What does a typical day look like for an investigative journalist?

It’s a lot of meetings, a lot of conversations, a lot of relationships that develop. But it’s also grunt work. People tend to imagine you have some incredible technology for getting information, or that a guy shows up and hands you the whole file… Most of the time, for me, it’s very much a craft: slow, manual work that takes months, even years.

So it’s a bit like a police investigator’s work.

Yes, it’s like an investigator’s work. But there are two big differences.

A police investigator has the resources of the State behind them: they can search premises, summon people, hold them in custody, and so on. As a journalist, you’ve only got your powers of persuasion and people’s consent. That limits you in a lot of ways, because you can’t force anyone, but it can also take you further, since the people who talk to you are there because they chose to be.

The other difference is that police investigations, and plenty of journalistic ones, for that matter, tend to run on formal, tightly structured question-and-answer sessions. I try to break that barrier down a bit. I’ll build relationships, have dinner, grab a drink with key witnesses, whistleblowers, victims… You follow them for months, even years. They trust you with very intimate things. You end up becoming part of their lives.

How do you turn all that material into a book? Is it more of a novelist’s job, in a way?

The sensible thing would be to write as you go… But I usually investigate for two and a half years. I accumulate a monstrous amount of testimony and information. And at some point I sit down at my desk and start climbing the mountain: first breaking the investigation into chapters, then trying to tell the overall story and lay out all the ways a system has failed.

But it’s literary work, too. Sometimes you read books by journalists that have no story, no momentum, no characters… There’s nothing to hold on to, just facts and revelations. I tell the journalists I work with at Flammarion: “Nobody spends €22.90 and four hours on a book unless you’re telling them a story. Without a narrative to hold on to, it’s just too much to ask.”

And what’s your relationship to the truth?

You’re there to expose a scandal. You also know you’re dealing with serious subjects, and that what you do can have major consequences. So you can’t write just anything: the financial and human stakes are too high. You feel the power of words, and you have to stick as closely as possible to the truth, the numbers, the facts. As Spider-Man’s uncle says, “With great power comes great responsibility.” I’ve seen that play out many times. Words are far more powerful than people think, and you have to handle them with care. That’s the line I hold myself to.

That said, because it’s literary work, you hang those facts on a narrative. You don’t stray from the truth, but you make choices about impact and about how to tell the story. You also know you can’t put 300 characters in a story; it’s still a book. I’d say that’s the one way literature changes your approach to the truth: build a plot, develop characters, create suspense, and so on.

Do you see a difference between dedication and activism?

A huge one. Especially in investigative journalism.

For example, I teach at Sciences Po. Every year I guide 20 students through an investigation, start to finish. They’re talented and hard-working… but they often have one problem: they tend to be rather activist. That’s just how their generation is, and in many ways that’s a good thing. But you can feel their opinions in their articles. Sometimes it reads more like a pamphlet than an investigation. You can tell what they think, and that they wanted the investigation to go their way. And, to me, that’s disastrous.

So I tell them that, of course, they should pick subjects that affect them personally, and that they should invest more than office hours, but that it will always backfire if they become activists.

How do you define dedication if you’re not an activist?

Activism is letting your opinions do the talking. Dedication means being fully invested in a subject, in the truest sense of the word. I’m invested in my investigations; I put my life into them. Nurseries, care homes: I’ve been on these subjects for almost ten years now. I did the investigations, but then I make documentaries, fiction, I go on TV to defend them, to parliamentary committees, to the National Assembly, all over France to give talks… I stay on these subjects because they matter to me, and sometimes they obsess me. I talk about them for months, in the evenings, to my wife or my friends. It lives in me; it spills over into my life.

I would never say I’m a better or worse journalist than anyone else, but the difference is that when I take on a subject, I spend more time on it than anyone. I don’t let go until I’ve got what I came for.

At the same time, it’s not enough to do the investigation. You don’t stop the moment you hand it in: you do the after-sales service. You make sure it actually does something, that it has an impact in the real world.