In the confusion and horror of Paris in shock, the details stay with you. In the bleary early Saturday morning, behind the police barriers, a lone tour bus was still parked on Boulevard Voltaire in front of the Bataclan concert hall, where the Eagles of Death Metal gig had been bloodily interrupted by Daesh terrorists the night before. It was impossible not to notice how the band’s black-painted bus strangely matched the half-dozen hearses maneuvering around it to carry away bodies still lying in the concert hall by the dozen; a surreal ballet of mourning, watched mainly by cops and young soldiers, as Parisians had been advised to stay home.
Another image: a shaky telephone video of soccer fans spontaneously singing “La Marseillaise” while being evacuated from the Stade de France in north Paris, after three suicide bombers detonated themselves outside the France-Germany game in the course of the coordinated attacks. French soccer, and the Stade de France, have a complicated history with “La Marseillaise”: Fourteen years ago, then-prime minister Lionel Jospin walked out of a France-Algeria game after the “Marseillaise” was booed by French-born supporters of the Algerian team. More than once, the French national team was blamed because our players would not even pretend to mouth the national anthem being played before a game. But this time it was the public themselves, in a moment of uncertainty and fear, who reacted with the unerring Résistance instinct.
Our city has been attacked: For the first time, we have been hit by indiscriminate terrorism, not targeted at journalists, soldiers, or Jews. This makes it somehow more intimate: Our reaction is not just horror, but the feeling that this is personal, our moment of truth.
I first saw a tweet announcing “a shootout” in a Paris restaurant around 10 p.m.—something that could very well have happened for a dozen reasons on a booze-fueled Friday night—and when I heard it was in the area near Bastille where I’d done a series of broadcasts at the time of the Charlie Hebdo killings, something impelled me to turn on France Info radio news. The very first sentence I heard was “We mustn’t yield to psychosis; this may not be terrorism.” By that time there were tweets on another shootout in the same neighborhood, and “explosions” near the Stade de France, in a different district. I remembered Charlie. I no longer believed in coincidences.
The stories and reports trickled out: on the radio, on cable news, on Twitter. Mobile networks overloaded; but Parisians became ingenious. Someone set up a special “event” page on French Facebook, where you could “check in” and tick an “I’m safe” box; notice of it automatically went to all your friends, as the news worsened throughout the night.
We Parisians saw the morning on Saturday dizzy with shock and lack of sleep, obsessively checking on the ever-mounting body count from the bloodiest attacks since the liberation. What soon became evident was the immense spirit of solidarity.
There was a disconnect between the hackneyed, emotional introductions and questions from reporters and the calmness of survivors describing scenes of war and carnage. “Terrified Clarisse is trembling still,” one began; but Clarisse, a young woman whose flat is located just above the Petit Cambodge restaurant, the scene of one of the shootouts, was utterly composed. “We realized the bangs outside came from guns. We knew Charlie’s offices were nearby; it’s only been 10 months. I turned off all the lights; then I crawled to the window to look outside; and I saw this young man who’d been shot and was dead.”
Laura, another young woman, described in a ban-lieues accent how, driving with three mates for a Friday evening of fun, they had crossed the path of one of the terrorists’ cars. “You must have felt terrified?” she was prompted. “I saw his face; I saw his gun. They started shooting at my car; later we found the body [of the car] was riddled with bullets and we’d all been incredibly lucky not to be hit. I revved it and we escaped; but now I think instead of fleeing we should have crashed bang into their car.”
Bastille is Victor Hugo’s Paris: a lively area now being gentrified—all the best new restaurants seem to open around here—but still pretty young and diverse.
The café owner next to Bataclan told how they took in any people they could who’d fled from the hall, including some of the musicians, during the siege and in the confused hours afterwards. “We gave people phone chargers, we passed out drinks and food. Some of the rock band musicians were with us and wanted to pay, but we told everyone this was not about money, not that night,” Ymen, one of the bar’s waitresses, recalled. “People were on the telephone with families, telling them of deaths; but they would say things like: ‘she shielded us, she saved our lives’; they would give it meaning.” A friend’s 17-year-old son, shot in the behind, walked out of the hospital and told his mother: “It’s nothing, I just won’t be able to sit for a week; the doctors needed the space.”
Soon, the hashtag #PortesOuvertes (#OpenDoors) started trending on Twitter. As the news of the consecutive shootouts in Rue Bichat, Rue de la Fontaine au Roi, and Rue de Charonne spread, the entire area between Place de la République and Place de la Bastille became a confused war zone, with public transport halted. Parisians were giving out their home addresses and telephone numbers so that anyone stranded in the streets could find refuge. Among them was Emma, a theater actress whose flat, on Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, just yards from the Charlie Hebdo offices, ended up with 14 people sitting on her floor and talking throughout the night. “Of course we could not sleep; you have to process something like that. I just made coffee.”
News started trickling in from the Bataclan theater from the first escapees; then, after 1 a.m., from those who had managed to survive until the special RAID gendarmerie units stormed the place and the terrorists detonated themselves. A young woman described a scene terrifyingly similar to the storming of the Krakow ghetto in Schindler’s List.
“We were perhaps 60, running in the corridors of the theater; we tried to get into the boxes over the stage, but they gave no shelter; so we kept running up staircases and finally found the toilets.” These didn’t look like refuge enough either; one of the men climbed on one of the seats and tore off the ceiling tiles, opening up a narrow, dark loft space full of glass wool insulation; and the escapees huddled there in the dark for hours after replacing the tiles as best they could. “I’d dropped my handbag while crawling away; I had no telephone, had no way of knowing what was going on; we kept hearing shouts and screams. We waited and waited; we didn’t even talk. I was afraid that a killer would come in and just spray-shoot through the false ceiling. When finally the RAID gendarmes came in below us, we wouldn’t come down until they told us enough that we were sure they were real police.” As it turned out, people had hidden in all sorts of nooks and crannies of the old, historic theater, with some spending most of the night in a tiny shower stall.
A curfew was decreed, but Parisians, an unruly lot, decided not to cower. As hearses were still arriving at the Bataclan theater, by midmorning Saturday, a crowd had brought flowers and stood talking. “Stay in? I’m going to go out twice as much, go to the movies, to the restaurant, to bars,” one woman said. Around 11, a man rode in on a bicycle, pulling a grand piano on wheels. He played John Lennon’s “Imagine,” took applause, and left, still dragging the piano. I love the grand gesture, but I don’t need to imagine anything. This is my city, and I have never been so proud of it.
Anne-Elisabeth Moutet is a columnist for the London Telegraph and a frequent commentator on British and French television.
