They gathered, one week on to the minute from the assault of Friday the 13th, around what seemed to be a shadow devoid of life and light – a heavy black tarpaulin draped over the entrance to the Bataclan theatre: or “ba’ta’clan café”, as the awning reads. The previously illuminated sign is still there, now unlit: Nous Productions Présente Eagles of Death Metal, reports The Observer.
Across the road: the vast blanket of candles, flowers and personalised tributes. They form a lineage, somehow, from Washington Square on 11 September 2001, then Place de la République up the road on the night of 7 January this year, now this. Acts of intimacy and frail hope in a vortex out there, of mad politics and distant wars come vengefully home to claim those who had simply gone about their lives. In New York, they had been mid-ranking traders; in January cartoonists and journalists; now it was the turn of young folk out for a drink or pizza – and rock fans.
The hour struck, 9.17pm, and leaden silence fell, broken only by the babble of TV reporters beside their mobile trucks. Flags affixed to the fence: Sardinia, Lebanon, Puerto Rico, Brazil. Teddy bears, a guitar with le Bataclan est toujours vivant – the Bataclan lives forever. A paperback of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, translated as Paris est une fête – Paris is a party. A Paris Saint-Germain banner with an epic poem written on it and special joint plaque made by the supporters’ clubs in France of Liverpool and Everton. And a black vinyl LP, chipped and cracked, with a white flower in the middle – and attached, the darkly bitter words: Rock Kills You.
The story had been told incrementally over the week: by people such as theatre assistant Jean-Pierre Bouyxou recalling the reloading of magazines and shooting those who pleaded, urging his wife: “Play dead and above all keep down. We can survive this.”
The bloodletting had names: two gunmen who came here to execute these “hundreds of idolatrous sinners” attending a “festival of perversion”, as Isis repulsively brands young fans of rock’n’roll. One was called Omar Ismail Mostefai, the other Samy Amimour.
The story of these two men illustrates with cruel clarity the choices that France faced last week – and faces into its future – between two of the republic’s cherished traditions. One is the principle, and figure, of liberté, first and foremost in the secular trinity proclaimed by the revolution. Personified as Marianne, she was ubiquitous last week: one cartoon in a magazine of that name adapted Delacroix’s great painting of her leading the people to show liberty clad in blood-drenched robes leading hi-vis-jacketed paramedics and survivors wrapped in thermal blankets over ground strewn with bodies.