French President François Hollande led a tribute Monday to the victims of terror attacks, an annual ceremony that is taking on added significance as the country tries to heal from assaults that have killed over 200 people in the past year, reports The Wall Street Journal.
The ceremony, attended by hundreds of people including France’s leaders and families of those killed, was held in the gardens of Les Invalides, the burial site of Napoleon Bonaparte and many French war heroes.
“Our country had never been attacked to this extent, with such destructive rage, with such barbaric cruelty,” Mr. Hollande told victims during a 20-minute speech
The names of the victims of attacks carried out by Islamic extremists last year in Paris and in Nice on July 14th were read out during the solemn ceremony, which also remembered French people killed in attacks in Brussels, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast and Mali. Rows of armed soldiers clad in ceremonial uniform stood opposite the crowd.
After some of the families of those killed made short speeches, Mr. Hollande delivered an address, praising the resilience of victims and issuing a rallying cry for the defense of France’s values.
With less than eight months until the French presidential elections, Mr. Hollande’s rivals have accused him and his left-wing government of not doing enough to stop the attacks. Some conservative politicians have called for exceptional changes to French law to ban Islamist symbols and preventively detain individuals suspected of being radicalized.
Mr. Hollande has rejected those calls, saying that France would defeat its enemies by sticking to its democratic rules.
“The rule of law is not a weakness; it is the strength of the state,” he said on Monday. “All these attacks have the same goal: to spread fear and desolation, to destroy the cohesion of our country, to weaken our democracy and our way of life, our culture, our exceptional way of being together.”
Mr. Hollande used the speech to announce that the French government had reached an agreement to shore up a fund to compensate victims that was being drained by the surge in attacks, although he didn’t provide details.