Eiffel Tower viewed from Human Rights Plaza at Trocadero. Photo GLK.
While the current health crisis causes us to withdraw into our homes, France this week commemorated fear-inducing events that previously brought millions out into the street: terrorism.
Though it went little noticed as COVID-19 dominated the news, on March 11 France commemorated its first National Day of Homage to Victims of Terrorism.
This new annual commemoration on the French calendar echoes the European Day of Remembrance of Victims of Terrorism that was first held one year after the Madrid bombings of March 11, 2004. Those bombings, acts of Jihadist terrorism, left 191 dead and 1800 injured, marking them among the most murderous acts of terrorism in Europe since the Second World War.
King Filipe VI of Spain therefore attended the French national ceremony which took place on Parvis des Droits de l’Homme (Human Rights Plaza) at Trocadero, with a view, well known to visitors, of the Eiffel Tower in the background.
The Paris ceremony was highlighted by speeches by French President Emmanuel Macron
and the king of Spain.
Other ceremonies took place throughout France on March 11.
The national ceremony was held in the presence of surviving victims and families of victims. It included a reading of portions of the Universal 1948 Declaration of the Rights of Man, singing by French singer Abd al Malik, a reading of extracts of the writing of Albert Camus, singing by a children’s choir, and singing of the Marseillaise, the French national anthem, and of the Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, the anthem of the European Union.
While the date of the French national day is in line with the date of the Madrid attacks of 2004, March 11 was also the date of the start of a series of attacks in 2012 by Moroccan-born Frenchman Mohammed Merah during which he would eventually kill four members of the French military in Montauban and Toulouse and three civilians at a Jewish school in Toulouse, with others wounded, before he was killed during a police raid on March 22.