At half-past nine in the evening, on Friday, November 13th, Matthieu, a thirty-three-year-old resident of Paris, was eating dinner outside with friends at Le Petit Cambodge, a restaurant in the Tenth Arrondissement, near the Canal Saint-Martin. The Canal is a cosmopolitan neighborhood and a favorite destination for the city’s twenty- and thirty-somethings. The restaurant serves Cambodian food in an atmosphere of industrial chic, with long tables, lots of brushed steel, and naked light bulbs. The evening was mild. Across the street, at a comfortably dingy bar called Le Carillon, patrons were mingling on the sidewalk with their drinks.
A car screeched to a stop a few feet from where Matthieu was sitting and a man jumped out, firing a Kalashnikov. For a moment, Matthieu thought he was watching a private settling of scores. Then the man fired a second burst; there was a tremendous shattering of windows and bottles. Matthieu leapt over the table and started running. At the top of the street, he stopped and listened. It was only then that he realized that a bullet had lodged in his left hand. His pinkie and ring fingers hung at a crooked angle.
“The terrible thing is that I saw I was out of danger, and so I had two options,” he told me. “I could either leave or go back to see my friends, at the risk of being shot again.”
We were sitting in Matthieu’s apartment, close to Père Lachaise Cemetery. I’d met him four years earlier through mutual friends, but, aside from running into each other at their wedding, we hadn’t been in touch since. He spoke wearily, pausing frequently to take long, shaking breaths. His left hand was bandaged, the two damaged fingers trussed together, a hospital bracelet still around his wrist. In his good hand he held a cigarette, which trembled as he moved it to his lips. Two days had passed since the attacks, which were organized by an ISIS terrorist cell with roots near Brussels and carried out simultaneously at six locations around Paris. Three suicide bombers had blown themselves up outside the Stade de France during a France-Germany soccer match, killing one civilian. At the Bataclan, a concert venue on the Boulevard Voltaire, three gunmen fired into the trapped crowd. The official death toll of a hundred and twenty-nine was sure to rise.
People were running through the streets in an eruption of panic, shouting as the police arrived and tried to establish order. The scene couldn’t be secured; Matthieu worried that the shooters might return. Next to him, a man without injuries held his girlfriend’s lifeless body in his arms. Then, without warning, he ran off. The woman was about twenty-five and very beautiful. Matthieu searched for words to describe her perfect, uncanny stillness.
A few medical workers came to the scene almost immediately. Le Petit Cambodge and Le Carillon, which also came under fire, are down the street from l’Hôpital Saint-Louis, one of Paris’s largest hospitals. But because of the number and severity of the attacks, and a confusion about whether the killers might still be at large, it took nearly two hours for ambulances to begin evacuating people.
As Matthieu was loaded into an ambulance, medics told him that he had been shot in the small of the back; adrenaline had masked the pain. The bullet had stopped just short of his spine. Surgeons at the hospital where he was taken told him it was riskier to remove it than not. He asked them to try anyway. “I’m going to spend the rest of my life with this tool of Daesh”—the Arabic acronym for ISIS widely used in France—“in my body?” He rolled an imaginary pellet in his fingers, then released it with a shudder. The bullet was extracted.
All last week in Paris, survivors of the attacks recounted their experiences on television, intercut with smiling Facebook profile pictures of the murdered as well as head shots of the terrorists. “LE VISAGE DE LA TERREUR” read the headline on the Thursday cover of Libération, next to a picture of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the young Belgian jihadist who had directed the attacks, grinning warmly, like a man in a vacation photo. He had been killed the day before, with at least two others, during a raid by French special forces on a house in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis. A number of accomplices had been arrested. Saleh Abdeslam, who with his brother had taken part in the attacks, was still on the run.
Apprehension took hold of the city. Two weeks earlier, ISIS had claimed responsibility for blowing up a Russian commercial jet leaving the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, killing its two hundred and twenty-four passengers. On the day before the attacks in Paris, two ISIS suicide bombers murdered forty-three people in a suburb of Beirut. Last Friday, news came that gunmen had stormed a Radisson hotel in Mali and taken some hundred and seventy hostages, separating out Muslims from non-Muslims; supporters of ISIS celebrated on Twitter.
