Create justice

Literature here serves as an instrument not only for addressing law and justice, but also for aesthetically negotiating and questioning them. The selected works thus offer a reflective perspective on the construction of legal and ethical orders within the tension between fiction and reality.

This irregular series is dedicated to the site of negotiation in contemporary French literature, where "justice" is narratively "created" – in the sense of "rendre justice":

“La justice is the constant and perpetual volonté de rendre à chacun ce qui lui est dû.” (Montesquieu, “L'Esprit des lois”).

All the Guilty: The Pelicot Trial as Documentary Theatre by Milo Rau and Servane Dècle

Milo Rau and Servane Dècle have created an oratorio in 40 fragments from the trial material of the Mazan rapes, “Le Procès Pelicot”, which transforms the historical criminal trial against Dominique Pelicot and his 50 co-defendants into a polyphonic theatrical document: indictments, witness statements, street interviews, psychiatric reports, feminist manifestos, perpetrator biographies and SMS dialogues are assembled into a panorama that aims to reveal not the legal truth, but the deep social structure of violence. This interpretation traces how Rau operates on several levels simultaneously: poetically, through the choice of the oratorio as a form of meditative contemplation without scenic action; intertextually, through the framing with Petrarch's "Ascension du Mont Ventoux" as a critique of the male gaze; and dramaturgically, through the arrangement of the 40 fragments, which ranges from the external legal framework through perpetrator biographies and sociological analysis to feminist counter-arguments. The interpretation reveals that Rau's most powerful decisions are often decisions of omission: no pathos, no political class, no synthesis of open questions of justice. At the center is Gisèle Pelicot herself—not as a saint or icon, but as a political actor whose refusal to accept the hus-clos becomes the fundamental gesture of the entire piece and who, in the epilogue, beyond the 40 numbered fragments, has the last word.

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The Monster and its Double: Pierre Rivière in Michel Foucault and Ismaël Jude

The review focuses on two radically different but inextricably intertwined books: the documentary volume “Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma sœur et mon frère”, edited by Michel Foucault, which makes the historical triple murderer Pierre Rivière visible as a focal point of competing discourses, and Ismaël Jude’s “grief” (éditions verticales, 2022), which performatively attacks precisely this discursive containment. While Foucault's book embeds Rivière's prison-written memoir within a polyphonic archive—legal files, medical reports, historical commentaries—thus demonstrating how a life becomes a "case" through institutional language, Jude propels this constellation into the present and dismantles it from within: His narrator reads Foucault, rewrites his terms (parricide becomes matricide, sororicide, fratricide), and transforms herself into the repressed female doppelgänger of the murderer. The review does not merely highlight this contrast as a difference between two methods—here the analytical distance of genealogy, there the furious, corporeal, language-destroying counter-speech—but as a kind of dialectical movement: Foucault shows how discourses appropriate a text; Jude shows that this critique itself remains a form of appropriation. The focus shifts decisively: Where Foucault reads the text as a battleground between justice and psychiatry and emphasizes its “strange beauty,” Jude insists on what disappears in the process—gender-specific violence, the bodies of the victims, the possibility of another, non-male voice. The review's argument derives its strength precisely from the fact that it does not pit these two perspectives against each other, but rather understands them as a necessary tension: It shows how Foucault's project creates the conditions under which Jude can write at all, and simultaneously how Jude shatters these conditions by radicalizing writing itself into an act. This creates a picture of a literary-theoretical constellation in which a central question becomes increasingly acute: If—as with Rivière—text and action merge, who then controls their meaning? And who is heard—or silenced?

