France has paid tribute to the 130 people killed 10 years ago by Islamic State gunmen and suicide bombers who targeted a stadium, bars, restaurants and the Bataclan concert hall in the country’s deadliest peacetime attack.
“The pain remains,” Emmanuel Macron wrote on social media on Thursday as he visited each of the sites that were attacked. Bells rang out across the city as a remembrance ceremony began at a memorial garden in central Paris attended by relatives and survivors.
“Everything will be done to prevent any new attack and to ruthlessly punish those who would dare to attempt it,” Macron said in a speech at the ceremony. “Eighty-five attacks have been foiled in 10 years, including six this year.”
Arthur Dénouveaux, the president of the survivors’ group, Life for Paris, said: “One thing unites all victims of terrorism: the will for it to never happen again to anyone else.”
Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attacks in and around Paris on the night of 13 November 2015. Attackers killed 90 people at the Bataclan concert hall, where the US band Eagles of Death Metal were playing. Others were killed at Parisian restaurants and cafes, and one person was killed near the Stade de France, where spectators were watching France play Germany in a men’s football friendly.
At the Paris remembrance ceremony on Thursday night, Jesse Hughes, of the Eagles of Death Metal, who was on stage when gunmen entered the Bataclan gig, sang “You’ll Never Walk Alone” with a choir of survivors and victims’ relatives.
The sole surviving member of the 10-person terrorist cell that staged the attacks, Salah Abdeslam, 36, is serving a life sentence in jail. The other nine attackers blew themselves up or were killed by police.
Abdeslam is open to the idea of speaking to victims of the attacks if they want to take part in a “restorative justice” initiative, his lawyer Olivia Ronen has said.
France is to open a terrorism memorial museum in 2029, telling the story of terrorism in France from the 1960s to the present day. It will show many objects linked to the 2015 attacks or its victims, most of them contributed by the bereaved families.
The collection includes a concert ticket donated by a mother who lost her only daughter at the Bataclan, and the unfinished guitar of an instrument maker who was also killed at the concert. It also contains a blackboard menu from La Belle Équipe restaurant riddled with bullet holes and bearing the words “Happy Hour”.
The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, told RTL radio: “The terrorists wanted to attack this culture that is ours – this culture of joy, celebration, diversity, sharing and music.”
Sophie Dias fought back tears outside the Stade de France as she told Associated Press of a “void that never closes” since her father, Manuel, became the first victim when the first bomb detonated outside the stadium.
Speaking at the gate where her father was killed, she said the absence he had left “weighs every morning and every evening, for 10 years”. She said: “We are told to turn the page, but the absence is immense, the shock is intact and the incomprehension remains.”
Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report