The day after seeing Matthieu, I visited Patrick Aeberhard, a cardiologist and a co-founder of Médecins sans Frontières, at his apartment overlooking the Canal Saint-Martin, across the street from a café called La Bonne Bière. We watched François Hollande on television addressing a joint session of the French Parliament at Versailles. Hollande strode through a corridor lined with guards in red-plumed hats, sheathed sabres at their sides, and into the assembly hall. “France is at war,” he said. A bombing campaign on Raqqa, an ISIS stronghold in Syria, had begun the night before. Hollande invoked a clause of a European Union treaty which calls for other member states to come to the aid of a country under attack, and proposed changes to France’s constitution to facilitate the prosecution of terrorists.
After Hollande finished speaking, the Parliament rose to sing the “Marseillaise.” At the lines “Against us, tyranny! The bloody standard is raised!” Aeberhard muted the television. On the evening of the attacks, he had been returning home from the funeral of his friend the philosopher André Glucksmann when he heard gunfire. “Since I’m sort of used to countries in the midst of war, I recognized the sound of Kalashnikovs right away,” he said.
On the sidewalk in front of La Bonne Bière, a young woman had been shot in the thigh; her companion had a bullet in his shoulder. He went to help them, thinking, as Matthieu had, that he was witness to some private act of revenge. Then he saw people inside the restaurant administering chest compressions to others lying on the ground. Four other people lay nearby, clearly dead. He treated the woman, using tourniquets made from strips of napkins and tablecloths that waiters brought to him, and went inside to help. A few first-aid responders arrived. “They began to organize a hospital in the restaurant,” he told me. With Médecins sans Frontières, and later with the group Médecins du Monde, Aeberhard had seen conflicts in Lebanon, Afghanistan, El Salvador, Ethiopia, and Rwanda, among many other countries. The situation reminded him of what he had seen in Beirut: “Blood absolutely everywhere—it was a war scene.”
Just as at Le Petit Cambodge, ambulances were slow to arrive. “We waited a very, very long time,” Aeberhard told me. “I think we lost one or two people.” When they did come, triage proved complicated. “There was a woman who had been shot in the stomach, and who was doing much better sitting up,” Aeberhard said. She was almost passed over in favor of people who were splayed on the ground with wounds that were less dire. “I had to fight for them to take her in the first round.”
A plan blanc, the city’s procedure for calling all medical staff to its hospitals in moments of crisis, had gone into effect. Another doctor I spoke with told me that patients began arriving at his hospital around midnight, two to an ambulance. He said that although his colleagues were used to handling traumatic injuries, “there was a psychological dimension to this that none of us had ever experienced before.”
Families rushed to hospital entrances but couldn’t get in; medical staff had little sense of what was going on outside. There hadn’t been time to perform proper identification of the injured and the dead, and, in the days that followed, people roamed from hospital to hospital in search of the missing. Nearly a week later, a full list of names still hadn’t been released.
Aeberhard was born in Paris in 1945, and began studying to become a doctor in his teens—“the classic path of the overprotected bourgeois child,” he said. He was a soixante-huitard, one of the youths who participated in the student protests of May 1968, but he quickly grew disillusioned with the ability of demonstrations to effect political change. That fall, as a hospital intern, he had responded to a Red Cross campaign soliciting medical volunteers to help out in Biafra; Médecins sans Frontières was created three years later.
By 1975, Aeberhard was working part-time for the organization and also had a cardiology practice in Saint-Denis, just down the street from the house where the terrorists were found. He worked there until six months ago and had observed firsthand the demographic shift that had taken place in the neighborhood during the eighties and nineties. The postwar French working-class population had been replaced by immigrants from poorer European countries, like Portugal, Italy, and Poland. Then came the Maghrébins—people from the former French colonies of North Africa.
“We saw the signs of fundamentalism start,” Aeberhard said. “The women began dressing differently, and men began dressing differently. I’d say that was the first exterior sign.” The quality of the local school declined, as did that of the local hospital.
