A few months ago, I traded Paris for the countryside of southern France. Having lived for years in the bustling Oberkampf neighbourhood in the east of the capital city, my family now lives an altogether different life.
Just two weeks before the horrific terrorist attacks on the Bataclan concert hall, Le Petit Cambodge restaurant and other locations which were also our places, we jumped ship and moved to the countryside. It was a long-term plan that took the best part of a decade to execute.
I used to spend Sunday mornings trekking to the park or strolling through the Marais, the buggy filled with or flanked by my four children. I now simply open the back door and shoo everyone outside to play in the garden.
We keep chickens. A feisty young cockerel recently took up residence with the roosters. The cockadoodledoo my children aptly christened Monsieur Noisy has yet to synchronise his morning crow with daybreak. This discord meant I found myself checking the time on my iPhone in the wee hours of last Friday. It was then I discovered the horrible news. A news app on my phone had sent an alert.
The night before, a French-born man of Tunisian origin had driven a truck into a crowd of innocent people in Nice on the Cote d'Azur, as local families and foreign holidaymakers gathered to watch the annual Bastille Day fireworks display.
Before the sun had risen over our olive trees, once again I found myself texting friends to see if they were okay. To check whether they were alive or dead. That’s just not normal. It’s downright tragic.
Eighty-four people were killed, among them ten children. Many, many more remain hospitalised and in critical condition. Scores have been maimed or disfigured.
People in the south of France are reeling. The day following the November attacks in Paris, I cried hot tears for friends in my old neighbourhood. For weeks afterwards, I felt carved hollow by the immensity and awfulness of it. It didn’t feel abstract to me. It felt real. It felt raw.
I couldn’t help but register at the time how locals in my little Provencal village appeared to be going about their daily lives as though nothing had happened. They remained at a remove. But that was not the case this time.
Exchanging greetings with staff as I dropped my toddler off at crèche last Friday morning, it was clear this time I wasn’t the only one struggling to hold back tears or steady my voice. Everyone looked exhausted. Imagine having to swallow such violence for breakfast.
Just the day before, I had celebrated La Fête de la Bastille with Parisian friends, toasting their arrival chez moi with a glass of rosé in the sunshine. Emmanuelle and Thibault soon admitted how good it was to get away from Paris for a bit.
The French nation as a whole appeared to breathe a sigh of relief on the evening of July 14th. The European football championships and state celebrations for the national holiday, had both gone off with (or rather, without) a bang.
President François Hollande had just announced the long-awaited end of the Etat d'Urgence, or National State of Emergency, activated following the terrorist attacks in Paris last November. Little did he know that just hours later he would be making a u-turn on this decision.
Bastille Day is a big deal in France. The French equivalent of our St Patrick's Day commemorates the storming of the Bastille Prison on 14th July 1789 and La Fête de la Fédération the year after. In short, it's a national holiday celebrating unity, which is painfully ironic given that terrorist attacks are now cleaving a deep divide in French society.
What people living outside France might not realise is that for contemporary French citizens, Bastille Day also heralds the start of summer holidays. A certain effervescence is always palpable about this date.
After a few years in Paris, I came to recognise how, every summer, around the beginning of July, the usual daily greetings at the bakery turned from automated to animated. The usually pouty boulangère bubbled with banter and happy anticipation, her congés annuels, or annual leave, finally within arm's reach.
All weekend news channels all cautioned heavy traffic on French autoroutes. Quelle surprise! The Great Exodus from capital to countryside and coastal havens is an annual affair, eliciting delight and dread in equal measure.
What relevance does any of this have to the dreadful, unthinkable terror that was inflicted on innocent people last Thursday night in Nice? The heinous camion crime was committed when, not only those people with their faces upturned to watch fireworks had their backs turned, but when the entire French nation had lowered its guard.
Only last week I had a spine-chilling conversation with a friend who stopped in to see us on her way from Paris to the Côte d'Azur. School wrapped up on the afternoon of Tuesday 5th and that same evening Marie jumped aboard the TGV at Gare de Lyon with her two children.
The train was direct and journey time estimated at three and a half hours. An hour into the journey, a man entered the carriage, and appeared to be consulting a train ticket, glancing from his mobile phone to the seat numbers, and back again. The man had what seemed to be a violin case strapped to his back.
