Paris remains eerily quiet. Straight after the terrorist attacks, on November 13, the tourists disappeared. Now, in grey January, the world’s formerly most visited city still feels empty. In the silence, Parisians can gauge where the attacks have left us.
My office is in the eastern 11th arrondissement, focal point of both sets of 2015 attacks. The little local post office now has a full-time guard to check customers’ bags. A few doors down, the Belle Equipe café — where 19 people were murdered in November — is boarded up, to reopen God knows when. My favourite local restaurant is offering an unchanging daily menu all week, presumably because with almost no customers there’s little point buying food every day. But you can get a table any time, and eating is still much of the point of Paris, so you sit there instinctively calculating where you’d run if gunmen walked in.
Perversely, the horrors have helped give Paris’s east side an identity. The historically poorer east, even after gentrification, was always the neglected Paris. It ranked below les beaux quartiers (“the beautiful neighbourhoods” in the west and on the Left Bank), just as Brooklyn ranked below Manhattan. The local Place de la République, for decades a big roundabout with a dirty old statue of Marianne, symbol of the republic, was Paris’s drabbest square.