Officials, families and supporters gather across Paris to remember victims killed in deadly November 2015 assaults.
France has paid tribute to the 130 people who were killed 10 years ago in a series of attacks in and around Paris, with President Emmanuel Macron stressing that the country continues to heal in the aftermath of the deadly assaults.
ISIL (ISIS) attackers carried out bombings and opened fire in coordinated attacks on cafe terraces, restaurants and the Bataclan concert hall on November 13, 2015, turning the French capital into a scene of calamity.
Recommended Stories
list of 3 itemsend of list
“The pain remains,” Macron wrote on social media on Thursday morning. “In solidarity, for the lives lost, the wounded, the families and the loved ones, France remembers.”
The French president was among a group of officials who paid their respects to the victims on the 10th anniversary of the attacks, observing a minute of silence and laying wreaths in front of the Stade de France, the national stadium of France, which was also targeted on that bloody day.
Throughout the day, Macron, survivors and relatives of the victims will honour those killed and wounded at each of the sites of the attacks.
Victims’ associations say two survivors of the attacks later died by suicide, bringing the total death toll to 132.
‘The absence is immense’
Sophie Dias’s father, Manuel, was killed in a suicide bomb blast outside the national stadium.
“Since that November 13, there is an emptiness that cannot be filled,” Sophie said at Thursday’s ceremony outside the stadium. The absence of her father “weighs every morning and every evening, for 10 years”, she said.
“We are told to turn the page,” she added. “But the absence is immense, the shock is intact, and the incomprehension remains. I’d like to know why, I’d like to understand. I’d like these attacks to stop.”
Georges Salines also lost his daughter, Lola, 28, in the deadly attack at the Bataclan concert venue.
“Lola was my beautiful daughter,” Salines told Al Jazeera before Thursday’s anniversary. “She was a young, dynamic woman with a great future, I’m sure.”
The attacks reshaped France’s political and emotional landscape, triggering sweeping counterterrorism powers and years of debate over security and civil liberties.
Reporting from Paris, Al Jazeera’s Natacha Butler noted that, “despite calls for unity” in the aftermath of the attacks, “far-right parties later used the assault to bolster their campaigns against immigration”.
ISIL claimed responsibility for the deadly assaults, and a 2021-22 trial ended with life imprisonment without parole for Salah Abdeslam, the lone surviving assailant, and convictions for 19 others.
But the effects of the killings continue to be felt across the country.
“The 10th anniversary is here and emotions and tension are everywhere for us survivors,” said Arthur Denouveaux, who escaped the Bataclan and leads the Life for Paris association. “You never fully heal. You just learn to live differently.”
The commemorations will culminate with the inauguration of the “November 13 Memory Garden”, a new memorial garden opposite City Hall.
Conceived with victims’ associations, it is a stone enclosure from which granite blocks rise to evoke the attack sites, engraved with the victims’ names.
Cities in the United Kingdom, Belgium and Germany also suffered high-profile attacks at the hands of ISIL in the immediate years that followed before the group was vanquished on the battlefield in Iraq and Syria.
