Marianne: With your memoirs, we discover a life of justice and a tour of France's courts: Montbrison, Corsica, Lyon, Paris, Carcassonne… It began in 1977 when you joined the National School of Magistrates (ENM). Justice was, you write, an “ideal”. Why did you choose to be a magistrate rather than a lawyer? You have this funny sentence in your book: being a lawyer means “compromising with the truth”…
François Molins:I certainly don't want to say that lawyers don't tell the truth! But the lawyer's primary goal is not necessarily to arrive at the truth: it is to defend his client. To show the truth in a light that is, perhaps, not that which is usually the content of the legal file. It consists of shedding light on something else to better defend. Why was I a magistrate? It's not a vocation. It is a reasoned choice. I was not a scientist. I have a literary baccalaureate. I realized that I really liked law, especially civil law and commercial law, for that matter. Criminal law was not my favorite subject. I understood that it was justice that attracted me, therefore a legal profession.
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Things would have bothered me in the legal profession. I would not have been comfortable in the relationship with the client, particularly in translating the time spent into fees… It may be stupid, but that's how it is. And I couldn't see myself either – lawyers didn't travel much at the time – going to stick my plaque at the bottom of a building and never move. I needed to move. I strongly believe in enrichment due to mobility. I understood that it was the magistrate who attracted me. And it's a choice that I have never regretted. It would have to be done again, I would do the same thing.
We know you for having been the face of anti-terrorism, but before that, in 1986, as a young prosecutor, you arrived in Montbrison. A very small court in the Loire, which has now disappeared, of which you recount the misery, the curious methods of the president who drinks, who doesn't care about procedures… Have we finished with this two-tier justice?
It was less an aspect of two-tiered justice than a vision of justice that is not correct, in reality. I could have not mentioned it, I didn't want to hurt anyone. But this president died a long time ago. And it is precisely a way of showing how much the training of magistrates – God knows if it is criticized – but how much it has progressed…
