Paris under Lockdown

It’s 6PM, and I’m walking home to the Latin Quarter after meeting a friend for coffee. We met in a café close to Les Halles, and did a little vintage shopping in the Marais. There’s a baguette tucked under my arm. To all intents and purposes, this is a normal day, but there are many signs that life is far from normal here in Paris.

To begin with, there are the sirens. A near constant stream of them, every ten minutes or so since the morning of the 7^th of January, when the initial attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices occurred.  Often, they fade into the background, just another aspect of noisy Parisian life. As my friend notes, “it could just be a robbery somewhere”. But the numerous convoys of police cars, including many plain-clothes cars (and even, in a bitterly humourous moment, an ordinary bus topped by a comically small blue flashing light), would indicate otherwise. Whenever one goes past, people look up from their newspapers and phones, trying to guess where it is going and why. Any one of them could mean a new attack somewhere, one that they haven’t found out about on Twitter yet.

In a city on lockdown, with four separate surprise attacks in the space of three days, there’s a constant sense of suspense, a morbid “where next?” Most people check the news more compulsively than ever before. If they’re like me, they assess the distance of each new attack from their home, and the homes of their loved ones. Each day brings new and tragic news, another blow to the city of Paris.

Life continues normally for the most part. People here have no choice but to continue with their working week, not cower in fear in their homes. There are, however, constant reminders of the danger of the situation. Drinking wine with my girlfriends at Trocadero, our giggles are silenced as a group of at least 20 gendarmerie walk by, blank-faced, glinting rifles poised for action. Exiting the metro at Châtelet, I can feel the armed soldiers assessing my face, my walk, my bag, for signs of suspicion.  Entering a museum, I’m met with a brusque “spread your legs”, and I’m frisked and scanned.

A local student I spoke to said “I was with two Muslim friends, and when we changed trains at Republique, 5 policemen stopped us, searched us, and asked for our IDs. I didn’t have mine, so they ran my name through the database to ensure I wasn’t wanted.” It may be of interest to note that I, a Caucasian female, was not stopped by the police at Republique the previous evening. France’s polarised religious tensions, which already run so high, have been reignited by the week’s events. Three attacks on Muslim places of work and worship happened yesterday, and the hashtag “Je Suis Ahmed” was created in solidarity. Whether anti-Muslim, anti-Islamist or pro-Muslim, everyone has a point of view on the issue.

There’s a sense of constant suspicion, but also of defiance: huge banners are placed on buildings and monuments, posters have been stuck up over regular adverts, social networks are inundated with posts, all reading the same three words: Je Suis Charlie. You only have to turn on the news to see the worldwide protests, but here the sentiment is tangible. On the other hand, there is a backlash quietly simmering away. Although a million copies of the magazine will reportedly be published next week, questions are beginning to be asked – quietly, not wishing to be unpatriotic or condone the atrocities – about whether Charlie Hebdo’s satire was an appropriate expression of free speech, or an outlet which took the joke too far and caused serious pain, for example, by mocking the girls kidnapped by Boko Haram or portraying France’s black Justice Minister as a monkey. 

Now that the three original suspects, and today’s gunman, have been apprehended, the drama seems to be over, and the people of Paris are taking time to mourn. As I walked home, the bells of Notre Dame were ringing out, and people stopped to listen, or to sit quietly and contemplate what had happened. Yesterday was a national day of mourning, with flags tied up with black ribbon, the Eiffel Tower’s light extinguished, and all government-run Twitter feeds marked with a black band in their icons. Paris’ celebrated joie de vivre is subdued. As the sun set over Paris, there was a sombre feeling in the air, but an assurance that France will never back down in the face of barbarity. As professed in a statement from French President Franҫois Hollande : "Nous sortirons encore plus forts. Vive la République et vive la France." *

* “We emerge from this even stronger. Long live the Republic and long live France.”

#JeSuisCharlie

#JeSuisCharlie

Today has been a dark day for Paris: gunmen bursting into the offices of satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and opening fire, killing 12 and injuring 7. At this moment, Paris is on lockdown and the perpetrators are still armed and in hiding. A debate has arisen about the freedom of the press, and protests are taking place all over the world to mourn the victims and condemn the attack. I attended the key protest, in Place de la République, this evening. Truthfully, I’m a fraud. I set out in a voyeuristic capacity, not to make my voice heard but to see the drama for myself. Trumped up on my own ‘Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin’ sense of adventure, I was quickly knocked down a peg or two by the tangible nature of the danger. Paris is currently on its highest possible terrorism alert, and most people are voting with their feet and staying indoors. The streets were practically empty. At every metro stop, I’d catch a snippet of an announcement that was being made “...La prefecture de police...” but the doors would close before I heard the rest. Only when the train glided slowly through Richard-Lenoir station, doors remaining firmly closed, did I realise that the station was on lockdown due to “raisons de securité” (read: terrorist threat). And the amount of police officers, both uniformed and plain-clothes, at Place de la République made me unsure as to whether I should feel safe, or stupid for venturing out in the first place.  

The crowd itself, spilling out around the square’s monument, was divided into two halves, which seemed to reflect the two sentiments of the protest itself: grief at the massacre of the victims, and rage at the stifling of free expression. The far side was muted, contemplative, reverent. Faces and quotes of the victims were posted on the monument and there were candlelit shrines. The people had come not to shout, but to mourn, and to process the events of the day.  The people weren’t just rebellious students but Parisians from all walks of life. As many people have noted before me, nothing brings the French together like a manifestation. On the other side, the side with the TV cameras trained on it, there was a crowd of students on the monument itself, shouting catchy chants and clapping their hands, very aware that they were the centre of attention, teenagers taking selfies, pretty girls hanging around hoping to be interviewed, and reporters all searching for the poignant photograph to accompany their piece (In under a minute, I heard both “Je cherche un source de lumiere” and “Pardon, can I take a photo of your candle?”). It was easy to be cynical, to wonder whether the crowd was here to defend the freedom of the press, or simply to be mentioned in it. As one bypasser noted of the protest’s most ardent shouter, “How can a 16 year old know about the freedom of the press?” The young woman in question seemed drunk on the experience – but was it a desire for social justice, or publicity, that fuelled her fire?  

While I was there, playing at being a journalist (and ultimately failing, what with my stunning point-and-shoot camera and blog), I came to see the ugly side of it all: while citizens were coming together, genuinely mourning and expressing fury, the place was swamped with reporters taking photos and looking for their story’s angle. You can’t fail to see the irony in the situation: that the sincerity of a protest in favour of press freedom was corrupted by the presence of the press itself.

N.B. I arrived at the protest later on in the evening, not when it reached its peak at around 8pm.