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. [...]
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.”
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