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The reparative turn: why literature today should do more than tell stories

This review presents Alexandre Gefen's essay "Réparer le monde: la littérature française face au XXIe siècle" (2017, English translation 2024) as an ambitious yet symptomatic diagnosis of contemporary literature: The aesthetic autonomy of the 20th century is replaced by a "reparative" paradigm in which literature is understood as a therapeutic, social, and ethical practice. Using a deliberately open corpus—ranging from Annie Ernaux to clinical case reports—Gefen maps a literature that forges identity, processes trauma, cultivates empathy, and safeguards collective memory; drawing on thinkers such as Paul Ricœur and care ethics, he describes storytelling as a technology of the self and an instrument of symbolic reparation. The review succinctly highlights this central thesis, acknowledging the analytical breadth and theoretical eclecticism, but simultaneously problematizing the normative narrowness: by reading literature primarily as a "cure," Gefen risks obscuring its inherent aesthetic logic in favor of an ethical utilitarianism. Thus, the book itself appears as an exemplary expression of the very tendency it describes—a committed, impact-oriented literary theory that oscillates between diagnosis and programmatic statement.

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Autofictional testimony, therapeutic writing, and self-empowerment: Gisèle Pelicot

This article reads Gisèle Pelicot's "Et la joie de vivre" (2026, cited as EJV) not merely as an account of a spectacular criminal trial, but as a literary reflection on self-constitution through language: The text tells the story of a woman who, after the shocking revelation of systematic violence—mediated through the fragmentary, dissociative structure of memory, through flashbacks to a childhood marked by loss, and through the gradual escalation of her husband's crimes—must recreate her own self by narrating it. Central to this is the shift in shame and interpretive authority: Starting from an internalized shame, articulated in the inability to acknowledge what happened as one's own experience ("Non, ce n'est pas moi"), the book develops a poetics of reappropriation in which naming, the choice of name, and the narrative voice become acts of self-empowerment. The narrative organization does not follow the chronology of events, but rather the logic of trauma—in layers, ruptures, and repetitions—while recurring motifs such as the ritual of the set breakfast table or the symbolism of light in the landscapes open up counter-spaces to the violence. In the final part, this movement culminates in the public court trial, which is staged as a platform for a social discourse on patriarchal violence and finds its political climax in Pelicot's decision to be transparent: "La honte doit changer de camp" functions as an ethical and structural peripeteia. The reading analyzes this development as a consistently autofictional project that mediates between therapeutic writing and literary creation: it shows how Pelicot's text implicitly designs a poetics in which writing is neither documentation nor fiction, but an existential practice that brings the subject into being in the first place. At the same time, the article interprets the life-affirming tone—which has often been received as a "hymn to resilience"—not as an affirmative glossing over of the issues, but as a hard-won counter-reading to violence, which manifests itself in unspectacular gestures of autonomy (living alone, choosing one's own name, being able to love). The argument thus aims to liberate the book from the sphere of mere testimony and to understand it as a literarily sophisticated, formally reflective, and politically effective work, whose true radicalism lies in the assertion that rediscovering one's own words is identical to rediscovering one's own life.

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Bourdieu's Fool: Theoretical parody and social diagnosis in Fabrice Pliskin

After a robbery, jeweler Antonin Firminy shoots one of the fleeing perpetrators and, following his release from prison, becomes a self-proclaimed avenger of the "oppressed" in Paris under a new identity, legitimizing his actions through a radicalized reading of sociology. In parallel, journalist Mandrillon follows his case, becomes entangled in his own moral contradictions, and ultimately transforms Suburre's story into a successful book that offers more interpretation than enlightenment. Fabrice Pliskin's novel "Le fou de Bourdieu" (2025, Le Cherche Midi) can be summarized as a narratively dense and intellectually sharp case study of the dangerous appropriation of theory: At its center is Firminy, who, after a fatal act of violence and a traumatic period of imprisonment, undergoes a radical reinvention of himself under the name Suburre, adopting Pierre Bourdieu's sociology not as an analytical tool, but as an existential system of interpretation. From his reading, he develops a worldview that translates social determinism into moral absolution and ultimately into a program of counter-violence exhausted by petty crime, symbolic destruction, and ideological manifestos. Meanwhile, the journalist Mandrillon observes, processes, and uses these events for literary purposes, never quite taking a firm stance. The novel is less about refuting sociological theory than about demonstrating its performative distortion: concepts like habitus, domination, and symbolic violence are absolutized in the mode of resentment and translated into action, creating a dialectical structure in which explanation becomes justification. Particularly powerful is the analysis of the constellation of characters as a reflection of two forms of responsibility avoidance—Suburre's ideological radicalization and Mandrillon's rhetorical self-relativization—which makes the novel readable as a parable of a discursively overheated society, where language replaces action and theory becomes a projection screen. Furthermore, by interpreting the formal structure of the text as an "experimental setup," the novel demonstrates its effect not primarily through plot, but through the consistent escalation of a way of thinking that detaches itself from reality and simultaneously deforms it.

