It was the biggest criminal trial ever held in France, where hundreds of people who survived the deadliest peacetime attack on French soil gave shocking details of their ordeal – from crawling past corpses at Paris’s Bataclan concert hall, to being held hostage by gunmen or ducking Kalashnikov fire at restaurant pavement tables.
The 10 months of harrowing testimony from the victims and the bereaved, became more than just a legal process. The trial gave a platform for survivors to speak out – a crucial step in France facing its collective trauma over the November 2015 Paris terrorist attacks, which killed 130 people and injured more than 490.
