In Paris, as in New York before it, resilience and defiance
‘We raised our glasses ... to the fact Paris will always be a party, despite the pain and the tears’
The past week in Paris provided no shortage of searing images.
There was the video shot behind the Bataclan theatre Nov. 13, showing people dragging victims through the street, a woman dangling from a window of the concert hall and bodies lying outside an exit, as gunshots and screams filled the air. There were the heartwrenching sobs of mourners who had walked to the Belle Equipe restaurant Sunday to remember loved ones gunned down — 19 dead — on its sidewalk patio. There was the 11th-arrondissement restaurant, its interior ripped apart by Kalashnikov bullets, an uneaten slice of pizza still on a plate one night later as if the diner might return.
But what I will remember most are not the bloodstains and bullet holes, but the Parisian display of resilience and defiance, reminiscent of the spirit that rose up among New Yorkers following the 9/11 terror attacks.
A doctor I encountered Monday as France stood still for a minute of silence embodied this mettle. Brigitte Mélot, 65, had just left the Métro on Nov. 13 and was on her way for her evening coffee when she happened upon what she later described as “a scene of war.”
Minutes earlier, the jihadi Brahim Abdeslam had blown himself up at her local café, the Comptoir Voltaire. Mélot identified herself as a trauma specialist and, wearing her street clothes, carrying no medical equipment and “bathing in blood,” set to work treating victims, including the bomber.
Three days later, she was insistent the carnage she witnessed first hand would not change her routine.
“We can’t let them impose their dictatorship,” she said. “We have to get out. We have to go to concerts. We have to go to the movies. We have to sit outside cafés. We have to have fun.”
In 2001, in the days after alQaida terrorists flew jets into the World Trade Center, there was a lingering fear on New York’s streets. The sound of U.S. air force jets flying overhead was enough to freeze pedestrians in their steps, wondering whether another strike was coming.
But like last week’s assault on Paris restaurants, bars and a music hall, the 9/11 attacks on the financial heart of New York targeted a way of life. And the response of the intended targets was to cling to that way of life even more dearly. In New York, this manifested itself many ways, including a large dose of strutting patriotism. American flags were ubiquitous, along with such defiant slogans as “These colours don’t run” and “United we stand.”
Mayor Rudy Giuliani told New Yorkers to “Be not afraid” and urged them to go shopping or take in a play to help the city’s reeling economy. When the New York Stock Exchange reopened six days after the attack, I spoke to Roger Erichsen, who worked with a Wall Street securities firm and lost 10 friends on Sept. 11.
Amid a sell-off, he had been buying shares in large American companies. “That’s the patriotic thing to do,” he said. “And I’m going to buy a car, and I’m going to put money in the economy, and I suggest that everybody do the same.”
In Paris, where the pleasure taken in drinking, dancing and music is enough to make it a capital of “abominations and perversion” in the eyes of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant terrorists, people swarmed terrasses this week even as heavily armed suspects remained on the loose.
In a post for the travel journal Roads & Kingdoms, Paris journalist Margaux Bergey explained what motivated her to launch the hashtag “OccupyTerrasse” the night after the attacks.
“Drinking a pitcher of red wine at Prune on the banks of the Canal Saint-Martin was our own way of saying ‘merde’ to all of this, that we were breathing, that we were alive,” she wrote. “Despite the knot of sadness in my stomach and the leftover adrenalin from work, being outside with people is what felt right …
“We raised our glasses high to Friday night’s victims, the ‘vile perverts’ like us, who enjoyed rock concerts and drinking at cafés. We raised our glasses high to life, to laughter, to friends, and to the fact that Paris will always be a party, despite the pain and the tears.”
The 9/11 attacks, on a brilliant late summer day, came out of the blue both literally and figuratively. There was disbelief that terrorist evil could reach such depths, targeting not the state but civilians going about their lives, taking a flight or working in an office.
Today, after New York, after Madrid, after London, after Mumbai and Sydney and Beirut, a new attack prompts despair, but not necessarily surprise. When the gunmen struck last week, Paris was still feeling the impact of January’s attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket that killed 17. A few doors down from my hotel on Boulevard Voltaire, rifle-toting French soldiers stood guard outside an unmarked building. The building, I learned, housed Ecole Ganénou, a Jewish primary school that like all Jewish institutions has been considered a potential Islamist target since January.
With the knowledge that radicalized young French men and women by the hundreds were heading to Syria to join ISIL, the feeling was it was only a matter of time before the next attack. Bernard Cazeneuve, the interior minister, said this week that six attacks had been foiled since Charlie Hebdo, four of which involved the planner of last week’s massacres, Abdelhamid Abaaoud.
The sense of fatalism means that gallows humour, off limits in the U.S. after 9/11, has a place in Paris. Comedian Bill Maher lost his ABC show after he challenged then-president George W. Bush’s characterization of the terrorists as cowards. “Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it’s not cowardly,” Maher quipped.
It is impossible to imagine a U.S. publication in 2001 publishing anything as provocative as this week’s edition of Charlie Hebdo, whose caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad made it a target of terrorists in January. The cover has a drawing of a Parisian quaffing champagne, which then spouts out of bullet holes in his legs and torso. “They have weapons,” it reads. “Screw them. We have champagne.”
In Paris, as in the United States after 9/11, there is a contradiction in the political response to the attacks. The violence gives rise to a patriotic insistence that the country’s values must be defended. “Our freedom will always be stronger than their terror,” read a sign attached to the monument in Place de la République.
But just as a majority of Americans immediately after 9/11 told pollsters it was necessary to surrender civil liberties to fight terrorism, the French are prepared to limit their cherished freedoms. A poll for France’s RTL network published Tuesday found 84 per cent of those surveyed are prepared to accept a “certain limitation” of their freedoms in the battle against terrorism. Three-quarters of respondents were in favour of the arrest and imprisonment of all those — estimated at 5,000 — suspected by the government of having ties to a terrorist organization.
Alphonse Bangoura, a Muslim living in the Paris suburb of SaintDenis, said France has been too soft on Islamist radicals.
“Too much freedom becomes a catastrophe,” he said, an hour after a police assault on a terror cell near his home ended. “They were too tolerant with these people.” He called for increased surveillance of mosques: “Everything happens there.”
With France this week extending the state of emergency declared last Saturday for three months, the imperatives of enhancing security and preserving liberty will continue to clash. Under the state of emergency, authorities can keep people under house arrest without trial, search homes without a judge’s warrant, and block websites and social media accounts.
The strongest argument against giving in to fear is heard not in the legislature but in Paris’s streets, bars and restaurants, where days after the murderous attacks, joy returned. At a restaurant 500 metres from the Comptoir Voltaire, the terrasse was packed Monday night and people danced as a jazz band played and a customer improvised percussion with a knife on a beer glass.
The next night, in search of a late meal, I came across Mélot, the doctor, enjoying a cigarette and an espresso outside a bistro off Boulevard Voltaire.
“You see,” she said. “I’m having my coffee on a terrasse.”
Drinking a pitcher of red wine at Prune on the banks of the Canal Saint-Martin was our own way of saying ‘merde’ to all of this.