The Cross: How strong can this celebration marking the 10th anniversary of the January 2015 attacks be?
Gérôme Tip: It is a constant, for each terrorist attack that becomes an event: the 10th anniversary marks a turning point. The first and second anniversaries are accompanied by extensive media coverage and the presence of prominent members of government at the ceremonies. Then, from the fifth year onwards, a hollow period of memory begins, until it resurfaces on the 10th birthday. This was the case for September 11, 2001 in the United States or even for the attack of March 11, 2004 in Spain.
Exactly, ten years later, what do we know about the rupture brought about by this year 2015?
G. T. : The attack against Charlie Hebdo in January 2015 represents a historic event which was immediately experienced as such. Thousands of people gathered the same evening, the “Je suis Charlie” movement flooded social networks and, the following Sunday, January 11, 4 million French people marched in the streets. It was the first time that journalists were assassinated in our country where freedom is fundamental. The run of terrorists in the streets of Paris, the attacks in Montrouge and the Hyper Cacher Porte de Vincennes also fueled this feeling of something unprecedented.
This is how The World was able to title “French September 11”, even if the number of deaths and material destruction were in no way comparable. Moreover, when nine months later France endured November 13, this analogy may have seemed clumsy, these simultaneous and much more deadly attacks appearing closer to the attacks of 2001.
How did the 2015 attacks impact French society?
G. T. : It is an ambivalent process. After a few moments of chaos, society organizes itself to respond to the attack. This strengthens cohesion – we rarely feel “together” – and creates common memories. But, at the same time, it fuels tensions. The debate “Who is or is not Charlie?” » was emblematic of this. There was particular suspicion towards working-class neighborhoods, which at the time could be said to be less affected than the rest of society.
With my colleague Fabien Truong, we investigated for ten years in Grigny, in Essonne, where Amedy Coulibaly was from. (one of the perpetrators of the Montrouge and Hyper Cacher attacks, Editor’s note) : very quickly, a discourse was put in place, insinuating that people here were basically more in solidarity with the terrorists than with the victims. Added to the shock of the attacks was that of stigma.
All this, however, only lasts for a while. After nine to ten months generally, we start to turn the page. However, in 2015, ten months after the January attacks, it is November 13. And eight months later, there was the attack of July 14, 2016 in Nice. This long sequence of a year and a half has deeply shaken France, like no other European country in recent history.
What memory does French society have of it?
G. T. : Each attack affects us and marks us more or less depending on our own factors. Everyone reacts to it from their position and from what they have experienced so far. The attack in Nice, for example, could have been strongly felt in the provinces, where until then such attacks were associated with capitals. Likewise, September 11 had not been experienced in the same way by those, in France, who knew the American metropolis, sometimes had friends there, and others. This then plays on the memory that everyone has of these events.
But overall, things also tend to smooth out and blend together in memories. The “13-Novembre” program, coordinated by the historian Denis Peschanski and the neuropsychologist Francis Eustache, has been collecting data for ten years. Many of those interviewed today mention the “Paris attacks” or “the 2015 attacks” indistinctly. And cite the Bataclan more than the other attacks of November 13. Journalists and politicians have a responsibility in this regard, when they use unfortunate expressions like “the Bataclan attacks”…
What are still the traces and effects in society?
G. T.: First there are all the memorial traces, such as the commemorative plaques or the tree of remembrance on Place de la République in Paris. Its story is interesting: for the first anniversary of the January attacks, it was planned to plant 17 olive trees there, but after November 13 and its 130 deaths, we finally opted for a single tree: an oak, destined to become centenary, but which very few passers-by notice at the moment… There is also the museum-memorial project, announced by Emmanuel Macron in 2018 but threatened today by cuts budgetary.
Then, there are all these traces that the attacks leave in urban space and our daily life, which we end up no longer seeing, such as security gates or concrete blocks at the entrance to pedestrian zones, image of the Promenade des Anglais, completely redeveloped since 2016.
As for the concrete effects, they are also numerous. In the short term, there are for example forms of memorial tourism around the struck sites, which we could observe in the République district in Paris as in New York after September 11, or the impact on a room spectacle like the Bataclan which, once reopened, struggled to become profitable again. But in the long term, it remains very difficult to distinguish what, on the scale of French society, has been specifically modified by this year and a half of attacks. Quite simply because this society has experienced many other things since then, from the yellow vests to the current political crisis, including – and this is not nothing in the realm of the “unheard of” either – the pandemic. of Covid-19.