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Nikolai Gogol, Nicole Caligari and the Paris attacks of November 13, 2015

At the heart of this interpretation lies Nicole Caligaris's novel "Le gogol" (2026): In a train station café at dawn, an exhausted narrator from the Ministry of Culture encounters a disturbed man in an oversized military coat who mistakes her for a judge and insists on finally giving his account of events. This coat, acquired in the chaos of the Paris attacks of November 13, 2015, in a bar called Mar Cantabrico, is too heavy, too wide, not "tailor-made": It becomes the visible symbol of a trauma that cannot be shed. While the man recounts gunfire, an escape through a trapdoor, and a nightly wait for a radio signal that never arrives, the narrator reflects on her own devaluation within the bureaucratic project system. Two existences, both marginalized, both trapped in systems that transform people into files, CVs, and "passive assets." From here, the interpretation traces a path back to Nikolai Gogol's "The Overcoat" (1842): There, too, the life of an unassuming civil servant hangs on a garment, but while Akaki Akakievich fights for his overcoat as a longed-for prosthesis of identity and is destroyed by its loss, Caligaris's "Gogol" wears a foreign, historically charged heirloom that defines him without ever having been his own. The argument vividly illustrates how the motif shifts from a promise of upward mobility to a metaphor of trauma: In Gogol's work, the stolen overcoat exposes the cruelty of a Tsarist hierarchy; in Caligaris's, the military overcoat becomes a material archive of collective violence and a symbol of a present in which identity can only be reconstructed fragmentarily. Through this intertextual continuation, the analysis shows that the “little man” of the 19th century has not disappeared in the 21st century – he now stands in the café, talks about radio static and torn puzzles, and demands nothing less than a modern “habeas corpus”: the right to be recognized as a vulnerable, historical existence.

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Between Act and Body: Literature as a Counter-Space to Justice in the Work of Laure Heinich

Laure Heinich, a Parisian criminal defense lawyer and essayist, portrays the justice system not as a place of decision, but as a space of experience in her two novels. "Corps défendus" follows a lawyer who, in the case of Ève, who was raped and murdered, finds herself caught between legal technicality, familial pain, and the materiality of traces and bodies; here, the law appears as a process that must reconstruct violence in order to judge it, thereby creating new wounds itself. "Avant la peine" (2026), on the other hand, follows a young judge during her first months on the job, where she learns that there is no absolute truth, only a "vérité judiciaire," a precarious weighing of statements, probabilities, and roles—exemplified in the case of an alleged rape, where one person's word is against another's. Both books depict the criminal justice system as an overburdened apparatus that must function despite a lack of certainty, transforming people into cases, files, and functions. The review argues that literary form makes visible what legal textbooks cannot capture: emotions, doubts, physical shocks, and the structural silence of the courtroom. By contrasting the different poetics—here the introspective gaze of the judge, there the scenic, physical perspective of the lawyer—it reads the novels as complementary investigations of the same system: once from within, as a process of habit formation, and once from without, as a confrontation with violence and trauma. This creates a picture of a legal system that is neither objective nor curative, but remains a permanent moral struggle. The review thus understands Heinich's literature as a counterpoint to the justice system: a space in which the unspeakable becomes narratable and the boundaries of truth, punishment, and justice become tangible.

