Cour d’assises

The Cour d’assises is the criminal court Myriam has long dreamed of entering as a lawyer. It represents the culmination of her professional ambition, but the trial she prepares also reveals a tension at the heart of advocacy: she must maintain analytical distance from a defendant accused of lethal violence while finding a way to defend him.

Professional Ambition

Myriam’s fascination with the Cour d’assises began well before her legal career. As a student, she tried to attend trials as often as possible. Her mother could not understand her interest in proceedings about rape, incest, and murder, whose accounts were delivered in precise, dispassionate detail. Myriam, however, was drawn to the court as a place where such crimes were examined in public.

While preparing for the bar, she followed the trial of serial killer Michel Fourniret in Charleville-Mézières. She rented a room in the city and went each day to observe. A large tent outside the courthouse allowed the many spectators to watch hearings on giant screens. Myriam kept apart from the women who gathered there, uncomfortable when they greeted the accused’s van with insults and spit, yet fascinated by their unrestrained hatred and calls for vengeance. Her attraction to the court thus includes an uneasy awareness of the emotions surrounding criminal justice, not simply the work of legal argument.

Preparing a Case

In the present-day trial, Myriam arrives early at the Palais de justice with a large file bound by a red cord. For more than a month she has been assisting Pascal in preparing the defense of a 24-year-old man. He is accused of joining three accomplices in a punitive attack on two Sri Lankan cooks, both undocumented and otherwise unremarkable. Drunk and under the influence of cocaine, the attackers beat the men repeatedly; one died. They realized only afterward that they had attacked the wrong person, mistaking a Black man for their intended target. They could not explain the violence, and surveillance-camera footage exposed them.

Myriam’s work is to establish what can be trusted in the defendant’s account. At an early meeting, he recounted his life through lies and obvious exaggerations, while still attempting to charm her despite facing the prospect of life imprisonment. Myriam methodically separated fact from fabrication, relying on evidence rather than rapport. She told him, in simple and cutting terms, that lying was a poor defense strategy and that he had nothing left to lose by telling the truth.

Distance and Advocacy

The case brings Myriam’s professional ideal into conflict with her private vulnerability. Pascal calls the necessary separation from a client the “good distance,” and Myriam works to preserve it with the defendant. For trial, she buys him a new shirt and advises him to abandon his tasteless jokes and crooked smile, which make him appear defiant. Her guidance is strategic: she tells him that the defense must show that he, too, is a victim.

The morning of the trial makes the strain of that role newly visible. Before leaving to defend a man before the Cour d’assises, Myriam encounters Louise in the kitchen, where the nanny offers her coffee. Myriam, admired for her tenacity and praised by Pascal for facing opponents, finds her throat constricted in Louise’s presence. The contrast places the public arena of the court beside a private conflict Myriam would rather escape: professional courage does not translate into ease in her own home.

Narrative Significance

The Cour d’assises links Myriam’s youthful ambition to the concrete demands of legal defense. Its proceedings draw her toward the careful examination of violence, but the scenes around the court also reveal how justice is surrounded by anger, spectacle, and the pressure to make a defendant legible as more than his crime. In the current case, the red-corded file, the surveillance recording, and the new shirt mark distinct parts of that work: assembling evidence, confronting the facts, and shaping the accused’s presentation. The court is therefore both a professional calling and a stage on which Myriam’s belief in method and distance meets the human complications those methods cannot erase.