An essay published on Sunday by Emily Greenhouse of The New Republic briefly explains the history of Paris’ Boulevard Voltaire, where a suicide bomber detonated an explosive-filled vest at Comptoir Voltaire, a cafe along the thoroughfare, and the Bataclan, a music hall that became a mass murder scene last Friday night.
The street has been a scene of violence many times. During the Commune of Paris, in 1871, it hosted barricades and revolutionary schemes to recapture Montmartre, to march on the center of Paris. Auguste-Jean-Marie Vermorel, a socialist journalist, was gravely wounded on the boulevard during the “Semaine Sanglante,” that “bloody week” that ended the Communard dream. In 1957, the boulevard’s Place Voltaire boulevard was renamed for Léon Blum, the first Jewish prime minister of France, whose country later sent him to concentration camps.
Among the violence along Boulevard Voltaire, was the brutal murder of Ilan Halimi, a 23-year-old man who was bound, stabbed, and burned with acid in 2006 by his captors, a group called “The Barbarians,” because he was Jewish. In the essay, Greenhouse reminisces about the time she lived along the boulevard, even recalling a threat against the Bataclan dating to 2011 because its owners were Jewish:
I lived off the Boulevard Voltaire after college, but I did not know this past, and did not know that it was, at least in part, a Jewish quarter. I did not know, then, either, that my mother’s late mother had grown up nearby. She, a French Jew, had survived the Holocaust in Paris in hiding, and left her country for the United States after the war. (She died when I was two months old, but passed her citizenship onto me.)
I learned about my grandmother from her friend Madeleine, who had hidden in Paris, too, and who never left. I learned about the Boulevard Voltaire from the people who spoke to me on my walks home from the Métro—young French Jews, particularly men, signaling that in France you’re never free from what your face or ethnicity may say about you. Several times I was asked to wear a t-shirt in support of Halimi, to light a candle, to join a Shabbat dinner that Friday.
From my commute I got to know the Jewish shops and eateries on the Boulevard Voltaire—terrific pastries, imperfect bagels. And I got to know that the Bataclan on the Boulevard Voltaire was owned by Jews, too—Pascal Laloux and his brother Joel—and had been for forty years. For this, it had been targeted several times.
In 2007 and 2008, Le Bataclan, a pagoda style building with bright red and yellow facades from the 1860s, received threats. The venue was hosting conferences and galas for Jewish organizations. (One was in support of the Israeli border police.) In 2011, a Belgian man named Farouk Ben Abbes, arrested in Egypt in conjunction with a terror attack that killed a French high school student, confessed that he was “planning an attack against the Bataclan.”
It’s worth a read, here.
Previous: The Paris Attacks: Understanding France, Terror, ISIS, and More
Related: France’s Toxic Hate
Jonathan Zalman is a writer and teacher based in Brooklyn.
