On Emmanuel Carrère’s ‘The Adversary’

Carrère’s book is a deeply disquieting investigation of the nature of truth and evil in one of France’s most notorious criminals.

Emmanuel Carrère
True Crime | Literary Nonfiction
208 pages
5.5” x 8.5
Perfectbound Trade Paperback
Also available in eBook formats
Review format: Paperback
ISBN 9781784705800
First Paperback Edition
Vintage
London, UK
Available HERE
£8.99

On the Saturday morning of January 9, 1993, while Jean-Claude Romand was killing his wife and children, I was with mine in a parent-teacher meeting at the school attended by Gabriel, our eldest son. He was five years old, the same age as Antoine Romand. Then we went to have lunch with my parents, as Jean-Claude Romand did with his, whom he killed after their meal.

Emmanuel Carrère’s The Adversary is subtitled “A True Story of Monstrous Deception,” and it is certainly an account of a staggering catalogue of untruths, although the matter of who is deceiving whom is often not a straightforward one. Jean-Claude Romand appeared to be living an ideal bourgeois life with his wife and family in small-town France while working over the border in Switzerland for the World Health Organization (WHO). He was a doctor working on the kind of cutting-edge medical research that allowed other doctors to save lives, with his expertise being such that he taught one day a week at a university in Dijon. Romand was perhaps a little nondescript, but he and his family were well-liked, and they had a number of close friends living nearby.

One of those close friends was Luc Ladmiral, and it is from his perspective that Carrère begins to explain Jean-Claude Romand’s terrible fraud. Ladmiral was awakened in the early hours of January 11 by the news that the Romands’ house was on fire. Along with several other friends, he rushed to the scene in the hope of helping to save the family’s possessions, only to be confronted by the sight of the bodies of Florence Romand and the two children, Caroline and Antoine, being removed from the house. Jean-Claude Romand had survived the fire, but he was badly burned and would remain in a coma for several days. During that time, it became clear that Florence and her children had died before the fire started. Further, when an uncle went to break the news of the tragedy to Jean-Claude Romand’s parents, he found that the couple (and their loyal dog) had been shot.

The police questioned Luc Ladmiral as to whether he knew of anyone who might want to harm the Romand family. He could think of no one, but he suggested that the killings could perhaps be due to the classified work Jean-Claude did for the WHO. It was at this point that 18 years’ worth of lies were unraveled remarkably quickly. One phone call revealed that Jean-Claude Romand did not work for the WHO, nor had he ever done so. He had not in fact ever completed medical school. His entire career was a fabrication. What’s more, a note was found in which he confessed to killing his family in order to prevent them from finding out the truth.

The Adversary is certainly no whodunit. Carrère’s interest in Jean-Claude Romand’s case is not focused on solving the murders and establishing his subject’s guilt or innocence, since there is plenty of evidence in that regard, but rather he is concerned with how Romand maintained his lies, both to the outside world and to himself:

[…] what I really wanted to know: what went on in his head during those days he supposedly spent in the office, days he didn’t spend, as was first believed, trafficking in arms or industrial secrets, days he spent, it was now thought, walking in the woods?

Romand’s life as a conman was surprisingly mundane. He convinced friends and family that his Swiss connections meant he could invest in various lucrative schemes, and he then used the life savings and retirement funds that they invested through him to fund his family’s middle-class lifestyle. Save for the period of time when he kept a mistress in Paris, Romand spent his time walking in the woods, reading magazines in the car, staying in cheap airport hotels, and occasionally wandering around the public areas of the WHO. Perhaps maintaining such a level of secrecy and deception proved so draining that he couldn’t be bothered to spend his ill-gotten gains on more exciting pursuits?

Jean-Claude Romand’s life of lies seemingly began while he was a medical student. He failed to turn up to his second year exams and, rather than arranging to resit them, he simply told people that he had passed. From that point on, he maintained the fiction of attending medical school, dedicating more effort to the scheme than would have actually been required to complete his exams. In the interests of keeping up appearances, he actually did the reading and completed the same work as his peers. Romand later decided that he graduated near the top of his class, and he thought up a suitably impressive career for himself. He also invented a cancer diagnosis, which eventually helped him to convince Florence to marry him. His life must have seemed to outsiders to be punctuated with quite dramatic moments. Yet, while Romand’s fictionalized life was structured around some remarkable (untrue) achievements, none of his friends or acquaintances considered him to be a braggart:

It was extraordinary, this ability to deflect conversation whenever it turned to him. He did this so well that you didn’t even realize it, and thinking back on it later, you wound up admiring his discretion, his modesty, his desire to show others to advantage instead of himself.

Of course, his apparent modesty no doubt helped Romand to maintain his deception, but it does seem surprising that such a compulsive fantasist was able to stick to a consistent story and avoid relaying different embellishments to different people. In fact, the whole saga is shockingly unlikely, despite the straightforward way in which Carrère describes the events. It is astounding that not once in 18 years did anyone try to visit or telephone Romand at his WHO office. It is equally startling that Florence Romand never checked up on the family’s finances, since a glance at one bank statement would have revealed that Romand was not drawing a salary. The whole situation was so outlandish that it is perhaps not surprising that many of Romand’s friends initially thought that the accusations against him might have been part of some grand conspiracy:

Perhaps Jean-Claude was a spy, a peddler of scientific or industrial secrets, but he couldn’t have killed his family. They had killed them, they had concocted evidence to frame him for the crimes, they had even gone so far as to destroy the traces of his past.

Only there was no conspiracy or elaborate frame-up. Romand had simply invented a life for himself for reasons that Emmanuel Carrère never quite manages to determine. Perhaps Romand was paralyzed by a fear of failure? Perhaps he felt that manipulation was his only means of attracting attention? Perhaps he is simply evil? In a swerve toward the esoteric, Carrère does seem to indicate that Romand’s actions are the result of evil (in which case the eponymous adversary would be the devil) and as such they can be observed, but never properly understood. While not wholy convincing, this notion of pure evil does juxtapose nicely with the overt religiosity described during the latter part of The Adversary.

Does Jean-Claude Romand feel guilt regarding his actions? Carrère suggests that he perhaps does, although Romand’s greatest deception might actually have been convincing himself that he should not be blamed for his actions. While Romand didn’t deny killing his family, throughout the trial he seemed convinced that he could prove himself (whether through further lies or via the testimony of kindhearted people who seemed incapable of recognizing that he might have sought to manipulate them) to be a generally good guy who became the victim of circumstance:

He was obviously underestimating the difficulty of giving a favorable impression when one has just murdered one’s family after having deceived and defrauded one’s relatives for eighteen long years.

The Adversary is a deeply disquieting investigation of the nature of both truth and evil as portrayed in the infamous actions of one of France’s most notorious criminals. Emmanuel Carrère is perhaps sometimes a little too solicitous of Jean-Claude Romand’s feelings — even he frequently comments that his obsession with Romand’s crimes and their rather strange pen pal relationship make him deeply uncomfortable — but he would never have been able to write this book without establishing an emotional connection of some sort with the killer. While his writing style is very factual and candid, Carrère has had to insert himself into the narrative and his true feelings about Romand (that is, his crimes, his psychology, and his level of remorse) are crystal clear by the end of the book. As for Romand, who knows what he really believes about himself?