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Nobody kills: Constance Debré

Constance Debré's "Protocoles" (Flammarion, 2026) replaces a "literature of the death penalty" with the literary reproduction of its administration: The book traces the countdown of a condemned man's final 35 days and reconstructs, with cold, prosaic precision, the technical, bureaucratic, and logistical processes of execution in the United States. The individual no longer appears as a moral subject, but as a "corps du sujet," a body whose weight, skin, veins, resistance, and decomposition are regulated by protocols. The division of labor among the execution teams points to a system that anonymizes, fragments, and depersonalizes violence until "no one kills." In parallel, Debré sketches a topography of the United States as a landscape of regularity, surveillance, and moral erosion—from "We buy souls" signs to school monitoring software to an omnipresent sense of impending doom. The review interprets "Protocoles" as a break with the tradition of Hugo and Camus: instead of pathos, moral appeal, or existential reflection, Debré relies on the formal mimicry of legal protocols, thus depriving literature of its hermeneutic function. Debré's poetics of desubjectification, "purity," and the self-referentiality of the rule are examined. "Protocoles" exposes the modern logic of law, technology, and the administration of the death penalty as a totalizing order in which literature can only exist as a copy of power.

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The Law as Sound: Constance Debré

In its analysis of Constance Debré's novels "Offenses" (2023) and "Protocoles" (2026), this essay illuminates the continuous transformation of her writing from autofiction to socio-political analysis. "Offenses" tells the story of an unnamed young man from the Parisian suburbs who murders an elderly neighbor. The act is not psychologically exploited, but rather used as a starting point to expose the structural violence of the justice system and the social injustices of society. Debré shifts the focus from the individual crime to the institutional "noise" of the court and the ritualized order in which the individual is reduced to physicality and silence. The analysis highlights that the radical reduction of plot and subjectivity—both perpetrator and victim remain nameless, their biographies play no role—is a deliberate choice to expose the hierarchy and arbitrariness of social and legal procedures. Critics compare Debré's approach to Dostoevsky, but point to the lack of moral purification and the aesthetic coldness that make *Offenses* a "muscle-bound" literary work that challenges readers while simultaneously opening up a philosophical reflection on guilt, power, and structural violence. With *Protocoles*, Debré shifts the focus to institutionalized violence on a different level: the bureaucratic organization of the death penalty in the USA is described precisely and almost documentaryally, while her fragmentary style still incorporates personal observations and poetic moments. Whereas the subjective dominates in *Offenses*, in *Protocoles* the "you" enters into the bureaucratic processes, creating a paradoxical sense of both intimacy and distance. This interpretation analyzes how Debré, through this shift, emphasizes the structural dimension of violence and control, deriving the poetic effect less from introspective reflection than from the confrontation with ritualized power. Both novels demonstrate that Debré consistently examines the conditions of literary subjectivity and human autonomy in contexts where law, power, and social norms reduce the individual, and the reception praises her ability to aesthetically and argumentatively reveal the mechanisms of subjugation and structural violence.

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Destruction as a possibility: Manhood and violence in the work of Bernard Bourrit

Bernard Bourrit's novel "Détruire tout" (2025) reconstructs a real femicide in 1960s Switzerland, yet consistently rejects a linear perpetrator psychology or moral resolution. Drawing on archives, observations, and essayistic fragments, the perpetrator, Alain, appears less as an individual monster than as a symptom of a patriarchal, rural, and authoritarian social structure that enables violence. This review demonstrates how Bourrit exposes the narrow confines of rural life, male normalization, unspoken emotions, and asymmetrical gender relations, analyzing masculinity in particular as a fragile, overburdened construct whose claim to control morphs into destructive violence. The male body becomes the arena for social injustices, while Carmen emerges as a projection screen for societal expectations, without being reduced to a mere figure. Formally and ethically, the text avoids using the murder as a narrative climax, leaving it as an empty space, thus focusing attention on the underlying conditions rather than sensationalism. Thus, the review understands “Détruire tout” as a literary investigation of social violence, which unfolds its political and aesthetic power precisely in the failure of explanation and catharsis.

