A case that has haunted the press for almost ten years, heavy with the lives it destroyed and the questions it leaves open … This one bears the name of the one we often think we recognize – Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès – dead or gone, evaporated as so many minds ponder its story, so many readers on the lines that tell it. This summer, the magazine Society devotes two issues, 76 pages, two parts of an investigation that one tears – which puts the relationship between news item and journalism on the table, questions its narration and the fantasies it arouses …
With Pierre Beverage, editor-in-chief of the magazine Society, and co-author of the survey published this summer dedicated to the Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès affair, Dominique Kalifa, historian specializing in the history of crime, the news item and its representations, and Christine Marcandier, professor of literature at the University of Aix-Marseille, co-founder of the online magazine Diacritic, specialist in the fictionalization of the news item.
_All the particularity of this run is that at the same time it leaves very clear traces but at the same time, we discovered during our investigation that there is a desire to erase certain memories that it could have let,_he tries to keep the past from going back. For example, on its computer servers, it erases 7,700 files just before disappearing. Likewise, when the police first enter his house, there are no more pictures of his family: all the frames are empty.
Pierre Beverage
There are very intimate links between fiction and news item, butthe news item is itself a fiction. There is a first story which is the media story, but before that, there may even be the story that the criminal constructs for himself, internally and externally. He built a run which is a kind of dichotomy between “I hide” and “I show myself”, it is a fiction author who constructed the idea that he had gone to the United States, that he was a protected witness. Marc Dugain wrote in Vanity Fair that Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès was the author of a very bad fiction, a fiction which does not hold.
Christine Marcandier
The various facts tell about the extraordinary life of ordinary people. Dupont de Ligonnès, his family is from Versailles, we could know them, we could cross them. _It tells the extraordinary story of you and me_. There is also duplicity.
Dominique Kalifa
The news item is the democratic fact of ordinary people. There are no news items in totalitarian regimes: it is a form of transgression that has no place, and in the Soviet regime for example, the proletarian has become the hero of history, so he does not need to be told the ordinary story to exist.
Dominique Kalifa
There has long been a historical rejection of the news item on both sides of the political spectrum, either viewed as unhealthy or viewed as the opium of the people. This narrative modality has always been considered illegitimate. […] We have always had this form of disqualification, of discrediting this form of storytelling, even then (and no doubt because) it was at the heart of the public’s fascination and interest.
Dominique Kalifa
When you reconstruct your story, it becomes a new story. […] Ligonnès’ father had a mistress called Catherine, Ligonnès had several mistresses called Catherine; Ligonnès’ father was indebted to URSSAF, Ligonnès was also indebted to URSSAF … _It’s mysterious and fascinating to put these elements in juxtaposition_. Ligonnès’ father died three months before the crimes. That Ligonnès made the same mistakes as his father when he tried all his life not to repeat them is very disturbing. But we didn’t try to get a psychological analysis out of it : we put these elements next to each other. What can we say about it? Nothing more than this juxtaposition.
Pierre Beverage
_There is something that makes us try to hide from ourselves, and suddenly we appear in a form of truth. It is an opaque truth, an undecidable truth.And this is what means that we will be able to talk, I think, for a very long time yet about this news item.
Christine Marcandier
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