"In the salle des assises, the Paris courtroom reserved for the examination of murders, rapes, and other serious crimes, a box of thick glass has been erected atop the old wood enclosure in which the accused is made to sit. The glass is a recent addition, and incongruous; the remainder of the room—the lustrous carved oak of the wainscoting, the six brass chandeliers strung from the high plafond—has been preserved as it was at least a century and a half ago. Above the glass box, a grand mural depicts a conclave of red-robed judges and the child king Louis XIII. The mural is in fact a somewhat recent flourish, having been commissioned by the wartime fascists of Vichy, but that infelicitous detail is easily obscured by the vision of splendid continuity the painting sets forth. French judges still wear those red robes. Amid this pomp, the effect of the glass box is that of nothing so much as a museum specimen case, one intended for curiosities of human scale. Last year, for the month of October, it held a 35-year-old Franco-Algerian man named Abdelkader Merah. ..."
New Republic
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