You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast.

I'm Thomas Jones.

Today I'm talking to Madeline Schwartz, who has been following the Batiklant trial in Paris since last September,

and has written about it in the latest issue of the LRB.

Can France judge terrorism, she asks, when terrorism has transformed

its political system? Hello, Madeline, and thank you for joining me. Hi, it's so nice to be here.

So I've just referred to it as the Bataclan trial, and the Batatclan theatre is where 90 of the 130

people were killed, though as you say in the peace, given the enormity of that, journalists

have a tendency to overlook the other attacks in Paris on the same day. So maybe to begin,

you could remind us in outline what actually happened on the 13th of November 2015.

Yes, so the victims in this attack actually preferred for it to be called the trial of November 13th,

because on November 13th there were three attacks across Paris. The first at right outside

of the Stade de France, which is the French national stadium where France and Germany were playing

a soccer match. The second at a series of bars and open-air terraces in the 10th and 11th

aronisman, and finally the most famous attack, which was in the Bataklan concert hall.

These attacks left a total of 130 dead and hundreds more wounded and were claimed by the Islamic

state.

All but one of the suicide bombers and gunmen who carried out the attacks

are now dead. So who are the 20 men on trial, 14 of them in court and six in the percentia?

Well, it's one of the paradoxes of this trial is that the people who one might most want to

hear from have already died. So a number of them died over the course of the attack and of the accused,

five more are presumed dead, killed by coalition strikes in the Middle East. And their involvement

...