At 9.20pm on Friday, Paris didn’t fall silent or weep. Instead, exactly a week after last Friday’s devastating attacks, it burst into waves of human sound: cheering, whistling, whooping, clapping. And music: reggae, pumped from outside the Bataclan theatre by a yellow van with stereo stacks.
Some held hands and raised cans of Kronenbourg. Others turned up with their kids. From a fifth-floor flat next to the concert venue – where 89 people were killed last week – a man started singing La Marseillaise. On the pavement below, illuminated by candles, others joined in. It was a defiant affirmation of eternal values: noise, joy, light.
One week on, the mood in Paris has changed. Abstract horror has given way to particular grief. It now has a name, a story. In the garden opposite the Bataclan, the faces of those killed in the multiple shootings – 130 people – stare out. The p ictures show at a glance that most of the victims were young. Some are smiling, insouciant, with friends and lovers. Others are in suits, as if about to hurry off to work.
Next to the pictures are messages, penned by friends, relatives, well-wishers. One: “To Cédric. My so competent colleague, assassinated by imbeciles, along with so many others.” Another: “To Stephane”, shot not inside the Bataclan, but while sitting at home in his studio apartment opposite. A ricocheting bullet hit him in the back.
The space across the road in Boulevard Voltaire has become a soggy shrine. After a week of superlatively mild temperatures, Paris was drenched on Friday in heavy rain. Thousands have come here to show solidarity with the dead, to lay flowers and to mutter prayers – a shuffling procession of the stunned and quietly grieving.
“It’s the photographs that get me,” said Marie, 20, a business studies student from Lille. “You see the pictures of these people when they were so alive. They are so young and now they are dead. Part of me says thank God it wasn’t me and then I feel bad about that.”
Mathieu André, 29, who works for a technology startup, said: “This has felt like the longest week of my life. Seeing these photos and knowing what has happened it seems so terrible but so unreal. I go to the Bataclan a lot. It’s often bands that not many have heard of but the atmosphere is fantastic. That’s why the place was packed. It’s fun.”
The public can be fickle. But on Friday the sentiment among most was that the fun for which France’s capital is famous – especially in its bohemian 10th and 11th arrondissements – should go on. It might not seem like much, but against the horror of the past week, raising a glass of wine and turning up the radio amounts to a declaration of defiance.
A group of artists have suggested exactly that. Via social media, they published a lyrical appeal to their fellow citizens under the hashtag #21h20. It urged everybody to “stand up” at exactly 9.20pm, the moment the first attack last week took place outside the Stade de France football stadium, one of four suicide bombings to rock the city.
The best way to defeat Islamic State, the artists wrote, was to reclaim Paris’s squares and pleasurable terraces where so many people were gunned down. “Let’s make noise and light, to make [Isis] understand that they have lost,” the appeal said. Many agreed. “The answer isn’t war. That’s what Daesh [Isis] wants. We need to live our life as before,” said Paul Colin, a 23-year-old student.
Colin lives a few doors from the Comptoir Voltaire, one of seven restaurants targeted by French and Belgian-born Islamists. Last Friday, Brahim Abdeslam, 31, walked in, ordered a beer and sat at a window table. He drank it – then, at 9.40pm, he blew himself up. His younger brother Salah is still on the run, Europe’s most wanted fugitive.
You could still see blood stains on the floor. The cafe’s waitress is alive but grievously injured. Soldiers in uniform were patrolling in the rain nearby, as if this were somehow Afghanistan, walking past urban launderettes and bakeries. An advert for a festive beaujolais nouveau night sits in the cafe’s front window.
Colin was last in the bar three weeks ago, drinking red wine and eating tapas with his girlfriend. He said last Friday’s tragedy had touched his generation. “Everybody knows somebody who was one of the victims … One of my best friends lost her best friend,” he said. At his university, students had followed the news compulsively on their phones all week, even during lectures.
Defying the terrorists was one thing. But what about the consequences for French society? Some have admitted that each time they take the Métro, they immediately look around to see if there were Muslims in the same carriage. Others, however, have described talking to their neighbours for the first time, united by mutual shock and civic feeling.
France’s commander in chief, President François Hollande, has struck a martial tone, declaring a war on Monday against Isis. Julien Fidon, a 34-year-old architect, said he was worried that the far right would nevertheless sweep regional elections in December.
Did Hollande get it right? “I like him. He’s doing his best. It isn’t easy,” he said, adding that, in contrast to George Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, Hollande’s “war” was not based on a lie.
Others, however, felt let down by Europe’s political class. It is now clear that most of the jihadi who carried out the massacres were already known to the authorities. The apparent mastermind, Abdelhamid Abaaoud – killed in a bloody shootout in St-Denis on Wednesday – was able to slip in and out of the Schengen area with ease.
Christophe, 31, summed it up: “I cried on Friday and on Saturday and Sunday. After that I was shocked and now I am beginning to feel angry.” He asked: “How were these people allowed to come in and out of France from places like Syria and Iraq? How many more are there slipping through the net?”
Outside La Belle Équipe restaurant – where 18 people were murdered – Alyson Bernard wiped away a tear. Here too the pavement was festooned with flowers.
Bernard, a psychotherapist, said that mourning was a process with different stages, including fear, anxiety and hate. “Islamic State is using fear as a weapon. It’s like a poison. I know some people are really afraid,” she said. “People say we will continue. We will. But we won’t forget.”
Back at the Bataclan, there were unmistakable signs that ordinary life was returning. The post office next door – sealed off for most of the week by police tape – had reopened; the nail bar was full of customers.
The Métro was stopping once more at the nearest station, Oberkampf. Next week is likely to bring another round of mourning as the first funerals of the victims begin.
A state event is planned at Les Invalides, the monument where Napoleon is buried. Republican guards will carry a photograph of every victim of the shooting and bombings; all families are invited. More than 1,000 people are expected to attend. It will be another moment of national grief.
At Le Pure Cafe, close to La Belle Équipe, barman Raphael Massoud said he wasn’t sure how many customers would stop by this weekend. “We knew the Belle Équipe team. They were our friends,” he said.
How should France emerge from its darkest modern nightmare? “Over the past week people have wanted to go out. They want to live. They want to carry on as if nothing has happened.”