Ashamed, my friend recounted how she trembled for several long minutes, frozen in her seat, fighting with the urge to pull the emergency cord. "Could that instrument case conceal a Kalashnikov?" she asked herself. A well-timed cursory passage through the carriage by the SNCF conductor eventually dissipated her fears, fortunately unfounded.
This is just one example of the inner wrangle many French citizens have been torturing themselves with every day for the past 18 months.
Les Français, and their national motto, "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité", have been challenged in the extreme since the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the kosher supermarket in Paris in January 2015.A friend from Paris put it this way: "How can you feel brotherhood with the person sitting next to you on the Metro or wheeling a trolley alongside yours in the supermarket, when they might actually be 'one of them' - a radicalised terrorist, ready to go to any lengths for the Caliphate?"
On Friday evening French prime minister Manuel Valls called for the nation to remain united. But is that realistic? The man who drove a truck into a crowd full of families was a resident of Nice. He slew his own townspeople. What happened to his sense of brotherhood?
Waiting for my children to emerge from summer camp the other morning, I fell into conversation with a cluster of parents and grandparents. One man from the village introduced himself as Louis. Moments later he told me, almost apologetically, that he was of Maghreb origin. He asserted that where there was once diversity and pluralism in France, now there is only divisiveness.
Louis said that he feels "honte", or shame, on behalf of his people, for not standing tall and denouncing the terrorists. He believes that by doing so, normal peaceful Muslims could differentiate and distance themselves from the radicals and extremists.
Noteworthy is that when Louis referred to “his people”, he referred to the country from whence his family came: Algeria. Louis was born and raised in the south of France. This speaks volumes about the alienation felt by second and third generation immigrants in France; they don’t feel French. Many of them would say they are not permitted to.
This same man recounted how he was one of very few “non Europeans”’ present at the silent standing protest which spontaneously took place on Place de la Republique the evening after the Charlie Hebdo attacks. Why so few Muslims? They don’t dare show up for fear of reprisals, for fear of being tarred with the same brush as the terrorists.
Presidential elections will be held in 2017 so this is potentially a very pivotal time for French politics. No-one was surprised to hear that president Francois Hollande was booed when he came to pay his respects to those who perished on Nice's Promenade des Anglais.
French friends I spoke to all concurred: they’re sick and tired of hearing politicians pronounce “we do not negotiate with terrorists”, without any concrete action or follow through. There is a sense that Hollande is a president fumbling in the shadows, his mandate scarred by one terrorist attack after another.
Following the January 7th and 9th terrorist attacks, Parisians proved their resilience, taking to the streets and shouting the slogan "Je suis Charlie".Borrowing an endearing phrase plucked out of French children's storybooks, they repeated "même pas peur" ("we're not afraid") to interviewing journalists and TV crews.
It all feels rather different this time around. That optimistic rhetoric just doesn’t seem to wash. People appear less resilient following last week’s heinous events.
At the very moment when the French populace should be downing tools, clocking off work and packing a valise for the Côte d’Azur, fear has gripped the nation by the scruff of the neck.
Back in the summer of 1991 I lived in Nice, eating dry baguettes and drinking only eau potable (tap water) for weeks, so I could pay for my digs. I scoured Nice Matin newspaper and pounded the majestic Promenade des Anglais under the hot sun day after day in search of a summer job. I was 19, and poor, but content. When eventually I unearthed employment, I splashed jubilantly with my childhood friend through the fountain on the famous Place Masséna, not an armed guard in sight. That was clearly a very different, carefree era.
What must French families be thinking as they pack (or decide to unpack) for their few weeks annual leave? Previously the terrorist threat was limited to urban landscapes.
As a local woman I bumped into to yesterday morning at the butchers said, “It’s not just Paris any more. It’s the towns and villages. It’s everywhere”.
France and its populace are now caught up a war without a name, without rules, without boundaries. The randomness of it makes me think of the party game Pin the Tail on the Donkey. My neighbour likened the period we’re now living through in France to “one of those horrible video games… except we don’t know where the power off button is”.
It wasn’t just a new day that broke over Nice on Friday 15th July. It was the dawn of a new era, everywhere.
