As a teenager in Paris, the night of the Bataclan was hard to grasp. I struggled to process what was unfolding around me, and how quickly the city turned threatening.
Even now, 10 years later, the experience is still hard to communicate.
In 2015, I was 13 years old, attending an international school in Paris where my mother taught, while my father was abroad on missions with the Irish Defence Forces.
On November 13th, I misled my mother by claiming I was just going to sleep over at a Colombian friend’s house. Instead I ended up at a party with him and a Russian friend. At this age we all wanted to be grown-ups, and covertly drinking alcohol while playing spin-the-bottle at a girl’s birthday party was our best attempt.
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Our immersion in our imitation was, however, abruptly interrupted, as the disco ball switched off and the lights flicked on. Our host’s parents were in the middle of the room, with grave faces, announcing there had been an attack and it was best we go home. I remember thinking they were being melodramatic. “What does that have to do with us?” I thought.
At that point in the night, nobody understood exactly what was going on. Attentat au Stade de France, fusillade at the Bataclan, stray grenades into cafes and shootings at restaurants, seemingly at random.
Not understanding the scale, we agreed to get a taxi back to my friend’s house.
But outside, the streets were filled with blue lights as fleets of police cars flew past. Our taxi driver was thrown off by the sudden duty of getting three boys home safely. The attacks stood between us and where we needed to be. Journeying from the 20th to the 14th arrondissement, the driver dodged road closures and speeding emergency vehicles and rumours of gunfire at every turn.
We got back safely, but my friend’s mother had been caught outside, so us three boys were home alone for the night.
We kept all the lights off, curtains drawn, and pushed his couch up against his front door, just in case. We holed up in one bed for the night, with the desk against his bedroom door.
Awakening the next morning, our phones were full of texts to check we were safe, from Bogotá to Moscow to Cork. The hashtag #PrayforParis was all over social media. We had videos from schoolmates standing in the middle of the Stade de France field. Through our phones we pieced together what had gone on around us. It left us speechless.
What exactly do you do after that? We decided to head out for a classmate’s bar mitzvah. It was only 15 minutes away, but the images have never left me.
Streets I had always known to be bustling were so empty it felt like we were intruding, as though everyone had been deleted and we might be next.
We got on the metro, going one stop from Duroc to Ségur. When we surfaced on the other side, we saw no one, a stillness that felt like chaos.
The synagogue was only a short walk away down an avenue and side street. But it meant we were out in the open, feeling like prey emerging from the thicket, exposed. Every step felt weighty. Our eyes darted, scanning every horizon.
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Turning the corner of the alley, we saw a gunman with an assault rifle right in front of us, moving in our direction.
Adrenaline sent us retreating, falling over ourselves in a pile of fleeing limbs. On the ground, we looked up, bracing. Then we sighed with relief. The gunman was a soldier sent to safeguard the synagogue. We laughed at ourselves. The army man let out a smile and lent out a hand.
In the days and weeks that came after, Paris sought to recover. Solemn speeches, impromptu memorials, defiant slogans all gave solace to those seeking reassurance. But bravado belied brittleness.
I had a Latin teacher who instilled in us the importance of Paris’s motto of resilience and defiance, “Fluctuat nec mergitur” (tossed by the waves but does not sink). That same teacher banned us from using red ink, as it reminded her of a red dress she wore on the night of the attacks. She now felt that red was an aggressive colour and she would become visibly upset if we used it.
I myself struggled to make sense of the night. The Troubles, as my father described them from his time on the Border, carried a logic I could try to grasp. The causes were clear, the violence localised, a conflict contained by people and place. But the Paris attacks felt shapeless.
At school, we were told they were Islamist terrorist retaliation for France’s intervention in Syria. The explanation never really satisfied me emotionally: why would fans of a Californian rock band be massacred for the French government’s foreign policy?
That question soon gave rise to an even more disturbing one: if people who had nothing to do with the conflict could be killed at a given sports match, or rock concert, or even their local cafe, why could that not happen to me? And so the psychology of terror worked on me.
Paris today is full of people who remember that night when attackers killed 137 people. Those who had a ticket to the concert but never went, who were at the stadium that the attackers almost entered, who lived in the streets where the cafes were struck. Many lost loved ones, many barely survived.
Ten years on, the night is still hard to forget, and, for some, even harder to remember.
Hugo Harvey, also known by artist name Kogan, is from Cork and lived in Paris from 2007 to 2020. He is now a freelance culture journalist working in London. He has interviewed political figures like Zack Polanski and Noam Chomsky for his personal channel and musicians for his Culture with Kogan channel including Irish musician Maverick Sabre.
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