The Tally of a Tragedy

PARIS — Paris awoke in groggy shock Saturday under a state of emergency as French President François Hollande declared three days of national mourning. Terrorist attacks, dizzying in their scale — the deadliest since World War II on French soil, by multiples — have claimed 129 lives. Victims were struck down by automatic-weapon-wielding, bomb-belt-wearing suicide bombers at six locations, assaulted in the space of three horrific hours. As many as 352 people were left injured, with at least 99 still in critical condition.

Questions abound here in the French capital, where authorities recommended Parisians still stay indoors. The most crippling unknown is whether any of the attackers remain at large. Meanwhile, forensics squads race to identify seven dead killers, six of whom are said to have blown themselves up, with a seventh shot by police, detonating his belt. The uncertainty exacts its own toll. And so the figures — the sheer numbers, at once terrifying in their breadth and mercifully abstract — become insidious.

The deadliest of the attacks, at the Bataclan concert hall, saw 89 killed. One witness told France Info radio she and perhaps 60 other concertgoers hid in a ceiling crawl space above a bathroom for three or four hours waiting, helpless, for the horror to end. Attacks on four restaurant terraces in eastern Paris left at least 39 dead.

In a morning-after fog the day after a massacre, it is curiously easy to surrender to the macabre numbers game, even knowing that it is a game the attackers themselves play in a drive for ever more bloodletting, to instill ever more fear. The attacks claimed the highest terrorist toll in Europe since al Qaeda bombings killed 191 in Madrid in 2004. There are, at least provisionally, more than four times more fatalities reported than the next-worst attack in French postwar history, the 1961 bombing of a Strasbourg-Paris train that killed 28.

The new assaults make the unconscionable January attack on cartoonists at the Charlie Hebdo newspaper office, only yards away from the now similarly infamous Bataclan, seem a mere opening act by comparison. Then, over three horrific days, 17 lost their lives, including cartoonists, three police officers, and four Jewish hostages at a kosher grocery store. Suddenly Mohamed Merah’s sickening killing spree in Toulouse and Montauban, which claimed seven lives, including those of three children at a Jewish school a month before the 2012 French presidential election, seems a dress rehearsal. Back then it, too, stopped cold a nation, riveted to the bloody wee-hours standoff. Merah’s spree lasted nine days; on Friday, the same horrific toll was doubled in the very first minutes.

In a sense, doing the math is absurd, the process of reeling off numbers almost flippant. Yet in the moment, on the ground, it seems the only way to settle the terms of a whirlwind tragedy enough to contemplate it amid the din of sirens blaring across the city. If 17 murders drew a record 2 million people into Paris streets in solidarity and protest on Jan. 11, are there even enough pairs of French feet to go marching to an exponential drumbeat of new casualties?

They could have been — and seemingly can always be — even higher. Just as observers wondered aloud in January how much more harm the cartoonist-massacring Kouachi brothers could have done if one hadn’t dropped his ID card in an abandoned getaway car, leading police to him, how much worse was the intent of the three suicide bombers who detonated belts outside an 81,000-seat stadium, but only managed to kill a single person among them? Another assailant set off his belt on Paris’s Boulevard Voltaire, causing injury but, as the toll stands, killing no one but himself.

Like the sheer randomness of the targets — which included a Cambodian restaurant, a brasserie, and a California band’s rock show — the monstrous numbers begin to sow seeds of fear for the days to come. What of the COP 21 environmental summit to begin in Paris on Nov. 30? Its 40,000 guests, its 100 heads of state? What of the Euro 2016 soccer tournament, slated for France next summer, with 51 matches scheduled at 10 venues across the country? To say nothing of the next single espresso at the corner cafe, or the double date over four-cheese pizza, or that five-a-side weekend soccer game one might now think twice about.

With three weeks to go before the first round of French regional elections, critical figures loom, too, for pollsters. Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Front has been poised to make unprecedented headway, with the anti-Europe, anti-immigration party perhaps even winning one, two, or three French regions. All eyes now will be on whether these events, as with all manner of debacles in France, bolster Le Pen.

This past week, Prime Minister Manuel Valls wreaked havoc in his Socialist Party when he argued that leftists must “envisage every possibility,” including coalitions with the right-wing opposition and bowing out of Dec. 13 runoffs altogether, to prevent National Front gains. And that was before Friday, Nov. 13. In the wake of the attacks, Le Pen wasted no time calling for permanently closing France’s borders on Saturday, even as she claimed to suspend campaigning.

Still, it is worth recalling that the 2012 attacks by Merah couldn’t push a cynically hard-line incumbent, Nicolas Sarkozy, to victory over the Socialist Hollande. And Hollande’s handling of the January 2015 attacks more than doubled the leftist president’s lackluster approval ratings in the immediate aftermath, albeit temporarily, while Le Pen seemed to stumble, overwhelmed — a cautionary tale for pundits who will claim the far-right now has this election’s number.

There are more hopeful metrics in this tragedy. French blood-bank websites were crashing on Saturday, overwhelmed by the sheer number of clicks, and spontaneous donors have overrun services in the Paris area. One Le Monde reporter told of a five-hour wait, and a line at least a thousand people long, to give blood at one 15th arrondissement blood bank. Twitter users en masse shared the hashtag #PorteOuverte, which they adopted Friday night to offer shelter to fellow Parisians stranded in the chaos of the attacks. Twitter reported 6.7 million mentions of #PrayForParis in the space of 10 hours (by comparison, the iconic #JeSuisCharlie took five days to rack up as many uses back in January).

It is at once frivolous and fundamental that much of what sums up Paris at home and abroad closed Saturday in the wake of the attacks: the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Opéra de Paris, the Château de Versailles, the Comédie-Française, the Galeries Lafayette, the Olympia concert hall, Paris cinemas, farmers markets, and 11 Métro stations. But Paris’s city hall announced that while most municipal services would be shut, wedding services in all 20 Paris districts would remain open Saturday. Through adversity, the City of Love making it count.

Photo credit: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images