The events that started on January 7, 2015, by Youcef’s count, weren’t going to change the relationship between cops and Muslim or secular non-whites. The relationship sucked, already. Non-whites felt unfairly targeted for stops, ID checks, and searches — an accusation formally leveled against French police by Human Rights Watch. One report by an anti-authoritarian organization listed 127 people killed by French police between 2000 and 2014, and while it’s illegal in France to keep statistics about a person’s ethnic or religious status — Egalité — and while the report stretches the limits of the phrase “killed by,” including not just shootings but accidents incurred by suspects fleeing or hiding from police, most of the names are awfully non-white sounding. Meanwhile, cops were working with the stance that if your suspect was named Abdullah Something-or-Other, you weren’t going to stop white guys looking for him. Youcef didn’t consider police racism entirely the fault of police. He didn’t like the amount of crime in minority communities, either. No luck, he thought, when something bad happens, it’s always Moroccans or Algerians who did it.

Integration was crucial to the stability and security of the country (FRATERNITÉ). But, Youcef thought, France will never achieve it. The government had torn down some massive projects in some suburbs, constructing some smaller, cuter ones here and there, but what was a few apartments against an imam with extremist ideas embedding in a community that was cut off by culture and transit from larger French society? Or in a prison, where he could preach to people who were even more isolated? It could be easy for Youcef’s fellow Algerians to be seduced by zealotry, much less the criminal life and easy money, he thought, in a republic they had so little faith in. S.O.S. Racisme and the International Labour Office published studies that showed where Muslims, Jews, and immigrants were categorically denied job and housing opportunities.

J.R. was only half buying it. Maybe they had fewer opportunities, but if they wanted to work, they could. We have examples — people who come from suburbs who’ve done it.

Luc believed that the unemployment rate in the suburbs—40 percent in some—made everything there terrible. But honestly the economy was awful for everyone currently, and he didn’t feel like most immigrants, even second- and third-generation ones, even wanted to integrate.

Youcef knew it was time to leave his job when he’d been on a mission supplementing a local police force in another city and had gone to arrest a man accused of assaulting a woman. When Youcef’s team arrived in the (black) neighborhood, the whole neighborhood, it seemed, came out and surrounded them. One of the civilians went for Youcef’s gun, and Youcef got kicked hard in the stomach in the scuffle. He ended up in the hospital having surgery for a hernia that could have killed him. That’s when he thought, Enough. Watching the news about the cops who’d died in the terrorist attacks only reinforced his feeling that he’d done the right thing. This is exactly why I left, he thought. I don’t want to die on my family.

Now Youcef was most concerned about the relationship between Muslims and French civilians. On January 8, Youcef had gone out for coffee with his dad, who was more obviously Algerian in appearance, and when they walked in the owner griped loudly, Oh, again, these Arabic people.

Youcef had taken it in stride. This wasn’t the United States, where there’d be media outrage and celebrity boycotts if an African-American walked into Starbucks and the barista yelled: Ugh, BLACKS. But his father was upset. That people put everyone in the same bag. That people weren’t smart enough to distinguish origins from religion, and religion from extremism. And Muslim extremism from all terrorism. Far and away most terrorist attacks in Europe (98 percent) were committed by separatists or nationalists who were not Muslim, and were in some cases anti-Muslim.

In 2012, Islamophobic incidents in France were already up more than 20 percent, along with other racist incidents over the year before. And that was before 2013, when the French government and media were panicking over the number of people leaving the country to become rebels or jihadists in Syria. Even way before that you had Nicolas Sarkozy, when he was minister of the interior and before he was elected president, saying he’d clean the scum out of the slums with a big hose.

In those suburbs, Youcef thought, there’s not just bad people. But when a guy like this uses this sentence — then among everyone there, there’s rage.

The ethnically Algerian Kouachi brothers grew up, and were orphaned, in a suburb. After their deaths, a former classmate at the boarding school where social workers deposited them recounted in an interview that even at a young age, they really hated white people.

After the countrywide unity march, a half-Cameroonian French comedian posted on Facebook that he felt like a cross between Charlie Hebdo and hostage-taker Amedy Coulibaly.

He was arrested.

