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Published on 2 January 2016
France turns page on 'terrible' 2015 with scaled-down new year celebrations
Published in the Guardian January 1, 2016
Thousands turned out on Paris’s Champs Élysées to watch scaled-down New Year’s Eve celebrations, but it was impossible to escape the shadow of the terrorist attacks six weeks earlier, which killed 130 people and injured hundreds more across the city.
With France still under a state of emergency, the traditional fireworks display was cancelled and replaced with a video projection on the Arc de Triomphe, while 1,600 police and gendarmes protected the Champs Élysées avenue alone. The turnout was far lower than the 600,000 revellers that usually fill the area at new year. With more than 100,000 police on duty across France for the celebrations, including 11,000 in Paris, most people were keen to turn the page on 2015, which polls showed a majority felt was a very bad year.
President François Hollande’s new year TV address to the nation recalled the grim toll of what he called a terrible year that began with the terrorist attacks on the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket, which killed 17, and ended with November’s gun and suicide bomb attacks at bars, the Bataclan concert hall and the national stadium. There had been several other incidents in between, including an armed man attacking passengers on a high-speed train from Amsterdam to Paris before being overcome by holidaying US marines.
Hollande said he owed France the truth that it had “not finished with terrorism yet” and the threat of another attack remained at its highest level. Positioning himself more than ever before as a kind of father figure for the nation, he said his first duty was to protect the French people.
“That means attacking the root of the evil, in Syria and Iraq,” he said, adding that French airstrikes on Islamic State had intensified. “The hits are taking their toll, the jihadis are in retreat, so we will continue as long as necessary,” he said... Read more.