“In Saint-Denis, there are about eighty different nationalities,” Aeberhard said. (Other estimates run higher.) “So it’s not a city of French—even poor French—origin any longer. It’s a cosmopolitan city. And cosmopolitan cities should be good! I’m all for them!” He laughed. “But it’s a city with a lot of tension. Twenty-five percent of the population doesn’t work. Thirty percent of the population votes. You see, it’s a real problem. We didn’t know how to integrate the Maghrébins, who were mostly northern Algerian, who were French, who should have blended right in.”
Ten months ago, after the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket were attacked, more than a million and a half people marched through the center of Paris—the largest demonstration in the recent history of a country in which marches are the most vital expression of solidarity. But after last week’s violence, the police forbade Parisians from assembling in large groups for their own safety. Instead, people gathered quietly, singing songs and embracing strangers. At the attack sites, they laid candles and flowers and handwritten notes.
The question of how to react to the new round of terrorism went deeper than mere logistics. The Charlie Hebdo shootings had been widely understood as an assault on freedom of expression and French secularism; all over the country, people came together to proclaim their lack of fear. But now people were afraid. The journalists of Charlie Hebdo had known that they were terrorist targets and had carried on their work at great personal risk. Last week’s victims were normal people doing normal Parisian things: eating and drinking together, going out at night to hear a concert or watch a soccer game. After a few days, the rhythm of Parisian life returned, but a new fatalism hung in the air. People seemed resigned to the idea that more attacks would happen, maybe soon.
Even before November 13th, the sense of unity established in January had begun to erode. The novelist and filmmaker Abdellah Taïa told me that, after Charlie Hebdo, “this question was here in my head suddenly: Am I going to spend my whole life in France?” It was Monday evening, and we were sitting at La Veilleuse, a café on the Boulevard de Belleville, a short walk from La Bonne Bière and Le Petit Cambodge. Aside from a couple of quick trips to pick up groceries, since Friday night he had been too afraid and depressed to leave his apartment. The afternoon before the shootings, he had gone to the public steambaths in the largely Maghrébin neighborhood of Barbès, in the Eighteenth Arrondissement, and then returned home to watch the France-Germany match. He was asleep when a friend in Casablanca called him with the news.
Taïa was born in Rabat, Morocco, in 1973, and grew up in the city of Salé, the eighth of nine children. His family was poor and spoke only Arabic at home. As a child, he dreamed of becoming a filmmaker, and he later pursued his studies with an eye to improving his French so that he could one day live in Paris. He arrived in the city at the age of twenty-five to work on his doctorate, at the Sorbonne, specializing in Jean-Honoré Fragonard, the eighteenth-century painter.
In terms of French cultural life, Taïa is at once an outsider and an insider. He finds the prospect of living in Morocco inconceivable—he is gay—but as a North African Muslim, he feels the confines of French society, the narrowness of its cultural expectations. More young people have traveled from France to fight in Syria than from any other European country, and there is a furious debate in France about the ways that the cultural separation of the banlieues may leave the young men who grow up there susceptible to recruitment by terrorist networks. Taïa was horrified by the terror, but sympathetic to the larger problem of isolation in the banlieues. “I relate to immigrants from the suburbs more and more,” he said.
I discussed the subject over dinner one night with my friend Sonia Ferhani, a doctoral candidate in English literature at the École Normale Supérieure. She was born in Algeria, a member of the Kabyle ethnic group, and immigrated to France with her parents in 1993, at the age of six. She understood Taïa’s view of the banlieues’ isolation, but she stressed the importance of personal agency. “No one has to tell you, ‘Yeah, you’re French,’ ” she said.
She and her two brothers were raised in Pantin, a banlieue easily accessible to Paris by Métro. Her parents had taken her into the city all the time, but, she said, “people who lived right where I lived would never go to Paris.”