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Nuremberg Trials Without a Conclusion: Alfred de Montesquiou

This article interprets Alfred de Montesquiou's novel "Le crépuscule des hommes" (2025, Prix Renaudot Essai) as a counterpoint to popularized portrayals of the Nuremberg Trials, such as James Vanderbilt's film "Nuremberg" (2025). While the film narrows the narrative to a psychological duel between Hermann Göring and his American psychiatrist, thus adhering to a personalized "cinema of great men," Alfred de Montesquiou unfolds a multifaceted panorama. His novel is not interested in verdicts or the psychology of the perpetrators, but rather in the periphery of the tribunal: journalists, photographers, translators, and observers who experience Nuremberg as a space of transition. The city appears as a semantically overloaded place caught between National Socialist self-presentation, legal rupture, and moral uncertainty. Language, translation, and media representation are revealed as fragile instruments that necessarily fail in their task of making the monstrous narrative possible. Argumentatively, the review situates the novel within the intellectual framework of Karl Jaspers and Hannah Arendt. As with Jaspers, the focus shifts away from purely legal guilt towards a moral self-examination by observers who become aware of their own complicity. Arendt's skepticism towards definitive explanations is reflected in the consistent refusal of a narrative or moral conclusion. The roman vrai thus emerges as an epistemic form that begins where files and judgments reach their limits. Nuremberg is not narrated as the endpoint of history, but as a state of limbo: a "twilight of humanity" in which the perpetrators' demise does not guarantee moral clarity. The reading makes it clear that de Montesquiou does not conclude Nuremberg, but keeps it open—as a space of transition in which law, memory, and narration themselves are put to the test.

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Lise Meitner's victory against Otto Hahn: Cyril Gely

Cyril Gely's novel "Le Prix" (2019) stages an intense psychological clash between Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner on the day of Hahn's Nobel Prize award in 1946. In the confines of a Stockholm hotel suite, a moral and intellectual duel unfolds, exploring the unequal power dynamics, gender dynamics in science, and the ethical failings of National Socialism. Gely's dramatic prose transforms historical facts into a huis clos, in which Lise Meitner reclaims her suppressed scientific achievements and Hahn is forced to confront his moral guilt. In the end, Hahn receives the Nobel Prize—but true recognition belongs to Meitner, whose quiet justice rewrites history as an indelible echo.

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Rehabilitation of the mother: Émilie Lanez on Hervé Bazin's “Vipère au poing”

Émilie Lanez's exposé "Folcoche: le Secret de Vipère au poing" reveals that Hervé Bazin's famous novel "Vipère au poing" was less an autobiographical indictment of a monstrous mother than a calculated literary revenge by a criminally troubled son who wanted to erase his past and seize his inheritance: While Bazin portrays the mother Paule in his bestseller as a sadistic "folcoche" who torments her children, Lanez reconstructs, based on police files, psychiatric dossiers, and family correspondence, that Jean Hervé-Bazin was a mythomaniac fraudster whose novel served as a tool for blackmail and whose portrayal of the mother was a "murder on paper"; At the same time, Lanez's other works, "La Garçonnière de la République," an investigation into the secret, barely accountable power practices of the political elite around the presidential residence La Lanterne, and "Noël à Chambord," an analysis of Emmanuel Macron's monarchical self-presentation at the Château de Chambord, show that the author systematically exposes the gap between public staging and hidden truth – so that the review argues that Lanez not only destroys the myth of the heroic son in "Vipère au poing," but fundamentally unmasks the moral blindness of French institutions that protect perpetrators and silence victims.

