Thirty years ago, I lived in Paris at the centre of the neighbourhood recently targeted, at 64 rue du Chemin-Vert, a quiet and unremarkable street that housed a lot of wholesale fabric distributors, just off boulevard Voltaire. The neighbourhood was not very interesting then: It was working-class and partly industrial. Just to the north, streets like rue Oberkampf (now a hip entertainment street) were lined with warehouses and shuttered at night.
A great many Arabs lived in the 11th and 10th arrondissements then: My corner store was owned by an Algerian family, the local café by a Lebanese. I ate a lot of cheap couscous. One day, in 1985, a small National Front parade came down the street, mostly skinheads in black bomber jackets waving Tricolours stamped with cryptic black devices. They were demanding the end of Arab immigration. I stood outside next to the corner-store guy and we watched them pass in silence. He just shrugged.
At that time, the local media were talking about the revitalization of the Bastille district, just few streets to the south. The opera house had not yet been built. There were a number of new bars and restaurants suddenly arriving in the narrow rue de Lappe, and they had a studenty-punky vibe. Some were American-style burger joints, and one could occasionally see elaborate rockabilly outfits complete with bouffant hairdos and pointy boots, stalking the cobblestones in defiant anti-Frenchness. There was a bathhouse on rue de la Roquette, where I would take showers for two or three francs, politely declining offers of sex. Many students and migrant workers did not have rooms with showers, and most of the bathhouse clientele were of North African origin.
At the spiritual heart of the Bastille trendiness, and just down the road from my attic room, was a concert hall called the Bataclan, a musical theatre that had been in existence since 1864, named after a piece of light opera by that master of the trivial, Jacques Offenbach.
From the 19th century, it had been a place of silliness, a place for satirical vaudeville and farce. In the 1970s, it became a rock club. In the 1980s, punk bands played there, and in the lineups outside I got my first glimpses of the elaborate face paint and teased black hair that came to define goth, and that was coming from Britain.
The area was by no means a tourist destination, for it did not seem particularly historical.
Charlie Hebdo was not being published at that time; its offices were to arrive in that quarter years later. The gentrification took off in the district in the 1990s. Then the 11th filled with bars that were not typically Parisian: They weren't light-filled cafés; they were dark lounges in the American style.
It is still like this, an area that does not feel like the great museum of architecture that is the rest of Paris. Its social spaces aim to represent contemporary culture, not the past. In this sense, they are more like the restaurants and galleries of New York or Berlin. I was rather disappointed, in fact, the last time I visited, to see so many bartenders with beards and tattoos and ball caps pouring craft beer. One does not need to cross an ocean for that.
Rue de Lappe is now a rather crass, even menacing place, a jumble of hip-hop-thumping nightclubs with bouncers and drunk teenagers outside; it has no particularly French quality. Most cities have such a zone.
It was this epitome of contemporaneity and globalism that the terrorists targeted, not the French state. The terrorists left the sites of prestige and power completely alone. They had no animus toward the vast throngs of tourists on the Champs-Élysées, nor toward its proud symbol of military imperialism, the Arc de Triomphe. They ignored the bankers and executives drinking champagne in Les Deux Magots. Unlike the 9/11 attackers, they did not target the stock exchange or the Ministry of Defence. They didn't even bother with the purest symbol of crusading Christianity in the entire world, the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris.
What they were after was heavy-metal music and Cambodian restaurants existing side by side. They were after artists, agnostics and anti-militarists, the very people who cultivated that international immigrant zone, the people who forced out, in their numbers, the National Front.