In the usual madness of domestic violence

“I never had to hit him, judge.

“What do you mean, you never had to hit him?” We don’t talk about a person like that.”

Peyman Ghaleh-Marzban, president of the Bobini judicial court, is in control, but the tone is fragile. Once a month, together with Eric Mathais, the prosecutor of France’s second jurisdiction, he conducts mobile hearings in one of the seven local courts of the Bobigny jurisdiction to close domestic violence cases, which have become a mass trial and a priority for national Emmanuel Macron.

These “spilling” hearings before a single judge, which chained dozens of cases without a break till 10pm last Thursday, are a tour de force. Some facts date back to the first arrest. All tell stories of ordinary violence rarely seen by the authors as inappropriate, much less criminal. Nor the psychological abuse that often underlies…