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On courage as well as cowardice: Jérôme Garcin on literature during the Occupation

In "Des mots et des actes: les belles-lettres sous l'Occupation" (Gallimard, 2024), Jérôme Garcin presents a morally incisive analysis of the French literary scene during the German occupation, demonstrating how words could become tools of subjugation or resistance. Through pointed portraits of collaborators such as Brasillach, Céline, Morand, and Chardonne, as well as resistance figures like Prévost, Decour, and Lusseyran, he shows that literary genius does not relativize moral guilt but rather exacerbates it. His guiding principle is the "échelle de Prévost," a scale he developed to assess the connection between ethical stance and literary practice. Garcin reveals how a cultural elite maintained a vibrant Parisian cultural life despite mass murder and repression, and how an aesthetic cult surrounding collaborationist authors persists to this day, while resistance writers are marginalized. The book is simultaneously a historical reckoning, a moral appeal, and an intellectual self-portrait of a reader who abandons "innocent reading." The review highlights the work's dual nature: the historical reconstruction of the literary field under occupation and Garcin's self-critical revision of his own approach to reading. It emphasizes that Garcin challenges the traditional separation of work and author, revealing the persistence of a French "aesthetic amnesia" that shows admiration for collaborators and only dutiful respect for resistance fighters. The review elaborates how Garcin connects literary portraits with structural arguments (the CNE, generational conflicts, social milieus), thereby initiating a moral re-canonization that rehabilitates responsibility as an indispensable category of literary criticism. Overall, the review reads the book as an urgent contribution against the trivialization of cultural betrayal – and as a manifesto against the continuing mythical aura surrounding the “geniuses” of hatred.

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Terrorism fictions

Special issue “Récits et fictions du terrorisme”, Revue des sciences humaines 359 (2025).

Narrative processing of the 2015 terrorist attacks

This special issue of Revue des sciences humaines This volume brings together contributions that emerged from a colloquium held in Paris from November 15 to 17, 2023. The central question is how French society processes the 2015 terrorist attacks through narratives—be they testimonies or fictional works. The issue offers a fundamental exploration of the narrative, ethical, and psychological challenges that terrorism poses for literature and society.

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This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.

Beyond Civilization: Fabrice Humbert

Fabrice Humbert's novel "De l'autre côté de la vie" (2025) unfolds an apocalyptic escape story in which the first-person narrator—a Parisian lawyer—flees a capital city engulfed in civil war with his children. The journey toward a semi-mythical "Republique du Jura" becomes a moral descent: what begins as an attempt at protection transforms into a phenomenological study of brutalization. Language itself is revealed as the vehicle of poison—"the words prepared the ground"—while violence arises from fear and conformity. The novel combines dystopian social analysis with an existentially charged poetics: childhood appears as the last vestige of humanity, nature as deceptive solace, utopia as a fragile wishful image that perishes in the flames. The parable does not primarily depict external catastrophes, but rather the erosion of humanity through the disintegration of shared values ​​and the social "fluidity" of former civility. The review interprets this novel as a continuation of Humbert's complete works and places it within a systematic, thematically and poetologically coherent context. It argues from two perspectives: firstly, the novel is read as a literary condensation of all previously developed motifs—the disintegration of social bonds, the media's poisoning of reality, the illusion of utopias—and secondly, as a radicalized self-correction by the author, one that skeptically breaks with earlier moral hopes. The critique reveals how the narrator, as a lawyer, subjects his own language to a "purification" and formulates the work as a counter-speech to violence, even as it simultaneously demonstrates the limitations of such discourse. The review makes it clear that Humbert takes his central theme—the self-endangerment of civilized humanity—to an uncompromising literary conclusion in this novel.

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Femicide as a thought structure: Ivan Jablonka

Ivan Jablonka La culture du féminicide: histoire d'une structure de pensée (Traverse, 2025).

Systemic phenomenon: sexual violence, mutilation and killing

Ivan Jablonkas La culture du féminicide: histoire d'une structure de pensée (2025) presents a literary and socio-historical analysis that reveals the cultural centrality of sexualized femicide in Western civilization. Jablonka, known for his works on violence and social structures, identifies the gynocidal culture or femicide culture (“culture du féminicide”). 1 as a universal thought structure that permeates society and prepares the ground for the pleasure derived from female terrorism. The fundamental problem is the ambivalence of this societal obsession: we are culturally “addicted” to sexualized murders while simultaneously condemning these acts as abhorrent. Jablonka defines femicide as “meurtre d'une femme en tant que femme” (murder of a woman as a woman), a premeditated and systemic crime rooted in social inequalities. He theoretically segments this act into three “items gynocidaires”: (1) sexualized violence (rape, prostitution), (2) mutilation (torture, dismemberment), and (3) the actual killing. The central thesis is that this gynocidal culture, through the “idéologie gynocidaire” – the justification of this representation – legitimizes and normalizes femicide from mythology to the present day as “logique qui traverse la société tout entière”.

