It was an attack on the youth of Paris
PARIS— Julien was supposed to go to the concert at the Bataclan, but got turned away at the door because it was sold out.
Emma got a text from her friend sent seconds before the shooting started: “I’m at Le Carillon.” Then for the next hour, with all the cellphone networks jammed, she couldn’t get through to him.
Eva was supposed to go out on the Canal St. Martin and would have walked right by La Bonne Bière café, but decided to finish a bottle of wine at home before heading out.
The bars, cafés and restaurants attacked in Friday night’s massacre were all popular hangouts for young people in Paris’ gentrifying northeast end, places where people of all cultures and backgrounds intermingle over a beer or a glass of wine. And two days after the carnage, those who narrowly escaped death now firmly believe these locations were carefully chosen for the kinds of victims that would be found there: millennials.
“This is where all people our age go out,” said Eva Frye, one of the few people who consented to have their last name used. The brand strategist from San Francisco arrived in Paris two days before the attacks for a month-long “work-cation.”
The first place her friends took her on Wednesday night was the Carillon for a drink. Then they crossed the street and had noodles at the Petit Cambodge. Frye walked home thinking she had found the Brooklyn of Paris.
But on Friday night, Frye had plans to see a DJ at a club near the canal, and is still shaken by the thought of what might have happened had she and a friend not lingered at her apartment.
“It’s a super common story,” she said at her shared office where English and French mingle amid the young workers tapping away at laptops. “It really puts things in perspective. You think you’ve got all these problems, but none of that means anything.”
As the piles of flowers outside each shooting site grow into mountains, the sympathy survivors feel is becoming tainted with fear.
At noon, President François Hollande led a moment of silence at the Sorbonne to honour the overwhelmingly young victims. He then proposed a constitutional reform that would reinforce police powers and enable authorities to revoke the citizenship of convicted terrorists. Shortly afterward authorities arrest 127 people in nationwide raids.
I lived in Paris from 2005 to 2010 and spent many evenings strolling on the canal, at concerts at the Bataclan and eating noodles at the Petit Cambodge. Before arriving in Paris again this week, I left a message on Facebook announcing I would be returning. By the time I landed my inbox was full of messages from friends, former colleagues and acquaintances. Some had close calls, others horrifying stories, almost all of them spent a sleepless night Friday. Everyone knew someone who had been killed.
Jean-Baptiste, an old neighbour, worked with Ludovic Boumbas, who is being hailed as a hero for shielding a friend from gunfire at La Belle Équipe. Jean-Baptiste told me he spent Friday evening in denial, telling himself his friend’s silence must be because his phone ran out of batteries, refusing to accept that Ludovic was gone. Monday morning, he made it into the elevator to go to his office’s memorial service, but couldn’t bring himself to get out and let the doors close in front of him.
“I just couldn’t deal with it,” he said.
Parisians aren’t the warmest people in the best of times. Most conversation in the street begins and ends at “pardon.” But Monday, people seemed to be discussing the attacks everywhere: neighbours lingering in the stairwells, strangers debating in the line at the bakery.
“It feels good to talk about it,” said Emilie, a waitress at a restaurant near the Carillon.
But that doesn’t mean people aren’t on edge. Beneath its composed exterior, the city is all frazzled nerves.
As she cleaned up after the lunch service, Emilie remained defiant.
“I’m going to live like I always have, and that’s it,” she said, before knocking over a wine glass.