Loyer and Bétaucourt have a taste for others. In immersion for two years at the Angoulême courthouse, the two authors were served. ” We wanted to seize the daily justice, from the solemnity of the hearing in Assize Court to the triviality of the relations between the people who work at the palace. We wanted to tell justice through the people who do it », Says the Northerner Xavier Bétaucourt, now installed near Bourges, in the Cher. If the two authors willingly stage themselves in their boxes, it is only to better highlight the famous “ants”, those little hands which carry at arm’s length a badly battered scale and sword.
We thus follow the tribulations of a squad of clerks, on the front line of this famous “tramping” of justice. perfectly related in this documentary comic. We shiver in front of the story of the boiler failure which puts the offices at 12 ° C. We laugh (nervously) in front of this poster on the elevator ” Warning ! Risk of breakdown! Prevent if use “. We are almost enraged at all the Kafkaesque situations that arise. Like that day, when it comes to bringing for his trial a detainee who is in prison 200 meters from the palace, but whom it is impossible to extract because the prison administration of… Limoges does not did not come to get it on time! ” But what is striking is the notion of public service. The legal professionals have it pegged to the body, it is not a posture. We could be in a crushing machine. But there is in fact a great deal of humanity. »
The book is the fair reflection of the palace corridors
: it is teeming with anecdotes, portraits and information. The finding is often funny, it is always confusing, precise like a verdict of the Assize Court. Journalist in another life, Xavier Bétaucourt pursues his mission with other means and with the complicity of Jean-Luc Loyer. The two authors brilliantly shed light on what is going on behind the scenes. And make us readers less blind to justice. A useful work.
“The Balance, the sword and the ants”, Xavier Bétaucourt and Jean-Luc Loyer, ed. Futuropolis, 176 p., 22 €.
A fruitful northern collaboration
Libra, the sword and the ants is the third collaboration of two Northerners, the Lille resident Xavier Bétaucourt (story) and the Heninese Jean-Luc Loyer (drawing), now “expatriates” far from Hauts-de-France. In 2006, they documented the escape of Métaleurop and the dismissal of its 830 workers in Black Metal (Delcourt) before, ten years later, returning to the region to The Big A (Futuropolis), an immersion in a hypermarket, city within the city in the heart of the mining area.
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