Sonia has had an élite French education—Catholic school, the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand, the École Normale—and is quick to acknowledge that her path is unlike that of almost all her contemporaries from Pantin. “It’s not perfect,” she said, of France. “But even if it’s cliché to say we’re the land of freedom, or that ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité ’ doesn’t mean anything—it does!” Her voice grew passionate. “My dad didn’t come to France just because he spoke the language. He could have gone to Switzerland or Belgium. But he came here because he recognized himself in these values.”
Taïa, like many Muslims in France, had been offended by the implication that after Charlie Hebdo it was incumbent on him to prove that he was “a good Muslim”— an unthreatening, if not truly equal, member of French society. “I was angry after Charlie Hebdo about many things, including France,” he told me. The latest attacks had had a different effect: “Now I am désespéré ”—despairing at the prospect of more terror.
A decade ago, one of Taïa’s nephews in Morocco had been radicalized, recruited on the street by a preacher of jihad. The boy’s father had taken his son to the police, but since no crime had been committed, he was released. After his mentor was arrested, the boy returned to a more normal life, though he was still far more religious than his parents or siblings.
Taïa’s nephew had been fifteen when he began to show signs of extremism. The entire family was baffled. “So young,” Taïa said. I noted that Friday’s attackers were all men in their twenties and that they targeted places popular with people in the same age group. Taïa sipped his tea, thinking it over. “And they were brothers,” he said: the Abdeslams; the Kaouchis, who carried out the Charlie Hebdo massacre; and, in Boston, the Tsarnaevs. “I don’t know what it means, but it struck me.”
When I asked Taïa why he wanted to stay in France, despite all its difficulties, his eyes grew bright. “I want to stay here because the fight has meaning for me here,” he said. Through his writing, he could hope to push for change in French society in a way he could not in Morocco. “I always have the feeling that I am fighting physically,” he said. “It’s a real thing I’m doing.”
Taïa’s most recent novel was published the day after the Charlie Hebdo killings. “Un Pays pour Mourir”—“A Country to Die In”—tells the story of two North African prostitutes in Barbès, one of whom is a transgender woman. “They are living in the heart of Paris, Barbès, and yet they don’t exist for France,” he said. He was thinking of writing a thriller next, about a Maghrébin serial killer.
“There is a real, catastrophic self-hatred in France,” Matthieu told me. We had been talking in his apartment for more than an hour. A friend was due at any minute, to drive him to Normandy; he needed to get away for a few days. Soon, he planned to leave Paris for good. Even before the attacks, he had become fed up with the city. He wanted to quit his job and move back to Bordeaux, where he grew up. His desire to go home surprised me—his parents had hardly been in contact since the news. His father had sent him a text message earlier that day; his mother e-mailed him while he was in the hospital to tell him that he should get sick leave.
Matthieu had his reasons for returning to Bordeaux. He recalled a line from Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel, “Submission,” in which the narrator decides to leave Paris for the southwest following the rise of a French Islamic party: “It was a region where they ate duck confit, and duck confit struck me as incompatible with civil war.” Matthieu smiled wryly. “It’s true that terrorism and the southwest are incompatible. Things move more slowly there. And the decadence of the provinces is less advanced than it is in Paris, where it’s always on the cutting edge.”
I asked him what he meant by “decadence.”
“To me, ‘decadence’ is objective,” he said. “It’s not a value judgment. It’s the fact that France, bit by bit, doesn’t believe in anything in common anymore. Anyone could tell you that.” Regional elections were coming up in a few weeks, and, like many people, Matthieu was worried that the attacks would mean a major victory for Marine Le Pen, the leader of the extreme-right Front National, which could make her a formidable candidate in the 2017 Presidential election. “What I’m really afraid of is that either everyone will rally around the values of the Front National or there won’t be any rallying around anything.”
I remembered that when Matthieu and I first met we’d discussed our upbringings, and religion had come up. His family was Catholic, but I couldn’t remember if he was religious.
“I’m more agnostic than Catholic, though I come from the Catholic culture,” he said. “In any case, this isn’t really a moment when I’m thinking about religion. When I think about religion, I always think about it in connection with what’s beautiful, what’s good. But never in connection with evil. I just don’t see the connection.”
