an investigation, or rather a counter-investigation, that leads the sociologist to interrupt all his other projects for several months. The man’s death and the ensuing criminal inquiry take a forceful hold on him – a sort of ethical urgency that cannot be put off. For, ultimately, this story is a tragic illustration of what has formed the substance of his two most recent books: the will to punish and the inequality of lives. He must once again return to examine the circumstances of this tragic event and the legal proceedings in order to understand what has played out here at both the specific and the generic level. He therefore conducts twelve interviews with the protagonists in the case, explaining his project clearly to each person so as to avoid any misunderstanding. The deceased’s relatives and those involved either closely or more distantly in the events and its aftermath agree readily, as do the judges and lawyers, save one. Conversely, repeated approaches to the gendarmes, both individually and via their institution, both locally and at the national level, yield no result. Likewise multiple requests to some of the indirect witnesses, such as the emergency doctor, and to others having taken part in the story, such as the journalist. Thanks in particular to the diligence of the family and of the public prosecutor’s office, documents are assembled: the five handwritten accounts by the parents, uncle, brother and sister-in-law, made just after the tragedy; the twenty-seven statements of witness depositions; the autopsy and ballistics reports, that of weapon examination, the toxicology and forensic analyses; the record of the reconstruction of the events and of the visit to the scene; the public prosecution’s charges and the defense lawyers’ responses; the ruling that dismissed the case and its upholding on appeal; the fourteen press releases from the support committee and the twenty-eight articles in the regional press. The pieces of the jigsaw gradually come together. Yet gaps remain, owing to questions that were not asked by the investigators, contradictions that were not brought up during the criminal investigation, points of vagueness and approximations in the various versions of the facts, silences and refusals to be interviewed. Thus, a rich but incomplete fabric is woven, in which the record of a deposition can partially fill in for the missing interview with the witnesses concerned.
But the point of this project is not to substitute the authority of the words written by the sociologist for the authority of the words spoken by the judge. The aim is first to do justice to all the versions of the events and then, on the basis of evidence collected, to formulate a plausible interpretation unfettered by the judicial decision. The relationships between the work of judge and that of historian have long been scrutinized, with the aim either of demonstrating the similarities between them or, on the contrary, to warn against a historiography that sets itself up as public prosecutor or defender of characters or events. Some historians have even gone so far as to re-examine court decisions in cases from their own times. In the present instance, there is something of a potential dialogue between the judge and the ethnographer, in which the ethnographer takes the liberty of investigating the judge’s interpretation. A new form therefore needs to be essayed in order to produce accounts that keep as closely as possible to the facts as they emerge over the course of interviews, depositions, field observations and the assembly of other documentary traces, all the while embedding them in descriptions and narratives through a process of re-creation. Composing the text becomes an operation akin to jointing a brickwork of empirical data, using the cement of reasoning and imagination, so as to generate a novel structure of what might be termed an augmented reality. This augmented reality first places readers as close as possible to the experience of the protagonists and then draws them into the counter-investigative work of the sociologist.
But, in order to craft this masonry, the facts need to be tracked down to the smallest detail. Creative freedom is to some extent restricted by the commitment to truth-telling. Thus, when the text says that the officer thinks you never know with Travellers, and that he believes that his was the fatal shot, it is because during his deposition he states that Travellers represent a difficult community for them and, later, that he was probably the one who killed the man. When the text notes that the father thinks the evacuation of the officer was staged to make it look as if he was injured, and imagines that the shots could have led his oxygen bottles to explode and thus transformed his son into a terrorist, these are points made in one of the interviews. Many more examples could be cited, almost line by line. Similarly, the terms employed in the text reproduce as far as possible the words used by the speakers. The gendarmes call their victim the target (la cible), the objective (l’objectif), the individual or the man; they say that they want to neutralize (neutraliser) him, which means to kill him, and euphemistically talk of handling (prendre en compte) his father and his brother when they pin them down and handcuff them. The family uses expressions typically belonging to the language of the Roma to speak of the gendarmes (schmitts, clistés, cagoulés), translated here as cops, whose semi-automatic weapons are Tommy guns (mitraillettes); the lean-to of the house is named a shed (cabouin) or a barn (grange). When referring to the Travellers, the public prosecutor alternates the slightly pejorative noun gypsy (manouche) and the common phrase travelling people (gens du voyage). However, the point is not to incorporate verbal tics, syntax errors or clumsy expressions that would undermine the credibility of the speakers and distract readers. Hence the refusal to use the realist effects of quotation marks and dialogues. Furthermore, it is important to remember that, while interviews do allow access to the words of the speaker, records of depositions are not word-for-word transcriptions but summaries of what the court clerk heard. They thus do not constitute a complete reproduction.
No proper name of any person or, indeed, of any place appears, nor any date. This choice of anonymization arises not only out of ethical concerns to protect the individuals involved or legal considerations to protect the author; both these protections are illusory given that modern search engines make it a simple matter to identify all the details of such an event. Anonymization is used above all as a way to draw out the broader meaning of this death, the conditions of its possibility, the actions of the gendarmes, the practice of judges, the campaign led by the family. Specific though this story is, it nevertheless reveals fundamental features of the state’s law-enforcement institutions and of the punitive treatment of Travellers: it is not merely a regrettable incident. One exception is made to this rule of anonymization: the forename of the Traveller. Refusing to consign him to anonymity is a way of respecting the memory of the person who is, ultimately, the only victim of the events that occurred one day in early spring at his parents’ farm. The fragile trace of a life cut short. An intimate connection through which, for his family, he lives on.
But the plan to render an account of the case in all its complexity soon came up against a major dilemma with regard to the different versions. The problem is the difficulty of recounting the events in an even-handed way. The separate accounts, each one written from a subjective point of view, seek to reconstruct how each person experienced the scene, the events that preceded it and those that followed. This approach inevitably results in the presentation of some experiences that were actually lived and others that were falsified. For whatever one decides about who is telling the truth, the two versions presented, that of the relatives and that of the gendarmes, are irreconcilable. One of them at least is mistaken, and possibly even deliberately false. In order to get as close as possible to subjectivities, experiences should therefore be recounted as they were supposed to have really been lived, including the awareness of deceit, even if this version is radically different from what the individuals concerned said in interviews or depositions. Which effectively would come down to no longer respecting the accounts of the protagonists, introducing from the outset the perspective of an external observer assumed to know what did happen. This is not strictly speaking a moral dilemma, in the sense of choosing the side one thinks speaks the truth (assuming that there is one side that holds this truth). It is simply the logical conundrum of having to reconstruct a scene as if the protagonists had indeed experienced it in the way they tell it, even when they are deliberately misleading their interlocutors. And this has to be done without being able, and without wishing, to decide in advance which of them are telling the truth.
The way out of this dilemma adopted by the sociologist was as follows. In the first stage, he worked on the assumption that all the protagonists were telling the truth, and therefore he adopted their point of view on the basis of the versions they gave. The parallel accounts of the first officer and the father, the second officer and the mother,
