COLUMN Overseas Briefing

Author: Claire Bourne

PARIS — When the lead headline of Libération read, "C'est une tragédie!" ("What a tragedy!") on the morning of Sept. 11, I expected the article that followed to have some rapport with the lives lost and affected by the terrorist plot that had unfurled one year earlier. Instead, I found myself reading about the severe floods that have crippled southeast France in recent weeks. After having endured a year of American television stations, newspapers and magazines stretch the Sept. 11 story as far as it would go, I had almost forgotten that there was a world outside the United States (save Afghanistan and every now and then a place called Europe).
In the week leading up to the one-year anniversary of the terrorist assault on New York City and Washington, D.C., the French press, too, approached the subject with full gusto. Fueled by speculation about U.S. military intervention in Iraq, Le Monde dedicated pages two through seven of its Sept. 10 edition to the September attacks and related topics, while weekly news magazines such as Le Nouvel Observateur released special issues that touched on everything from the inner-workings of Al-Qaeda to a first-person narrative by former U.S. President Bill Clinton.
Rich with debates on who was to blame for the attack on America and, more recently, whether U.S. preemptive action against Saddam Hussein could be justified, the French media has made its voices — and there are many of them — heard over the past year.
Le Monde, in particular, played a vital role in the days following Sept. 11 when, on Sept. 12, 2001, Editor Jean-Marie Colombani confirmed France's solidarity with the United States by declaring in an editorial, "Nous sommes tous les Américains" ("We are all Americans.").
In a country known for openly contesting the "Americanization" of Europe and the rest of the world, Colombani's words made it appear as though anti-American sentiment in France was waning.
And although the image of America in the eyes of the French population has deteriorated since last autumn, according to a recent survey conducted by Le Monde, the first anniversary did not pass without spectacle.
Paris erected two massive columns of light on the evening of Sept. 11 to pay homage to the fallen towers, and several companies in the city observed moments of silence at 12:46 GMT, the time the first jetliner pierced the North Tower.
In addition, French brothers Jules and Gédéon Naudet's "Des Racines et des Ailes," the most reveling of all the 9/11 documentaries and the only one to take the viewer inside the towers during the evacuation, was replayed on French television — it was broadcast on CBS earlier this spring — as part of a chock-a-block line-up which included HBO's "In Memoriam."
With the tributes came heightened security. Police officers patrolled major monuments, notably the Eiffel Tower, on bicycles and roller-blades, while the Saint-Michel métro station, located near Notre-Dame Cathedral, was evacuated and shut last Wednesday night due to safety concerns.
Those of us from American institutions studying in Paris have been told to "remain vigilant," to use a phrase that has recently crept into our vernacular.
E-mails from the American Embassy tacked to the Reid Hall bulletin board encourage us to avoid American hangouts and tourist sites and to keep our eyes open for unusual behavior, which is hard, to say the least, given that most of what I have observed since arriving in Paris two weeks ago has been out of the ordinary. So goes the adjustment to an entirely new culture and language.
Nevertheless, I am relieved that I was not present to relive the morning of Sept. 11 vicariously though coverage on the major networks and cable news outlets in the U.S.
In other words, I have come to believe that what happened on U.S. soil that crisp September morning should never be forgotten, but neither should the fact that there is an entire world beyond American borders where tragedies happen, as well.