What if the terrorists won?

Like 9/11 for New Yorkers, the Paris attacks of November 2015 have become that rare thing for city slickers — a topic of conversation in which everyone can participate. There are two million Parisians, each of whom has a story about the night suicide bombers and gunmen killed 130 people at cafés, restaurants, the Stade de France and the Bataclan music hall.

Some offer a poignant mix of tumult and tragedy, like the one my high school friend tells of diving under a table at a café when a terrorist opened fire on drinkers with an assault rifle. (She performed CPR on a shooting victim who ended up dying from loss of blood). Others, like mine, are less riveting. After making sure my friends and family were safe, I got to work covering the story. The tales all have one thing in common: a moment in which the person recounting it is struck by the enormity of what occurred.

In my case, it came more than 24 hours after the attacks. After news of the shooting broke, my girlfriend and I hunkered in our apartment: me to write and report, her to comfort and host friends who kept dropping by. It was only the next day, when a couple of German friends called and suggested getting together, that we ventured out into post-attack Paris. Our street is usually a party strip. It was utterly silent. Bars, restaurants and hotels that do brisk business even under driving rain were closed and empty. The scene — eerily quiet, cinematically barren — yanked me out of the story I had been writing and into the reality of the tragedy that had engulfed the city.

As we turned left onto Avenue de Clichy, I tried to joke about it, noting that it looked like the perfect setting for a sequel to the zombie movie “28 Days Later.” My girlfriend didn’t laugh. An awful thought crowded my mind: The terrorists had won. With a few cell phones, Kalashnikov rifles and suicide vests, they had silenced this proud and insolent city and reduced its residents to cowering in their apartments when they should have been making noise in the streets.

Illustrations by Nicholas Vinocur

Once we got to our friends’ place, just a few blocks away, the mood lightened. We drank, shared our stories of the night, and even managed a few relieved laughs. But there our conversation had a melancholy undertone: We kept coming back to whether the violence would trigger a civil war. Fortunately, it didn’t. Neither those killings nor any of the bloodshed that followed escalated into all-out conflict between French Christians and Muslims (though the head of domestic intelligence warned in testimony to a parliamentary committee this past summer that it was a possibility). But they primed us for the possibility that tragedy could strike at any moment, and they made all Parisians inordinately vigilant.

In the metro, people stared harshly at young men wearing beards, or, more ominously, beards paired with tracksuits and backpacks (the “jihadist look,” according to surveillance footage captured of two assailants who had ridden the metro after the attacks.) All of us suddenly became security experts who knew how to identify a soft target. Some of us — or maybe it was just me — would occasionally be stricken by sudden rushes of sadness. When I first went to see a movie at a theater a few weeks after the attacks, I felt proud to be relaxed enough to be keeping up my old habits. But when a young man entered the screening room late, I was gripped by terror. I had to reason with myself that, by staying until the end of “Crazy Amy,” I was doing my part in France’s fight against terrorism.

The terrorists had won. With a few cell phones, Kalashnikov rifles and suicide vests, they had silenced this proud and insolent city and reduced its residents to cowering in their apartments when they should have been making noise in the streets.

A year later, are we still sitting on the edge of our seats, half-expecting a terrorist to enter the room? No. Take a walk on any nightlife stretch in the French capital and you will see café terraces full of young people drinking and smoking as patriotically as before. The fact that Parisians returned to their old haunts so rapidly after the attacks was widely interpreted as proof of the French Republic’s resilience in the face of terror. The Moveable Feast was still on the move. The City of Light was shining as brightly as ever. Take that, terrorists, we said, raising our glasses of wine.

But it would be wrong to say that France simply snapped back to the way it was before the attacks. The place has changed more profoundly than most of its residents are willing to admit. Repeated acts of violence have robbed the French of their presumption of safety. Despite admirable efforts to respond to the terrorist threat in a measured way, to avoid reaching Israeli levels of obsession with security, France has mutated into a different version of itself: angrier, ready for more violence and locked into increasingly hostile and polarizing debates.

The most shocking thing about terrorism in France in 2016 is that terrorism is no longer shocking. It can be terrifying, distressing and infuriating, sure. But the steady drumroll of attacks that started in early 2015 — from the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan attacks in Paris to the massacre on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice to the murder of a Catholic priest in his church in Normandy — have burned away our capacity for shock. Instead of reacting to attacks with surprise, the French nation now responds with ever shorter loops of grief, outrage and calls to hang the bad guys.

