It’s a large spiral school notebook, which doesn’t look like anything else when you take it out of the box kept in the Paris Archives under the symbol 3992W. We open it, we read a few lines, and we are immediately plunged back into the stupor, the pain, the anger of November 14, 2015.
That morning around 10am, Stéphane Martinet, was elected from 11ame The Paris district – namely the Bataclan and several terraces that were machine-gunned the day before – saw citizens flock to the city hall asking where the list of condolences was. He returned to his office, took the first notebook he had in hand, and placed it on the table at the entrance with a pen and a bouquet of flowers.
Within six days, the spiral notebook was full. Three hardcover albums would follow, for a total of 1,325 orders. These four registers seem to be nothing “paper monument” in memory of the victims, in the words of journalist and historian Hélène Frouard, author of an article about them when she was a researcher at the CNRS. Reading them makes your throat tight and affects your spirits, but sometimes it also entertains and makes you smile.
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