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This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.

Notes
  1. "The term 'femicide' was coined by feminists in the USA in the 1990s to describe the killing of women because of their gender. Feminists in Mexico further developed the term and added the syllable 'ni' to femicide to express that it is not the murder of women as individualized cases, but a mass crime." https://contre-les-feminicides.ch/femizid-oder-feminizid/, December 21, 2023.>>>

The other side, without resentment: Paul Gasnier

Paul Gasnier's "La Collision" (2025, shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Roman Fnac) transforms a private tragedy—the death of his own mother in a street race in Lyon—into a literary investigation that blends autofiction, reportage, and essay. The accident appears not as an isolated misfortune, but as an emblematic collision of two Frances: on the one hand, the cosmopolitan, intellectual, and privileged mother; on the other, the young perpetrator, Saïd, shaped by poverty, peer pressure, and the culture of violence of the "pentes." Gasnier meticulously traces court records, witness statements, and biographies, revealing how deeply societal fault lines are inscribed in the urban landscape. The book thus places the collision of two lives at its center—and, consequently, the question of how a society produces its own divisions. The essay emphasizes that Gasnier refuses to translate his anger into resentment or allow the case to be exploited for populist purposes. Instead of assigning blame, he focuses on understanding the background, giving voice to those in Saïd's circle and simultaneously reflecting on the media, the justice system, and the temptations of political manipulation. Intertextual references—from Valéry to Despentes to his mother's yoga writings—frame an approach that seeks to transform grief not into revenge, but into insight. "La collision" thus becomes a literary gesture against oversimplification and resentment—and an attempt to see the violence of our present in all its complexity.

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Partnership and violence in the novel: Nathacha Appanah

The title “La nuit au cœur” (2025) of Nathacha Appanah’s new novel reflects its central themes: violence, fear, isolation, trauma, but also resistance and the search for meaning and memory. The novel is structured in five parts, alternating between the author’s personal, autofictional narrative and the reconstructed fates of Emma and Chahinez, with an “imaginary chamber” serving as a space for encounter and reflection. The novel deconstructs femicides not as isolated incidents, but as expressions of a deeply entrenched patriarchal system that transcends cultures and eras. It sharply criticizes patriarchal societies, particularly in Algeria and Mauritius, where women face stigmatization upon divorce and their autonomy is restricted. The parallel narratives of the three women—one survivor and two victims—underscore the universal danger women face and the chilling similarities in perpetrator profiles and patterns of violence (control, jealousy, isolation, physical and psychological abuse).

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Guilt, Shame, Freedom: Marie-Ève ​​Lacasse

Marie-Ève ​​Lacasse's novel "La vie des gens libres" (Seuil, 2025) is a quiet yet highly complex narrative work about the afterlife of guilt, the experience of stigmatization, and the struggle for a new self-image. At its heart are two women: Clémence Thévenin—formerly Clémence Robert, a doctor, criminal, and prisoner—and Laura Rolin, a single mother and physician in a precarious transition. The two are not directly connected, either biographically or socially, yet through subtle narrative parallels and symbolic reflections, Lacasse presents a kind of dual female biography that coalesces into a collective reflection on the possibility of female freedom. The novel is many things at once: a social critique of class relations, a psychological chamber drama about guilt and loneliness, and a poetic mosaic of inner monologues and concrete observations. In its deeper political structure, "La vie des gens libres" can also be read as a critical examination of the French justice and healthcare systems. Questions of social participation, solidarity among women, and the symbolic order of purity and blemish take center stage. What does it mean to be "free"—and who belongs to "vie des gens libres"?

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Rentrée littéraire: contemporary French literature
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