The kumbaya spirit of the post-Charlie Hebdo period, when more than a million people marched behind a procession of European leaders to proclaim their love of free speech, is gone. After a man killed 86 people by driving a cargo truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, opposition politicians didn’t wait 24 hours before slinging mud at the government, accusing it of “criminal negligence” for having let the attack happen. Needless to say, there was no new march — the state of emergency made sure of that.

Illustration by Brian Stauffer for POLITICO

France may feel that it looks the same in the mirror, but the rest of the world sees it differently. At recent a dinner in New York, I was asked by a worldly American whether it was dangerous where I live. My reflex was to accuse him of being naive, but I caught myself. The fact is: Yes, France is dangerous, compared to most other Western countries. I just don’t live in a constant state of alert.

French police thwart terrorist plots on a regular basis. They do their best to keep track of an estimated 10,000 radicalized individuals (and sometimes fail tragically — the men who murdered the priest were registered radicals who wore ankle bracelets.) Yes, cafés are full and your waiter is still too busy to bring the check. But now there is a man with a gun over there, patrolling in full combat gear with two buddies in loose formation.

Travelers may also notice that security has been tightened at certain border crossings. Bulky luggage now has to go through an airport-style machine scan at the Gare du Nord in Paris, and on board the trains heavily armed cops traipse up and down the aisles. Other changes are designed to go unnoticed — like the plainclothes marshals, who now ride on select routes, carrying concealed weapons. The government has also hired thousands of new officers for the police, justice system and domestic and exterior intelligence agencies and extended a state of emergency, granting police vastly expanded powers. Hundreds of suspects have been placed under house arrest, at times under flimsy pretexts.

Despite such measures, leaders acknowledge there is no such thing as zero risk. To prepare the population for the possibility of another big event, the state has ordered public hospitals, institutions and schools to carry out large-scale simulations of terrorist attacks. Even primary schools are no exception. In September, children as young as six practiced how to behave in case of a terrorist attack on their school, taking cover behind solid objects in classrooms with teachers barricading the doors. That same month, Prime Minister Manuel Valls called the terrorist threat “maximal.”

It would be wrong to say that France simply snapped back to the way it was before the attacks. The place has changed more profoundly than most of its residents are willing to admit. Repeated acts of violence have robbed the French of their presumption of safety.

Such warnings make headlines around the world — and tourists, not surprisingly, choose not to travel to France. It’s become increasingly rare to hear American English or Japanese spoken at the foot of the Eiffel Tower or the Arc de Triomphe, which has had a devastating effect on the economy in one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations. More painful is the psychological impact. Even during hard times, the French could console themselves with the knowledge that theirs was a country people wanted to visit, admire, emulate and envy. No more.

Over the past year, and especially after the Nice attacks, the tone of political discourse had gotten more brutal. Statements that would have raised eyebrows a few months ago are now standard fare. Conservative candidates seeking a presidential nomination have happily proclaimed that Islam is “incompatible” with the French Republic. A few months ago, saying so might have earned them a lawsuit for discriminatory speech.

Several have called for France to build its own Guantanamo-style camps, where “potential” terrorists can be locked away. And Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, a former conservative presidential candidate, suggested banning the hardline Islamic current of Salafism, winning herself an invitation to Valls’ office to discuss the idea. Marine Le Pen, head of the far-right National Front party, sounds moderate compared to some of the “mainstream” candidates, having dismissed the idea that there’s an inherent conflict between Islam and the Republic.

As politics has gotten tougher, intellectual debate has turned positively apocalyptic. Declinism has long been part of French fashion. Today, literary bestsellers describe a country swept away on waves of virulent political Islam and hordes of migrants. And it’s not just crusty nostalgists and Catholic fundamentalists who want France to stop worrying and start getting serious about policing the country’s five-million-strong Muslim population. Hipsters are at it, too. At a bar on Rue des Dames, I recently asked a young man sporting a furry beard and skinny jeans who he might vote for in next year’s presidential election.

I expected him to tell me that he was fed up with politics and didn’t find anyone particularly inspiring.

Without missing a beat, he said: “Le Pen.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Well, I don’t see who else is going to deal with terrorism,” he said.