He had left Plazac in Dordogne for his studies, he returned there to rebuild his life. Antonin Bergier is a survivor. He was at the Bataclan in Paris on November 13, 2015, when jihadist terrorists attacked the venue, leaving 90 dead and several hundred injured. It was a Friday evening, Antonin Bergier and his friends Allan and Bertrand, originally from the Landes coast, had decided to attend the Eagles of Death Metal concert together while celebrating the 40th anniversary of the third.
It was around 9:15 p.m., the first guitar riffs had just sounded when the first shootings broke out. Nine years later, Antonin Bergier has forgotten nothing of these minutes and these hours which sent him and the 1,500 spectators present into hell.
A bullet in the throat
“Bertrand is dancing, I'm having a drink with Allan when I hear explosions. I think first of firecrackers. But there is general panic. People are screaming, running in all directions. They try to escape the bursts of Kalashnikovs. We get lost. »
“In front of me,” continues the Périgord, “two attackers, a young man of small stature, the other quite tall with an athletic build, dressed in dark clothes and not masked, continue to shoot. I take a back staircase and find myself face to face with terrorists again. They ignore me and continue to machine-gun in all directions. I have to ride over corpses, the wounded moan, blood flows, I hear screams: it's horror. Finally I managed to get out and took refuge on the boulevard in a nearby building where there were already a dozen people. I'm not affected. I am caring for a young girl injured by a bullet in the shoulder and back, she will be quickly evacuated. »
“I have to ride over corpses, the wounded are moaning, blood is flowing, I hear screams: it’s horror”
Picked up by emergency services in the middle of the night and questioned at length, Antonin Bergier was only able to go to the hotel where his friends Allan and Bertrand were staying on the morning of November 14, 2015. He only found Allan alone, injured in the shoulder. It was only the next day that they learned of Bertrand's death: he had been shot in the throat.
In the days that followed, Antonin Bergier was referred to psychiatric services. At the time of the tragedy, aged 29, he was studying for a master's degree in economics and therefore lived in the Paris region. Everything changed: “I have an empty head, I am young but I no longer have any plans, so I decide to leave to get some fresh air for eight months in South America where I find work. But I miss Périgord, I'm back, I'm looking for myself, alternating between odd jobs and psychological follow-ups in the Paris region. »
A farmhouse to restore
If he then decided to resume his studies and obtained a master 2 in diplomacy in strategic negotiation, his reconstruction, slow and difficult, is progressing with a very concrete project: in 2020, the Périgourdin bought a farmhouse in the countryside in Meyrals , near Saint-Cyprien, to renovate it. Antonin Bergier has regained his “taste for life”, working to forget. Today, the work is almost complete and he is proud to live in this restored house. At the same time, he was recruited as a collaborator of MP Sébastien Peytavie.
“My luck is to still be alive but I remain forever marked, despite the passage of time,” he whispers. Not a day goes by without thinking about this night of horror and his friend Bertrand… In 2022, for the trial of the attacks of November 13 (1), he only went to Paris once, accompanied by a lawyer friend.
(1) The Paris Special Assize Court sentenced Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving member of the commandos who killed 130 people, to life imprisonment, the heaviest sentence in the penal code. The other defendants were given sentences ranging from two years in prison to life, with a security period for some and an incompressible period for others.
A Périgord victim
A young man from Dordogne fell at the Bataclan. Maxime Bouffard died in the arms of one of his friends. He was 26 years old and making his directorial debut. He had lived in Paris for five years but this child from Coux-et-Bigaroque remained very attached to his Périgord. The village also gave his name to the local school and his friends created a rock festival in his memory, the Bouffardises. The last clip he directed, for the song “Josephine” from Dernier Métro, was released, the group holding on to this posthumous tribute to this “simple guy who loved life”.