Over the next few days, so were more than 50 others, on the same hate-speech charge. A student was arrested for pretending to be a jihadist on Facebook. Even a year ago, it would have been harder to charge him, but in late 2014 France passed a series of new laws that criminalized even searching certain kinds of “terrorist” content on the internet, as well as saying anything terrorist-sympathetic. On January 21, two weeks after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls announced a proposal to create thousands of new military and intelligence positions for surveilling thousands of citizens. A week later, an eight-year-old boy was questioned by police for allegedly expressing “solidarity” with the Kouachi brothers. A drunk guy was sentenced to four years in prison for telling some police he hoped they’d be killed next.

We NEED to not pass a Patriot Act in our panic, many French journalists were insisting — though at least one called the Patriot Act the answer. Another readily admitted that no one in France had any idea what the Patriot Act really did, or was.

At J.R.’s station, there was no sign of the heightened security measures abating. He and his colleagues were told they were allowed to take their guns home, a new concept — but he refused to worry. He wouldn’t live that way. Still, he had no choice but to be armed and bulletproof-vested at work, and he expected that wouldn’t change for a long time, if ever. What guy in charge would be the one to roll these protocols back? he wondered.

A week after the attack, police shot and killed two suspected terrorists in neighboring Belgium. Two weeks later, the mayor of a city in the south of France announced that its municipal police would start carrying guns for the first time. Posters picturing a big handgun and the words “NOW THE MUNICIPAL POLICE HAVE A NEW FRIEND” were pasted up around town. “Armed 24 hours a day and 7 days a week,” the bottom caption specified. That same week, three officers protecting a Jewish community center in nearby Nice were stabbed. Eleven days later, a 22-year-old gunman attacked a synagogue and a free-speech symposium in Copenhagen, killing two.

At Theo’s work, everyone took their guns everywhere now. They took them to eat lunch. They took them to the onsite gym. They took guns to the bathroom. After an official email went around that French intelligence was picking up chatter that cops might be the next targets of an attack, some of them took their guns to their homes, too. Theo was one of these. He didn’t have a personal handgun, though he’d long wanted one; even as a police officer, he was on a minimum yearlong waitlist for a permit.

Not that he was getting crazy. He didn’t take his gun to a bar when he went out drinking with two gendarme friends two weekends after the cops and journalists were killed together. And he didn’t worry that he could or would get in trouble for doing interviews for this story. It had been illegal in his country to try to track down the anonymous sources of a journalist since 1881, excepting extraordinary circumstances, and he was confident that wouldn’t change, national crisis or no.

The national attitudes that had informed the content of Charlie Hebdo didn’t seem to be changing, either.

Theo and his friends, collectively three sets of sculpted shoulders crowding each other across the table from me at the wine bar, talked enthusiastically about Les Guignols de l’info. It was one of the weeknight satire shows, wildly popular — far more so than Charlie Hebdo had been. The prophet Mohammed had made his share of appearances there, in the embodiment of a puppet. In one skit after the attacks, he rested on a cloud with Jesus and Christian God, taunting them, to the melody of the children’s song-tease “You’re not wearing underwear,” that he was the one getting the magazine covers, while doing a loopy little dance.

As we drank, a pair of soldiers from Chasseurs Alpins strolled past the windows. Chasseurs Alpins: Alpine Hunters, the mountain infantry corps of the French Army. For special operations, they had white uniforms that rendered them invisible in the snow. They were out of place here in this city, wearing camouflage, but still recognizable by their exclusive berets. The two soldiers were on patrol — possibly bored, as they couldn’t help peeking into the cozy alcove, lined to the ceiling with wine-bottle shelves, that we were sitting in. Ten thousand soldiers had been dispatched around France in what the defense ministry was calling “an unprecedented domestic operation.” In Paris, where there were always some soldiers around important landmarks carrying guns and ammo — but separately — their magazines were all loaded, now.

Inside the bar, there was a loud pop, and the three gendarmes tensed immediately and shot looks around them, ready to leap from their chairs. But it was just a champagne cork. The owner of the establishment brought over a tray of complimentary glasses, the first of these policemen’s careers. As they dug into the charcuterie plate they’d ordered, a vast array of cured hams and salami, the one to Theo’s left realized there was a joke to be made about the way the cork had sounded like a gun and startled them. “It’s okay,” he said, smiling, as the other two got ready to laugh. “If it’s terrorists, we can just throw pork.”

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This story was written by Mac McClelland, edited by Michael Benoist, fact-checked by Julia Greenberg, and copy-edited by Lawrence Levi. Illustrations by Devin Washburn.