Truth and Form

The novel reflects the tension between journalistic factuality and literary truth. The narrator recognizes that the collection of facts is merely a gesture: “Le but n'était plus d'atteindre la vérité.” The aesthetic principle replaces the forensic one. Writing becomes an act of fidelity, not revelation. Brunel writes against transparency. In language itself, a space of deceleration emerges, a “poétique de l'opacité.” Thus, the documentary transforms into a meditation on the medium: The novel demonstrates that every form of knowledge of reality is aesthetically mediated—“la vérité est un effet de forme.”

In the final section, the narrator returns to the scene of the violence: “Le port de Hyères, c'est la morte saison.” In this silence, where the past lies like an empty backdrop, the novel reaches its paradoxical climax: the failure of enlightenment as a moment of aesthetic truth. The narrator finds no new witnesses, no new documents—only images: the empty hotel, the leafless tennis net, the wind over the sea. “The loose net held a carpet of dead needles in its mesh.” ⁵ This final image is emblematic: the network of memory holds only fragments, traces that coalesce into a form—not a truth. The novel does not end with revelation, but with a reconciliation with the unresolved: the acceptance of ambiguity as a form of clarity ("l'acceptation du flou comme forme de lucidité")..

The title Le cercle des obligés Its meaning unfolds on several levels – social, moral, and poetic. Literally, the “cercle des obligés” refers to the community of those who feel bound to one another by guilt, gratitude, or loyalty: journalists, actors, politicians, accomplices of an era held together by power, silence, and mutual blackmail. Figuratively, however, Brunel means the existential entanglement of every individual in an invisible system of dependencies – a circle from which no one can escape because memory, guilt, and obligation form a closed system. The narrator himself belongs to this circle, “lié à jamais à Salberg,” as he says; his search for traces is also a form of moral atonement. Finally, poetically, the title alludes to the circular structure of the novel – the recurrence of places, times, and characters – in which all truth reveals itself only in the movement of return. Le cercle des obligés It thus describes the endless cycle of guilt and knowledge that determines human existence: a circle of memory from which no one escapes.

Le cercle des obligés This is a novel about the aesthetics of the trace and the moral obligation of remembering. In the layering of fact and fiction, archive and dream, history and pop culture, Brunel reveals a France that knows itself only as an image. The circle of the "obligés" is the circle of those who must see—the reporter, the artist, but also the reader.

1. “J'allais reprendre à zero l'enquête qu'il n'avait pas eu la force ou l'envie d'achever... et j'en assumerais secrètement l'héritage.”>>>
2. “The three-dimensional arrondissement of the cadence of the plaintive metropolitan area”>>>
3. “Bardot nageant nue dans les eaux bleutées… the blondeur de Redford, les automnes new-yorkais de Sydney Pollack.”>>>
4. “L'histoire all entière, tu l'apprendras de chacun, par petits bouts… la vraie vérité.”>>>
5. “Le filet détendu retenait dans ses mailles un tapis d'aiguilles mortes.”>>>