Facing Terrorism in France: Lessons from the 2015 Paris Attacks

From 2015, Europe was hit by a new wave of terrorist attacks, coordinated or supported by an international Islamist organization (ISIS) but sometimes also perpetrated by citizens of the targeted country: the attacks on Paris, Brussels, London, Manchester, Nice and Barcelona probably attracted most attention but the most dramatic were perpetrated in Paris, in January and November 2015. These events shook the foundations of French society not only because of their magnitude but also because of the symbolic nature of the targets. Whilst in January, the targets were carefully selected as emblematic of France (the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, the police forces, the Jewish community) and of European liberal values (journalists and cartoonists), in November the victims ordinary people enjoying music, sports and restaurants. The book offers a unique interdisciplinary investigation into the complex responses of French society: from the individual level (survivors of the Bataclan attack, emotional citizens paying homage to the victims, French Muslims) to the meso level of civic association and web communities, and the macro level of the State and public opinion.

Florence Faucher is Professor of Political Science at Sciences Po, (Centre d’études européennes et de politique comparée), France, and Associate Fellow of Nuffield College and Visiting Scholar at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford, UK. She has previously taught at the University of Stirling (UK) and Vanderbilt University (USA) and has held visiting position in the US, Australia and the UK. She is the author of several books. Since 2015, her main research project focuses on the symbolic dimension of public policy with the financial support of the Labex LIEPP. She is currently working on a full length English language manuscript on symbolic public policy.

Gérôme Truc is sociologist, tenured Research Fellow at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and member of the Institut des Sciences sociales du Politique. He teaches at Paris Nanterre University and has held various visiting position inSpain and the US. He was the Principal Investigator for the CNRS funded REAT research project and he is a board member of the interdisciplinary “13-November” research program. He is the author of Shell Shocked: The Social Response to Terrorist Attacks (2018), for which he was laureate of the “authors on tour” program of the French Embassy in the USA.