both for the circumstances of her brother’s death and for the way the justice system proceeded in exonerating the gendarmes who killed him.
A simple story, then. A minor incident that did not even merit a mention in the national media. Only the local newspaper reported it, in brief articles that reiterated the public prosecutor’s version without any attempt to inquire into the family’s testimony. Yet what merits attention is precisely the fact that it is such a routine occurrence. Its apparent insignificance is what makes it significant. It combines all the elements present in any number of similar incidents that take place every day throughout the world: young men belonging to ethnic minorities who die as a result of encounters with the police; inquiries conducted by colleagues of the presumed perpetrators who confirm their account of the events; prosecutors and judges who decide not to pursue the case and accept their claim of legitimate self-defense. No homicide, therefore no case to answer. Lives stolen without justice being done. But, beyond this common set of circumstances, what makes this incident exemplary is, on the one hand, the normalization of deployment of special units and their disproportionate use of force as standard procedure in poor neighborhoods with a high ethnic minority population and, on the other, the increasingly generalized use of incarceration in response to offenses committed by lower-income sectors of society, contrasting with the leniency the law and judges exhibit toward crime and criminality among the privileged classes.
Such tragedies have long remained invisible to the majority of the population. The official versions justified punitive practices by stigmatizing the victims and exonerating the police officers responsible in the name of public order. But in recent years political campaigns have brought them into the foreground. In the United States, there is the Black Lives Matter movement, which burgeoned after Michael Brown was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. In France, the Justice and Truth committees have become vocal, the best known of which concerns Adama Traoré, who died in the police station at Beaumont-sur-Oise shortly after his arrest in 2016. Above all, the images of the dying moments of George Floyd, suffocated by a police officer in Minneapolis on 25 May 2020, have given this tragic event a worldwide impact, resonating with the police violence toward minorities experienced in many countries. What was until recently a blind spot in the public space is now common knowledge. What societies had implicitly tolerated seems to have become intolerable. Angelo’s death finds its place in this new moral economy, where what is at issue is not only the extinction of a life but also the indignity of the circumstances of this death, particularly the treatment of the deceased’s body, and the institutional lies that usually allow those responsible to go unpunished, further sullying the victim’s memory. Like a modern Antigone, the sister fights to restore respectability to her dead brother and, through him, to the Travellers, who are continually stigmatized and discriminated against, and she thus stands against all the Creons who lay claim to public authority.
But how can an account of this tragedy be rendered without eliding the issues involved? Is there a way to escape having to choose between outraged condemnation of an injustice and a bare description of the facts? This is a classic dilemma for social scientists, who often profess the value neutrality advocated by Max Weber, yet are aware that they are bound up in what Norbert Elias described as an involved epistemology. Over recent decades the answer has continually oscillated: in the French context, the tension is between the critical sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, declared to expose hidden power relations, and the pragmatic sociology of Luc Boltanski, supposed to establish a pure grammar of action and justifications for it, which dominated their field alternately in the late twentieth century. Rather than asserting that a solution to this dilemma has been found, it can be fruitful to take the view that this is an aporia which needs to be treated as such.
On this basis, I therefore proposed to approach Angelo’s death from two distinct directions. In the first stage, I strove to reproduce each of the testimonies gathered by the investigators and by myself, not only from those present at the scene but also from people who became involved later, so as to give an account from each individual’s point of view, whether that of the sister, the medical doctor, the public prosecutor, the local journalist or the examining magistrates. In the second stage, I attempted to carry out anew the investigation, drawing on all the available material, from records of depositions to expert witness reports, so as to produce a reconstruction of the events that, being based purely on empirical data, is as free as possible of bias and pressure. The writing strategy I have devised is therefore experimental. It seeks first to avoid the false objectivity of any unequivocal statement of the facts, as I give space to discordant voices and incompatible versions. It then makes it possible to do away with a comfortable relativism that would be limited to parsing each individual’s argument, since at the end of my analysis I propose an account of the events as they might plausibly have unfolded. My aim therefore is to open up the black box of the functioning of the state, more specifically its law-enforcement mechanisms, the police and the justice system, rather than adopting the position habitually taken by the social sciences on the outside. To put it another way, my aim is to investigate the investigation, and to do so by revealing what the judges caused to disappear. This is a delicate process and a risky endeavor, though. The judicial investigation is indeed legally protected by judicial confidentiality that may be lifted only by the public prosecutor. By dismissing the case, and consequently preventing a trial from being held, the examining magistrate removed the case from public view. By reopening the file, I make the various elements in it accessible to readers.
The field of research in which I present my proposition thus sits on the boundary between history and literature, between law and journalism. It is not a new one, but it is one that I invite readers to explore afresh. Michel Foucault recounts how, when he discovered the story of an early nineteenth-century parricide whose astonishing memoir describes how he committed a triple murder in his own family, he and the students in his seminar fell under the spell of both the case and the text. The story immediately aroused his interest, but it also moved him. It enthralled him, in the strong sense of the word, on both these levels. It was only later that he decided, with his young colleagues, to publish I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister and My Brother …, gathering together the extant documents, including the famous memoir, and adding a series of notes that effectively represent the reflections of the researchers in this little group. The aim, one of them later noted, was to make all the material in the case file available to the public. I think I can say that my relationship to Angelo’s story followed the same course. The circumstances of his death attracted my attention, while the courage and determination demonstrated by his sister aroused my sympathy. The idea of making it the subject of research and of a book came to me only a year later, here too in order to enable a broad audience to form their own view of what really happened in the lean-to that day, and what could possibly explain the great disproportionality between the crimes with which the young man was reproached and his eventual fate. Unlike the collective of authors at the Collège de France, I have not published the documents themselves, which would have been against the law, but I have integrated them into the accounts I have put together and the counter-investigation I have conducted.
The published archive therefore comprises not raw material but, rather, narratives and analyses drawn from it. As far as the narratives are concerned, the reconstitution of the various versions is akin to the literary form of the non-fiction novel, and the reference that immediately comes to mind is In Cold Blood, in which Truman Capote recounts a quadruple murder that took place in a small town in Kansas. Asserting that everything contained in this account derives from his own observations, his interviews and official records, he usually adopts the position of omniscient narrator, producing a third-person account that alternates the points of view of the murderers, the victims, the police and others related to the crime and criminals. Since the crime has been solved, the perpetrators having confessed, he is able to construct a coherent narrative. For my own part, while I draw on similar kinds of empirical material and alternate the viewpoints of eight individuals more or less directly involved in the events, I do not pass over the inconsistencies in these versions, which, at least as far as Angelo’s death is concerned, are irreconcilable. Since the circumstances in which the gendarmes were led to open fire were never fully elucidated, I give readers the opportunity to follow the trail and grasp the experience of each of the protagonists as they describe it, without prejudging
