Security officers escort released hostages from the kosher market Hyper Cacher in Paris. Photograph by Michel Euler / AP

"The kosher supermarket has been stormed," Gérard Araud, France's Ambassador to the United States, wrote in a tweet just before noon Eastern time on Friday. "The terrorist is dead. The hostages are alive," he added, in a phrase that would turn out, tragically, to be only partly true. (The tweet was later deleted.) The sun had just set in France. Minutes earlier, the police had launched simultaneous raids to end two sieges. One was near Dammartin-en-Goële, in northeastern France, where two gunmen were thought to have taken a hostage in a printing plant—the men were said to be the Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, the suspects in the massacre at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo earlier this week. They were both killed after security forces moved in. The other raid was at the Hyper Cacher—the name means “Super Kosher”—in Paris's Porte de Vincennes neighborhood, where a gunman identified as Amedy Coulibaly had allegedly taken hostages and threatened to kill them unless the police let the Kouachi brothers slip away. Friday afternoon had been the last chance to shop before the Sabbath began and there were women and, it appeared, at least one small child among the hostages. After the raid, at least six people were seen coming out of Hyper Cacher, and they were rushed to ambulances. But despite the hopeful early reports, four others were dead.

President François Hollande confirmed the death toll in a statement to the country at 8 P.M. Paris time. He praised the police (“we are proud of you”), and said that they had saved lives. He talked about the difference between Islam and extremism, and urged people to turn out for a unity rally on Sunday. Security measures were being taken so that the French people could “live quietly,” he said. “But we must remain vigilant.” In that project, he continued, “Freedom is always stronger than barbarity. . . . Unity is our best weapon.”

The raids began with abrupt explosions, lighting up the woods near the printing plant and the darkening street in Paris. At both sites, snipers and members of France's special forces took positions on nearby rooftops. Earlier, French authorities had said that eighty thousand first responders had been mobilized. A school near the supermarket was evacuated, and the village of Dammartin-en-Goële was essentially cordoned off. The police were still looking for a woman, in her twenties, named Hayat Boumediene; Le Monde and others reported that she was Coulibaly’s “companion.” The nature of Coulibaly’s association with the Kouachi brothers, and of his possible involvement in the Charlie Hebdo massacre, isn't yet completely clear; there are reports that he and one of the brothers, Saïd, trained together, perhaps in the mountains of France. (An eighteen-year-old had been named as a suspected getaway-car driver, but his schoolmates have said he was in class at the time.) All three men were born in France. Videos from the Charlie Hebdo office during the attack capture the gunmen saying "Allahu Akbar," and, according to witnesses, they made references to Al Qaeda.

Ten staff members were shot dead at Charlie Hebdo—cartoonists, editors, a maintenance man—as well as two policemen. That turned out to be just the first time guns were fired. Looking back now, it is remarkable and humbling that the people of Paris gathered so openly and defiantly when they knew that terrorists were on the loose in their capital and its suburbs. The next shooting that we know about was the killing of a policewoman in Paris's Montrouge suburb in the early morning of Thursday, the second day of the manhunt. The third was around 9 A.M. on Friday (the Guardian has a chronology), a shootout on a highway between the gunmen, who had hijacked a Peugeot, and some police officers, who, thankfully, survived. The gunmen in Dammartin-en-Goële fled into the factory—two men whose attack had targeted journalism itself, about to meet their end in a printing plant. One of the questions for the next hours will be whether they then communicated in some way with Coulibaly, initiating his move, at about 1:30 P.M., into the Hyper Cacher. Had they, or he, picked the store out in advance, just in case, or was it the first big building the gunman saw with the word “kosher” on it? Shops in the Marais, a Paris neighborhood with a rich Jewish history, were closed in response, as was the Grand Synagogue of Paris, known as La Victoire. Le Monde, citing police sources, said that the evening services were being cancelled.

La Victoire was built in 1874; according to its Web site, it has, since then, "witnessed every twist and turn in the community’s history, including tragic events such as the Dreyfus affair, or the deportations during the Holocaust." Alfred Dreyfus, the French officer whose court martial was a pageant of anti-Semitism, was married there. Friday's events appear to represent another twist in the community's history. France, as it comes to term with the events of the last few days, will be thinking about what the country has become and what it will be next. The assault on Hyper Cacher is—should be—a painful reminder of some of the country's worst, most debased chapters. The attack on a Jewish site in Paris is frightening in its specificity. It is also universal in its reminder of how quickly a country, even one as outwardly civil as France, can lose its bearings. France needs to protect its cartoonists and its Jewish mothers shopping for the Sabbath meal. It also has to protect freedom of expression, among other civil rights, and all of its religious minorities. It can do that and still catch murderers. It can fail at that attempt—there are forces in the country that want it to—and then the siege will never end.