The Brooklyn Rail

A 43-year-old music critic whose beat is hard rock and heavy metal attends a concert by one of his favorite bands whose latest album he has just reviewed for France’s most influential culture magazine. Raising two daughters with his partner, who is also a journalist and began her career covering the 9/11 attacks, he often has to do his writing late at night after the kids have gone to bed (“just like doing homework in high school,” he remarks). Despite his family responsibilities, he attends as many concerts as possible; as he self-mockingly comments on a social networking site, “I continue to honor Parisian cultural life with my august presence.” Twenty years earlier, he survived a terrorist bombing on a Paris subway that left eight people dead and 117 wounded. Tonight, he will not be so lucky. When a group of Isis terrorists attack the concert hall, he will be among the 90 audience members to lose their lives. As a friend and colleague remarks shortly afterwards, “If someone had told him that very morning that he was going to be murdered by some Daesh guys during the concert, he would have responded that such a thing was impossible, that it sounded like the plot of a South Park episode.” Eight years later, in September 2023, his widow publishes a polemical volume titled Quand la peur governe tout (When Fear Rules) in which she argues that “wokisme” and “islamisme” threaten French democracy. Interviewed on television a month later, following a horrific terrorist attack in Israel, she notes how one statistic cited in her book now jumps out at her: in 2021, 73 percent of racist attacks in France were aimed at Jews, who comprise one percent of the French population. “Anti-Semitism,” she says, “is the canary in the coalmine.”

(Guillaume Barreau Decherf, Pierre Siankowski, Carine Azzopardi)