President François Hollande vows to ‘defeat this enemy’, telling traumatised nation: ‘They have a cult of death, but we have a love of life’

In wheelchairs or on hospital trolleys, draped in black blankets to keep warm against the bitter cold, one in a baseball cap, another in forces uniform, wounded survivors of the Paris terrorist attacks watched from the vast military courtyard of Les Invalides as the president paid homage to the 130 killed.



At the solemn national ceremony to remember the victims of France’s worst-ever terrorist attacks, more than 2,000 family members and survivors gathered. But many more wounded survivors were still in hospital, several in intensive care, unable to attend.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Members of the French Red Cross accompany people wounded in the Paris terror attacks. Photograph: Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty Images

Many of the 352 injured had suffered devastating and life-changing injuries, and doctors said hundreds more had suffered psychological trauma that would be hard to overcome.

François Hollande, arriving to the national anthem La Marseillaise being played by the Republican Guard, attempted to address the trauma of a nation.

His message – in a speech he had penned himself rather than delegating it to speechwriters – was that France would not change. He promised that the diverse nation with a love of life and freedom would remain “just how the victims had loved it”.

He said: “The terrorists want to divide us, pit us one against the other. They will fail. They have a cult of death, but we have a love of life.”

As families watched images of the victims appear on a black screen – a smiling mother holding her baby, a young woman in a holiday snap, a man holding a beer, a man in tuxedo – the mood was of utter sadness and desolation.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Members of the crowd share their grief. Photograph: Olivier Coret/REX Shutterstock

More than half of the victims were under 35. A little girl led by the hand by an usher to the Red Cross support area for family members was a reminder of how many of those killed had left behind young children. The victims came from more than 50 places in France – housing estates, villages, countryside and cities – and 17 different countries.

Hollande said 13 November, when gunmen and suicide bombers attacked bars, restaurants, the Bataclan concert hall and the Stade de France stadium, was a date that would always be remembered in France.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The names of the dead are read at the ceremony.

He said the youth killed – who have come to be known as Generation Bataclan – had, “despite the tears, become the face of France,” and he urged people to fight back with more “songs, concerts and shows. We will continue to go to stadiums.”

Hollande’s speech also hammered home his vow that in the wake of the attacks, France was at war. “To all of you, I solemnly promise that France will do everything to destroy the army of fanatics that committed these crimes,” he told the families.

The military setting was deeply symbolic. The courtyard of Paris’s military complex, Les Invalides, where Napoleon is buried, is indelibly linked to the army and military history.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hollande speaks at the ceremony. Photograph: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images

This was the first time civilians had been honoured in this temple to the French military, where presidents are more used to honouring the flag-draped coffins of soldiers killed in service, as Hollande has done in the case of soldiers killed in Mali.

Holding the memorial here was a way for Hollande to reiterate his message that the attacks were an act of war, and that the people killed were victims of war. He said the attackers had acted “in the name of an insane cause and a betrayed god”, and he said France would “defeat this enemy”.

The commemoration of the November Paris attacks was very different to that of the 17 people killed in January when French gunmen opened fire at the office of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket. Then, four million people took to the streets in marches across France. In Paris, where 50 heads of state led the cortège with Hollande, there had not been a street gathering of that size since the liberation from the Nazis in 1944. Those January street demonstrations were hailed as a historic moment of national unity.

But this time, after the French government extended a nationwide state of emergency for the next three months, all street demonstrations of any kind have been banned. The absence of a public memorial march where people could have stood shoulder to shoulder in memory of the victims has weighed heavily on a grieving nation and coldly brought home the extraordinary mood and tension under which France is now living.

Hollande instead called on people to join in by decorating their homes with French flags and hanging tricolours from windows. The flags sporadically dangling from doorways, carried on the Paris metro or flying from motorbikers’ backpacks marked a newfound public appropriation of the tricolour, which in recent decades had been spurned as a symbol of nationalism, and which had not been waved with such universal fervour since France won the 1998 World Cup.

At the ceremony, Hollande stressed that this new patriotism had nothing to do with “revenge or rejection of the other”. Instead, he said, it was about French unity and “resistance”.

At the tribute, politicians from all parties stood together – even Marine Le Pen, of the far-right Front National, who had not been in Paris for January’s march after controversy over her taking part.

Now the private funerals are over and the deaths have been solemnly marked by Hollande, new challenges face France. Hard questions will be asked of the government over potential intelligence or security failings that allowed known jihadists to come back to France and carry out the attacks.

The family of François-Xavier Prevost, 29, who died in the attack at the Bataclan concert hall, boycotted the commemoration ceremony, arguing that not enough had been done since the January attacks. His sister, Emma Prevost, wrote in a Facebook post: “Ten months later, the same people are able to restart and this time cause 10 times more deaths.”