Paris attacks leave my city asking: how do we react in the face of this horror? | Andrew Hussey | Comment is free | The GuardianParis attacks leave my city asking: how do we react in the face of this horror? | Andrew Hussey | Comment is free | The Guardian










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Paris attacks leave my city asking: how do we react in the face of this horror?


Andrew Hussey








The author of the acclaimed The French Intifada has lived in Paris since 2006. He tells how the attacks have left residents sick at heart and wondering how to repair the damage














Andrew Hussey at a bar in Barbès, home to Paris’s north African market. Photograph: Franck Ferville/Agence VU





Saturday 10 January 2015 15.59 EST







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Everything seems very weird in Paris now. Everywhere you go, you hear the wailing of sirens and see police vans and ambulances in convoy. In normal times, this would be part of the soundtrack and spectacle of daily life. But since the murder of the Charlie Hebdo journalists, and the kidnappings and killings that followed, you can’t help but wonder what is going to happen next, and where?
I work in the 7th arrondissement, not far from the Assemblée Nationale. This is a district of embassies and government buildings so it’s not unusual to see heavily armed police and cars with blacked-out windows. (There are always the same cars parked outside the Syrian embassy, a short step away). But the police seem a little more jumpy than unusual, cars are being towed by bomb disposal experts, office workers are regularly moved out of buildings by bomb scares, gathering in courtyards or the street to chat, smoke and wait.
I live near the southern edge of the city, not far from the Porte de Chatillon and Montrouge, where on Thursday morning a policewoman was shot dead by Amedy Coulibaly, it seems. Normally, this is a homely part of town, culturally and racially mixed with a lively, sometimes rascally street life – a world away from the stuffy 7th arrondissement. I have never known the streets to be as empty and quiet as they are now.
On Thursday morning, I went to buy milk in my local shop, owned by Tunisians. This is normally the moment for me to utter some banter in my woeful Darija Arabic and comment on the telly, always tuned to a Tunisian football channel. This morning, there was no chat and the eyes of the guy who usually serves me were lowered. A tough, hard-faced looking white bloke with a utilitarian-looking mobile – it looked like police issue – stood silent as I did my shopping, waiting for me to leave. I guessed he might be asking questions about some of the black and north African kids who hung around the streets here, messing about and selling weed. The TV was turned to France 2.
At work that afternoon a Muslim female colleague exploded with rage and tears about what was happening. “This is not Islam. Islam is innocent,” she said, “We are being betrayed by cruel monsters.” She meant that she had been betrayed by the killers then on the run, taking hostages, taunting police and convulsing the whole French nation.
Other Muslims I know had hunched shoulders and strained expressions: they knew that blowback was on the way. The Islam of north Africa, where most of France’s Muslims come from, belongs to the Maliki school – a tolerant and easygoing tradition that does not force women to wear veils and encourages such non-fundamentalist activities as music, Sufi mysticism, superstition and magic. Nothing could be further from the fanatical creed of the killers, and this is what my colleague meant by betrayal.
On Friday afternoon, taking a break from my office, and the endless emails and calls about the atrocities, I went to get a haircut. The radio was on, giving live and heated details of the latest developments at Montreuil. We listened in silence. Then a customer said: “This is war. This is an act of war. The government must act.” My left-leaning barber (a Socialist supporter) flinched. But no one dared to disagree.
Much of the media coverage in France, it must be said, has been excellent, forensic, intelligent and not inflammatory. There have been three days of national mourning and flags have been at half-mast all over the city. From where I was watching, everybody, of all races and creeds, respected the minute’s silence on Thursday. Parisians are noted for their black humour even in the most severe circumstances but I have not heard, or heard of, any jokes in poor taste, in public or private. The bars and cafes are emptier than usual and, if they do go out, people seem to congregate in small, subdued groups.
However, the rolling news on television, ever more bleak and frightening with each new twist of the story, has depressed rather than reassured people. There are warnings to avoid the metro. One of my colleagues said that those who did use the metro, who had to use it to get home, were much friendlier than usual, but also wary of young north African-looking men and the frequent halts between stations. Every other person seems to be on a mobile phone, obviously ringing relative and friends: “Twelve dead”; “Two Dead”; “Don’t go to Chatillon”; “Don’t go to Montreuil”.
The politicians of the mainstream parties don’t know what to do. They make speeches and look serious – probably in shock. They are all terrified of what is called “l’amalgame” – mixing up revulsion at the murders with hatred of Islam, racism and a desire for vengeance. But this has not stopped Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front, calling for the death penalty and stronger and harder security measures – the suspension of the Schengen zone and the revoking of double nationalities. For many people, even those of a normally centrist or leftwing position, Le Pen is filling the void left by the mainstream parties. This may be a temporary phenomenon but is a symptom of a population that wants to be reassured that someone is doing something, even if it is the wrong thing.
The media have not made much of the fact that terrorists Saïd and Chérif Kouachi were of French-Algerian origin. But this has been of crucial significance for the French-speaking press of north Africa, in the former French colonies of Morocco, Tunisia and especially Algeria. All of them condemned the killings unequivocally, expressing sorrow and solidarity with their French friends. El Watan, the Algerian daily newspaper, noted that during the 1990s, at the height the Algerian civil war between the government and Islamist terrorists, journalists and intellectuals were the first to be targeted by the Islamists who saw free speech as the privilege of a Frenchified and ungodly elite. From this point of view, it is hard not see echoes of that brutal Algerian conflict now being heard in France.
The phrase “Je suis Charlie” is everywhere, on T-shirts and placards, on the TV, including on the stands for the Vélib, the bikes for hire. It is a decent and moving civic response to the massacre.
But what to do really in the face of such horror? It’s easy to fantasise about vengeance, as many people have been doing, but in reality there is no easy response. Attack Islamic State in Syria and Iraq? Come down even harder (but how?) on Islamic radicals in France? Reform the prison system, which is one of the engine rooms of radicalisation in France? None of these are easy, or are even necessarily going to work. As I write, the government has enough on its hands coping with the aftermath of two sieges and a massacre.
It’s impossible to say what will happen next. However, it is most likely that in the next few days events will be determined by the atmosphere in Paris, indeed in France, rather than big ideas or grand speeches.
It has been striking how many ordinary, apparently non-political people have described this as an attack on the République. For a British person, this can seem a quite extraordinary belief in an abstraction. But it is a fact that Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, the defining code of the republic, does mean something. It is what it means to be French, in everyday life as well as in the world of high politics. If anything at all positive can be said about the atmosphere in Paris in recent days, it is the sense that this is a living reality for most people, and not just an empty slogan.
This is why the murder of free-thinkers, anarchists, subversives, mischief-makers – the staff of Charlie Hebdo – has hit everybody so hard. The only way to sum up how people feel is the French word écoeuré – which means to be disgusted, physically sick, but also in its oldest sense, the first usage which predates the French revolution, to be “sick at heart”.
Andrew Hussey is dean of the London University Institute in Paris and author of The French Intifada: The Long War Between France and its Arabs (Faber, 2014) and Paris: The Secret History (Viking, 2006).



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