Chez Prune opened as usual on the Saturday morning after the attacks. Most of its regulars had not slept or were too scared to leave their homes; some were missing and others were dead, but the east Paris institution rolled up its shutters anyway.
“We had to show we were alive and we had to show we weren’t frightened,” said the manager, Omar Zemoura. “We had to pay homage to those who had died.”
In the days that followed, French newspapers published pictures of the people killed by gunmen in bars and restaurants across the 10th and 11th arrondissements. Omar recognised one of his regulars in Le Parisien. “We are a little village, the same people come and go,” he said. “The French may be known as the world’s biggest moaners, but when something like this happens, we show solidarity.”
The attacks that hit Paris on Friday the 13th targeted the young, carefree and open minded at gigs, football matches and bars in the city’s most diverse neighbourhood. This demographic has been christened Generation Bataclan – it’s a generation stunned to find itself at war.
In the 10th arrondissement, Le Petit Cambodge serves good cheap Cambodian food. Opposite is Le Carillon, an Algerian-owned bar, one of the few places in Paris you can still get a beer for €4. On any ordinary evening, they would be busy with hip young things, but this week the frontage of the bar was a shrine. Bullet holes in the windows had been spiked with flowers; on the pavement, a carpet of bouquets and candles held messages of solidarity and photos of the people killed there – invariably smiling in a group of friends, having fun.
The hashtag “Je suis en terrace”, I am on the terrace, is trending in France – a call to arms for Generation Bataclan. Across canal St-Martin, many of the drinkers outside Chez Prune were out for the first time since the attacks. If we were targeted because we drink, smoke and have fun, one explained, then I’ll just drink, smoke and have as much fun as I can: “Not to prove anything to the attackers or even my friends, but to prove to myself that I still can.”
Amos Reichman lives with his parents in his childhood home above Chez Prune. The 25-year-old student had been at the France v Germany football match at the Stade de France on Friday night when the terrorists blew themselves up outside . He did not hear the explosions and found out about the attack only when anxious phone calls started to come in. “It’s a very moving moment when the woman you loved 10 years ago calls to say I love you,” he smiled.
None of his close friends were hurt, but Reichman says each of them knows someone who was, or worse. They haven’t yet been able to process the tragedy, why it happened, why them, so they meet “to drink, to be together, to hug”.
The latest attacks feel different from the killings at the Charlie Hebdo offices in January. The victims were not targeted specifically for individual acts of alleged provocation, such as illustrating the prophet Muhammad. The attackers, it seems, just did not like the way they chose to live.
After shock and grief, the dominant reaction to this assault has been defiance. “Pray for Paris” has been eclipsed on Facebook and Instagram feeds by angry messages to the terrorists. As Reichman put it: “They wanted to kill life and our insouciance? Fuck them.”
In the footsteps of Charlie Hebdo, Generation Bataclan is fighting back with satire. The man who pleaded ignorance at having rented his St-Denis apartment to the terror cell behind the attacks has rapidly become a Twitter sensation. The handle Logeur du Daesh, Daesh Landlord, churns out ludicrous possible excuses for missing the fact that his tenants were terrorists: “They told me they were gonna drop something heavy I thought it was a mixtape.” And “When they asked me if I knew how to make molotov cocktails, I said I was no barman.”
Underneath this dark humour lies deep collective trauma and confusion – survivors are struggling to make sense of the atrocity. Some, like Tariq, 40, believe that multiculturalism – rather than hedonism – was the more likely target: “They shot the poorest, the youngest, the weakest ... everyone’s looking for answers, asking why?”
“Immigration has failed in many places across France, but in this one area, it is a massive success. In that one neighbourhood you find all cultures, religions – and it’s very culture-centric.”
On Friday evening, Tariq was heading out to his friend Hodda Saadi’s 35th birthday party at a bar she had recently become the co-owner of and was “running late as usual”. His mother called to say there had been a shooting in the 10th or 11th arrondissement, so he dropped his plans and got on Twitter.
It was only hours later that he saw the Belle Equipe bar where his friends were celebrating had been targeted. Houda had been killed, shot in the head, alongside her sister Halima. His friend Ludo “the hero”, Ludovic Boumbas, had pushed a young woman out of the path of the bullet that killed him. The gunmen murdered 19 people at that party. “I have no idea what’s coming next. No one does. I’m not there yet – I’m still at the Belle Equipe,” Tariq said.
On the terraces, people talk of a new era in French politics. Security is likely to become the dominating issue in the 2017 presidential elections. Le Front National is on the march. According to Le Monde, requests for information and applications to join the French army have trebled from 500 to 1,500 a day since the attacks. Generation Bataclan is waking to a new reality.
Sat on the sofa in his parents’ apartment, Amos Reichman wondered what this Paris would look like: “Something is broken. I spent all my childhood in this neighbourhood and I don’t see the places in the same way, or the people - it could have been them killed on the street. Our generation, we love to travel, to drink, to love and we don’t understand this. One of the strange points about our generation is that we are absolutely not engaged politically. Now it’s like we have no choice.”
