As tends to happen in major cities after terrorist attacks, life in Paris yesterday morning continued almost as normal.
Despite the recommendations by security forces that Parisians stay inside, the streets were full, shops and cafes were open, and people sat outside restaurants smoking cigarettes as usual.
The mood was sombre but not silent. Moroccan shop owners greeted customers with cheerful “bonjours,” perhaps overcompensating for the level of anxiety that they and other Arabs and North Africans throughout France will be feeling after these divisive, senseless attacks.
Locals even thronged around the scenes of the attacks at the Bataclan and Le Carillon bar leaving flowers and taking pictures. There were, however, noticeably fewer tourists around. Reuters correspondent, Emily Wither, tweeted that Eurostar staff at London’s Kings Cross St Pancras said only a quarter of ticketholders showed up to catch trains to Paris yesterday. For a city with an urban population of six million, a collective emotion will be difficult to get a handle on. But a sense of sheer disbelief mixed with cruel inevitability will be shared everywhere.
It is no coincidence that the sites of the attacks were so close to Place de la Republique, the monument to France’s history and statehood where hundreds of thousands gathered and daubed defiant messages after the march involving world leaders and ordinary citizens after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January. Islamic State, which has claimed responsibility for the attacks, wants to punish France for daring to stand up to it with military bombings in Syria.
A surreal, horrible Friday night
Inside the Le Bouillon-Chartier restaurant in the 9th arrondissement, my phone rang just after 10.15 Friday night local time. It was my sister in London. Seconds later, a call from Trinidad. We checked our messages and found friends had already left concerned texts. People halfway across the world knew that two kilometres away from us, at restaurants and bars in the 10th and 11th, masked gunmen had already killed at least a dozen people.
What had started off as a typically buoyant, exciting Friday night in Paris suddenly took on a surreal edge. Around us in the large, packed, constantly buzzing restaurant we began to notice more phones being checked. There was no panic amongst the mostly young crowd. If the waiting staff and restaurant manager knew of the attacks happening close by—and they must have done—they did a very good job of hiding it.
As calls kept coming in from people watching international television news, my dinner guests began to feel nervous and expressed a desire to get home. Earlier in the evening we had been to see the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe and strolled down the Champs-Elysée with its Christmas decorations, blissfully unaware of what was about to happen.
On the Métro, people chattered nervously. A few fans wearing the national colours of Les Bleus were the most distressed people we’d seen all evening. In our local neighbourhood, the 18th, there was an eerie silence except for a few people outside local bars, heads in hands. Public transport was officially shut down around midnight.
A deadly toll
The volume of the detonations of the three suicide bombs close to the turnstiles at Stade de France and a McDonalds restaurant nearby were so terrifyingly loud that Patrice Evra, playing for France in a friendly against Germany, could clearly be seen on television looking around, alarmed, while making a pass.
While supporters initially assumed the noises to be firecrackers and cheered the explosions and continued with the Mexican waves, at full-time, having clearly got the message, they spilled onto the pitch, scared to exit the stadium onto the streets of Saint-Denis. At the Bataclan, some of the crowd at the Eagles of Death Metal concert also thought the explosions were part of the show, but quickly saw that two gunmen, “not more than 25 years old, with Kalashnikovs” and looking “pretty calm,” according to one eyewitness, were firing from a balcony.
For what must have seemed an eternity, the men calmly emptied their magazines then reloaded and fired again. “It was like a gust of wind in a wheat field. Everyone fell —dead, injured or alive. Even if we didn’t have experience of war, we suddenly understood what it’s like,” said another survivor.
More than 80 people are known to have died in the Bataclan out of the 1,500 concert-goers at the sold out show. Many hid under dead bodies for up to two hours before police stormed the theatre.
Defiance
Graffiti artists, a staple of Paris’s expressive culture, were yesterday painting the Latin phrase, “Fluctuat nec mergitur” on boards in Place de la Republique. The words are Paris’s motto, taken from the coat of arms. In French, they translate as, “Elle est agitée par les vagues, et ne sombre pas.” In English, “She is tossed by the waves but does not sink.”
At a meeting of the French National Assembly yesterday morning, a minute’s silence was broken by MPs spontaneously singing the French anthem, La Marseillaise. The last time it was sung in parliament was during World War I.
Aurelie Raya, a Paris Match journalist, speaking next to one of the bars attacked on Friday night, said, “They just want us dead, no debate. Debate is for intelligent people. You think we can debate with those who killed people at this café?”