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Drawing on ethnographic observations of French antiterrorism trials, this paper offers a study of the trials of the “presumed dead” convicted of their participation in “jihadist terrorist networks”. Through a reversal of the figure of the dead, passing from “victim” to “presumed terrorist” then to “condemned presumed dead”, the analysis of the judicial chain up to the stage of the trial hearing illustrates a particular treatment through French penal power. The legal, social and political realities of these trials question the multiples forms of “troublesome dead”.