Tired by illness, Jacques Dalmasso had come to the Notre-Dame de l’Assomption basilica in the centre of the Riviera city of Nice to join a gathering on Friday organised in homage to the three victims who died in the knife attack there by a Tunisian Islamist extremist the previous day.
The 60-year-old pensioner who lives in the immediate neighbourhood, found a chair to sit on in the middle of the Jean-Médecin avenue, normally busy with traffic, his eyes firmly shut. “I’m tired of everything I’ve seen, that’s why I don’t want to open my eyes anymore,” he said, fiddling with the beads of his rosary.
It was just before 8.30am on Thursday morning last week when Tunisian national Brahim Aouissaoui, 21, arrived at the church armed with a long knife and slit the throat of the church’s warden, Vincent Loquès, 55, and attacked two women inside the church. He fatally stabbed a mother of three, Simone Barreto Silva, 44, who managed to flee the building but died from her wounds, and “virtually beheaded”, in the words of France’s chief anti-terrorism prosecutor, 60-year-old Nadine Devillers.
Aouissaoui, who was shot by police and hospitalised, had still not been questioned on Sunday due to his condition.
“I often used to speak with Vincent,” said Dalmasso, referring to the church warden, “and he understood what I wanted to say. These recent days, I already had a heart heavy with the catastrophes of the Roya, Covid and all that.” Dalmasso comes from the Roya Valley, north of Nice, which was hit by devastating flash floods in early October. “On Thursday I was frightened.,” he continued. “Early in the morning I came passed the street and I heard screaming […] We’ve seen so much. I’m tired.”
Enlargement : Illustration 1
“I often came to the basilica. I’d place a candle, I’d say a little prayer. I used to speak with Vincent, we were friends.” As Dalmasso was talking, a man walked past to place a candle alongside many others on a protection barrier that had been erected beside the church in 2016 when the city was the site of one of the most murderous terrorist attacks in France, claimed by the so-called Islamic State group.
That took place on July 14th 2016 when Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a Tunisian national, drove a large truck into Bastille Day crowds on the seafront boulevard, the Promenade des Anglais, killing 86 people and injuring more than 450 others.
While the investigation into Thursday’s attack continues – six people were being questioned in custody on Sunday – the shock of the barbaric events appeared to have dazed the inhabitants of this district of the city, once emblematic of the attractions of the Riviera.
Marie and Jérémie, both students and both aged 22, also arrived in front of the church on Friday carrying flowers and holding hands. “Yesterday I felt completely disorientated,” said Jérémie. “I learnt the news from a friend who was on the spot. You feel lost. One has the impression that things repeat themselves, like a few years ago, on a different scale but just as serious.”
Marie said she had initially felt frightened, but that in the evening, the last before the newly announced lockdown on public movement to stem the rapidly increasing Covid-19 virus epidemic came into place, the pair decided to go out for a drink. “To have a breather, too,” said Jérémie. “I wanted to get things out of my system. Everything was mixed up in our minds. The lockdown, the attack, the fear of the virus, the disgruntlement. I had the feeling that anything I did was unjust – after all, there’d just been an attack and I was off to have a drink. But at the same time, as soon as we changed neighbourhoods, life was still there.”
Whereas all through Thursday, when the centre of Nice was blocked off by security barriers and police vans, bringing the Jean-Médecin avenue to a standstill, by the evening, when the heavy police presence was lifted, the terraces of cafés and bars were filled with customers and, like elsewhere in the city, stayed busy until the 9pm curfew already in place because of the virus epidemic.
Laurent Champenois is the manager of the Fnac store in Nice, one of a popular national chain selling electronic and entertainment goods, which sits opposite Notre-dame church. He is also president of an association representing all the shops and stores in the busy local area of the Jean-Médecin avenue and the Masséna square. “All the traders say it: we don’t understand the world in which we live,” he said. “We’ve felt anger, but all the while asking ourselves why this is happening again for us in Nice.”
The neighbourhood is also residential, and Champenois described a convivial atmosphere where people know each other and share company. He spoke of how, arriving at his store early in the morning, he often came across church warden Vincent Loquès. “There is this idea that time allows things to heal, but I think today people are fed up,” he said. People ask themselves ‘why?’ – What have they done?"
Enlargement : Illustration 2
The treasurer of the Notre Dame parish committee, Jean-François Gourdon, used to join the warden every morning for the opening of the doors of the basilica church. After doing so last Thursday morning, it happened that he left early, just moments before the attack. “I lost my friend,” he said. “In the beginning I felt a lot of sorrow, now it’s anger. Forgiveness serves no purpose. The parishioners are appalled and angry. They say they’ve had enough, the want to see results.”
Thierry Vimal, whose eldest daughter died in the July 14th 2016 terrorist massacre on the Promenade des Anglais, is co-president of an association called La Promenade des Anges (“the promenade of the angels”) which provides support – including with legal, medical and professional issues – to victims’ families and the survivors of the attack.
“For me, on Thursday, I didn’t feel dumbfounded,” he said. “I said to myself, it’s happening again, there’ll be people who will need us.” Of the apparent despondency of many following last Thursday’s attack, he said: “Strong emotions are something that is enormously tiring. We, the bereaved victims of July 14th [2016], haven’t yet found rest from that. So, there are moments of anger, of spiteful anger, of emotion. But we are tired and there’s a lot of despondency. People are saying, ‘it’s too much’.”
Marie Borges Sanchez, 34, is an auxiliary nurse at a care home and a parishioner of Notre Dame. She said she learned of Thursday’s attack at work. “I immediately thought of July 14th,” she said. “That evening [in 2016] I was with my children, we left running.” She joined those paying homage to the victims outside the church. “What is tomorrow going to be made of?” she asked.
Patrick Allemand, a former socialist member of the Nice municipal council and who served 17 years as vice-president of the council of the surrounding region of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, underlined the importance of the trauma left by the July 2016 attack in understanding reactions now, which he described as a restrained anger. Nice, notably in its peripheral housing estates, has a sizeable population of North African origin, and Allemand, said that after the attack four years ago, “it was a clear anger that took hold, creating a city fractured in part”. He sees a different sentiment now. “We have already lived through horror, that contributes towards an acceptance, despite the anger,” he commented.
Nice-based psychologist Florent Viard is a specialist in treating the effects of trauma using the technique known as EMDR – for “eye movement desensitization and reprocessing”. He sees a neuroscientific explanation for the common reactions to Thursday’s attack. The process of identifying insecurity in a given situation begins in the amygdala, which are clusters of neurons deep in the middle of the brain. “We then analyse the situation, then our prefrontal cortex will allow us to calm ourselves,” he explained. “But if we are too exposed to situations of insecurity we become too sensitive, and in that case different reactions are possible […] Some people have come to see me who have anxiety attacks simply from the idea that a terrorist attack has taken place, without even being [directly] confronted by it.”
Viard said that in some people, in order to survive a new trauma, the brain can adopt a detachment that ranges from no longer feeling anger to despondency. The attack last Thursday could represent, he explained, “the straw that breaks the camel’s back and which sets off this dissociative reaction”.
-------------------------
- The original French version of this report can be found here.