State violence. It was May 26, 2016, in Paris, near Porte de Vincennes. Demonstration day. The city, the entire country, is under tension for the largest social movement known in many years. This is to protest against the so-called “Labor” law carried by the minister in charge Myriam El Khomri and the government then led by Manuel Valls. That day, or more precisely that evening, since the demonstration was coming to an end, a man, presented as an independent journalist, Romain D., 28 years old, was seriously injured by what very quickly appeared to be gunfire. disencirclement grenade by the police. What was first called an “incident” was filmed, and the press seized on what could only be described as a blunder. The emotion in public opinion will be immense and Romain D., emerging from a coma after remaining between life and death for many days, becomes, despite himself, a symbol and martyr of police violence.
What can save a news item or even an affair of state from the oblivion inflicted on it by the amnesiac Moloch of the news, constantly hungry for new stories, new scandals? Maybe a novel. The demonstration is the fourth by Nelly Alard, however different from the three that preceded it, since the author resolutely relies on the truth of this tragic event by revealing little by little what, almost always, remains unknown, those who remain. Parents, sisters, friends, relatives, lovers, their anguish, their sorrow, their fear, their anger, their desperate desire to know and understand. Nothing seemed to predestine one or the other, this Parisian family rather well-off and respectful of established bodies, that of Romain, to have to live such a nightmare, to have to face a word (from a Minister of the Interior, from a prefect police) clearly false. They too, in a certain way, will not come out unscathed… Nelly Alard very frontally, very rightly, exposes this terrifying mechanism which wants the public interest to always prevail in a man's truth. One might be tempted to say that his writing is bathed in a kind of dull anger. All guilty (the State), all victims (the family) and as many lives stolen.
Nelly Alard
The demonstration
Gallimard
Edition: 10,000 copies.
Price: €20; 224 pp.
ISBN: 9782073097750
