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From Wikimedia Commons: Arab Horsemen Carrying Away Their Dead (Théodore Chassériau, 1850)

Ten years have passed since the night of November 13, 2015 — the night that tore open the heart of the French Republic. The coordinated terrorist attacks that culminated in the Bataclan massacre, where 90 civilians were slaughtered by Islamist gunmen, remain one of the darkest chapters in modern France’s history. The attackers, French citizens radicalized in the name of jihad, turned their weapons, not on soldiers but on concertgoers, young people, and lovers of life. The tenth anniversary of the massacre has equally revived collective mourning and unease. France again lights candles in the streets, again holds vigils for the murdered, and again confronts the question that has haunted it ever since: what, if anything, has France learned from Bataclan, from Charlie Hebdo, from Nice, from the long chain of Islamist massacres that have desecrated the Republic’s peace?

In recent weeks, that question acquired renewed urgency. French security services foiled yet another plot — this time, a conspiracy involving three Muslim women allegedly preparing an attack in the name of Islamic State. The tragedy that was narrowly averted underscores a brutal continuity: the ideology that motivated the Bataclan killers is not dead. It persists, mutates, and grows in new generations. Yet France’s public response — ritualized mourning, candlelight vigils, and peace marches — seems unable to rise to the level of the threat. The “shadow of the Bataclan” extends beyond the memory of a massacre; it is a permanent condition of French life, a shadow that lengthens with every denial, every euphemism, and every political retreat.

In the days following the 2015 attacks, France was united in grief. In time, however, commemoration became habit; solidarity, a performance. Each anniversary brings speeches about “resilience” and “living together,” yet the attacks’ survivors — hundreds still suffering from physical disabilities and PTSD — experience the price of this rhetoric daily. Many cannot work, some cannot sleep, and most cannot understand why, a decade later, the Republic that failed to protect them still refuses to name its enemy clearly.

Lighting candles for the dead, singing John Lennon’s Imagine or marching under banners of “peace” — these gestures are moving but insufficient. They represent a moral defense mechanism, a way of........

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