France InterInterview6 October 2026
Three years after 7 October, “Sermons sous les décombres”
Benjamin Duhamel · 10 min
On 6 October 2026, on the eve of the third anniversary of 7 October, Delphine Horvilleur was Benjamin Duhamel’s guest on France Inter’s morning show. At its heart, “Sermons sous les décombres”: what the war has done to our words, the camp mentality that demands everyone pick a side, and the call to rally the voices of nuance.
“Those who attack you always say ‘we’. […] Those who support me speak in the first person singular. […] It is time to rally a different ‘we’: the moderates, the nuanced, those who refuse these packs on both sides that look so strangely alike.”
“I felt it was time to reread them and try to understand, more broadly, what the war has done to us: what it has done to our words, what it has done to our souls, what it has done to our discourse.”
“I cannot bring myself to go to a demonstration where only one flag is flying. I have no wish to be surrounded by people who are unable to see human suffering, whatever its colour, whatever its ethnicity.”
“I had to speak out: for love of Israel, as a Zionist, which is what I am. I still define myself that way. […] On the contrary, I feel that speaking out is an act of loyalty: loyalty to values I believe in, loyalty to humanism, let’s say, but also loyalty to a Jewish tradition of self-criticism.”
The session
Ten minutes in four movements. First the book, reread in the light of three years of war, and its blind spots: how long it took to name the other side’s pain. Then 2025, the hostages’ families, and her May text on Israel’s “moral bankruptcy”, attacked from both sides. Next the word “genocide”, read as a shibboleth: a word demanded to mark out a camp. Last, the presidential campaign, and the political spectrum seen as a circle where the extremes meet.