Writing in the edition of Le Monde dated March 10th, Martine Silber reported from Madrid on an election campaign where the voters seemed more interested in the renewal of the Real Madrid soccer star Ronaldo's contract than in any politician's statements.
Other subjects using up most ink in the Spanish press were the continuing repercussions of the WMD issue (in Britain and the US) and the banning from schools of the Islamic veil (in France).
By March 11th, everything had changed. Electioneering was immediately suspended, but most commentators predicted a higher turnout than might otherwise have been expected after a dull campaign. Writing in El Pais just a few hours after the bombings, Javier Pradera warned against the political manipulation of the tide of popular emotion which would naturally be sweeping Spain over the next number of days and weeks.
On Le Monde's website, Jean-Luc Marret of the Foundation for Strategic Research was responding to questions on Eta, al-Qaeda and the security response to terrorism. Asked why, in spite of so much counter-terrorist activity, attacks such as Thursday's could still happen, Marret replied: "That is the greatness and the weakness of democracies! No police force has the means to prevent an attack happening. In France, we have escaped five attempts by Islamic groups since September 11th."
Terrorists and terrorism, or, as some would have it, revolutionaries and revolutionary struggle, had been in the news across Europe even before the Madrid attacks.
The death during the week of the Palestinian Abu Abbas in US custody in Iraq recalled what was certainly his most famous act. That was the tossing into the sea from the hijacked Italian cruise liner the Achille Lauro of a 69-year-old Jewish-American paraplegic, Leon Klinghoffer, a subject about which the composer John Adams later wrote a fashionably "controversial" opera.
The Italian magazine Panorama reminded us how the capture of Abbas near Baghdad last April had encouraged Donald Rumsfeld to crow about definitive proof of the Iraqi regime's contacts with international terrorism. The reality, said Panorama, was otherwise: "Abu Abbas, boss of a pro-Iraqi faction inside the PLO, belonged to another epoch, an epoch when Palestinian terrorism was motivated by nationalist, anti-imperialist reasons more than religious ones, when Arab leaders, financed by the Soviet Union, preferred to talk not of jihad but of anti-colonialist war."
There were acute differences between French and Italian ideas on the correct attitude to be adopted to the case of Cesare Battisti, a successful detective-mystery writer and former leader of the Armed Proletarians for Communism, condemned by Italy for several murders in the 1970s and benefiting since 1990 from refugee status in France. The Italian press of left, right and centre all found offensive what they took to be France's indulgence for a terrorist who was using armed violence to overthrow a democracy.
Meanwhile Italy's Internazionale, summarising the findings of an article in the US journal Science, wrote of the "rapid and chaotic changes" which language, both oral and written, was now experiencing throughout the world.
Somewhat surprisingly, Internazionale reported, the onward march of English might not be as inevitable as we thought. "If in the 1950s about 9 per cent of the world population spoke English as its first language, in 2050 this will be a little less than 5 per cent." Patterns of demographic growth suggested that, in 50 years' time, English would have moved from second to fourth place in world rankings, behind Mandarin, Arabic and Hindi/Urdu.
The loss of "less successful" languages, meanwhile, was continuing apace.
"Every time a language is extinguished," wrote Alexandra Aikhenvald, a linguistic researcher in Amazonia, "what is lost is not just a culture but a vision of the world and an enormous quantity of information on human nature."
For example, in Tariana it is impossible to convey information without simultaneously disclosing, through the language's grammatical structure, whether this is information one can vouch for personally or has simply heard to be true. This is a refinement English might have benefited from, says Dr Aikhenvald, during the WMD controversy.