Adélaïde de Clermont-Tonnerre for “I wanted to live”

Alfred de Montesquiou, winner of the Renaudot Prize in the Essays category

The Twilight of Men, by Alfred de Montesquiou, Ed. Robert Laffont, coll. Pavilions, 384 p., €22.

80 years ago, in November 1945, the extraordinary trial of 24 senior Nazi dignitaries of the Third Reich such as Göring, Hess, Dönitz, and von Ribbentrop opened in Nuremberg. This is where the notions of “genocide” and “crime against humanity” were born. “We thought we were judging men, but it is in fact a new form of international law that the court is creating. A jurisprudence for the future,” writes Alfred de Montesquiou, senior reporter, Prix Albert Londres, who traveled to many war zones, notably Darfur where he worked on the action of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which investigated crimes against humanity.

An investigation which fueled his latest work dedicated to the Nuremberg trials. As the reading progresses, the characters take their places in the courtroom theater, facing 300 figures from the press who have come to attend the hearings. In the Faber-Castell castle where they are housed, Joseph Kessel rubs shoulders with John Dos Passos, Madeleine Jacob, Boris Polevoi…

Alfred de Montesquiou, who is also a documentarian, immerses us in this crazy atmosphere of nocturnal gossip, in permanent tension, while the trial gets bogged down (and will last until October 1, 1946). “It’s not just a trial, it’s a collective therapy where history tries to catch its breath after years of horror,” he maintains.

The horror of the camps is described, via the testimony of survivor Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, as is the misery of Germany in ruins and the beginnings of the Cold War. Despite its slow pace, this atmospheric book is a fair and precise work of memory that brings all these protagonists to life.

Patrice Teisseire-Dufour

Our opinion: PPP