At 6pm sharp on Tuesday, Mickel Dagdalar and Maxence Lezeau squeezed behind a tiny bistro table at Le Barometre, a casual neighborhood hangout on the Boulevard Voltaire. They each lit a cigarette and began sipping at glasses of beer, as the crowd around them swelled.
It was the most typical of Parisian scenes — the sharing of drinks among friends. However, after the worst terrorist assault on France in recent history, it was also meant to be an act of defiance, a modern-day symbol of “la resistance.”
What better way to declare the endurance of France than to live it up at a cafe?
Photo: EPA
“This was an attack on our way of life,” Lezeau said, shouting to be heard above the noise of clinking glasses and rock music. “With this simple act, we’re showing that we are never going to let the terrorists get at the heart of France.”
That the bistro was in the 11th Arrondissement, less than 50m from where a massacre unfolded at the Bataclan theater on Friday last week, added an edge of poignancy to the gesture.
“They were trying to kill our very culture — the French way of life,” said Camille Dancourt, 18, a student at the Institut Catholique, while out with friends earlier in the day. “They will not succeed.”
France is still reeling from the shock of the synchronized terrorist assaults, in which attackers killed at least 129 people in a hail of gunfire and explosions at six sites across Paris. Many conversations drift to somber reminiscences about acquaintances lost, or those still recovering in hospitals.
Hardest hit were the 10th and 11th arrondissements, where gunmen opened fire at three restaurants within walking distance of one another before massacring scores of revelers down the street at the Bataclan.
However, even as French President Francois Hollande warned that “France is at war,” Parisians were mounting their own style of defiance of the Islamic State, the militant group that claimed responsibility for targeting what the group called “the capital of abomination and perversion.”
After days of living with wailing police sirens, hovering helicopters and general unease about large gatherings in public spaces, Parisians ventured back into cafes on Tuesday night, encouraged by a call on Twitter to show defiance by doing the simplest of French acts: lifting a glass of wine on a terrace.
The hashtags #jesuisenterrace, modeled after the Je Suis Charlie sign, and #tousaubistrot lit up people’s cellphones and sent them scurrying toward the nearest bottle of rouge.
“I can’t say that we’re not afraid,” said Dancourt, who lives on the Boulevard Voltaire, a central location of the attacks. “As soon as people hear a loud noise, they look around, and even if we didn’t know the victims personally, it’s clear that this could have happened to any one of us.”
However, compared with the terror and repression that the Islamic State represents, “we have a fantastic life: We are as free as the air. Their acts make us even more determined to show that we will never give up our freedoms,” Dancourt said.
Vanessa Lucot, an architect at La Defense business district, who earlier in the day was eating lunch with a colleague under a gray Parisian sky, ticked off the ways of the French, one by one.
“The French are always out on a terrace, drinking a coffee or wine, talking, smoking a cigarette,” she said as military men in red berets and fatigues armed with machine guns crossed the skyscraper-bordered plaza.
“We’re a little undisciplined. We’re a little irritating,” she said.
“We like to do what we want. That’s the French way,” she said. “They’ll never kill that.”
Before Friday, lingering at a cafe, kissing on the street, savoring avant garde art or even attending an exhibit at the Musee d’Orsay was just a normal facet of French life, Lucot said.
“We didn’t see it as a statement of any sort,” she said. “Now it’s being turned into an act of defiance and a statement of our humanist ideology.”
Still, Parisians are on edge. The busiest lines on the city’s subway system, the Metro, those crossing the main axes of the city, have been emptying out by midevening, while some areas in even touristy neighborhoods like the Marais, the heart of the Jewish quarter, remain uncharacteristically quiet.
At an outdoor market on the Boulevard Raspail in the 6th
Arrondissement, a woman who identified herself only as Mama Bijou said people were still going about their daily routine of shopping for fruits, vegetables and other goods.
However, “they’re just buying what they need, then getting out of here fast,” she said, packing up an array of African wood sculptures as the market closed.
“Everyone feels traumatized, but we still have to go on living,” she said.
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