The fact that it has been possible to organise an international conference on ‘Remembering/ Imagining Terror in EuropeFootnote 1’ bears witness to the extraordinary development of the field of ‘terrorism studies’, understood in a broad sense, over the last 20 years. When I started working on the social responses to terrorist attacks and their memorialisation in the mid-2000s, a relevant bibliography would not even fill a pageFootnote 2… That such a scientific event has now taken place is therefore the result of the convergence of a wide variety of research projects, both collective and individual, launched in the aftermath of deadly attacks that have struck European cities since 9/11 such as Madrid and London, first, in 2004 and 2005, then, more recently, Oslo and the island of Utøya, Paris, Brussels, Nice, Berlin, Manchester, or Barcelona, among others.Footnote 3

My book Shell Shocked: the Social Response to Terrorist Attacks (Truc, 2017) was part of this overall movement. It was an attempt to answer a question that can be stated as follows: why do people who are not direct victims or witnesses of an attack feel concerned by it, to the point of reacting publicly to it, especially when this attack takes place in a foreign country? Why are they not simply indifferent, as they are to so many other events occurring every day—in their country or in the world—and sometimes just as tragic and deadly? My inquiry led me to emphasise three key factors in this book. First, the importance of media coverage: our reaction to an attack is heavily dependent on our perception of it through the media lens. It will vary according to the images we have been shown—or not—and the words journalists use—or not—to describe and qualify what happened. Second, the role of a sense of common belonging—a sense of ‘us’—which links us to the victims and makes the concern obvious to some. But such feelings are not limited solely to the feeling of national belonging: they also arise on many other scales, such as that of the cities hit, or of what I call a ‘community of conditions’, such as users of public transport in big cities, when terrorists hit trains, metros or buses, like in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005. Third and lastly, the influence of a singularisation process, which leads us to experience our relations to an attack and its victims on the ‘I’ mode rather than ‘we’ mode—something the slogan ‘Je suis Charlie’ (I am Charlie) after the Charlie Hebdo attack in January 2015 has exemplified on a global scale. The idea behind this is that there would be links that belong only to me which tie me to the victims, inscribed in my socio-biographical trajectory, from what I have lived through, the experiences I have had, to the trips I have made, etc., that lead me to feel a little more intensely concerned by a given attack than my neighbour, and perhaps also more by this attack than by another.

This work corresponds to the first two parts of my PhD thesis. The third and last part of it was dedicated to the question of the memorialisation of terror attacks, to which I intend to devote another book. This second monograph, that the present chapter prefigures, will also be based on the results of other research launched after the 2015 Paris attacks and reflections based on my role today as a member of the team in charge of conceiving the French national museum and memorial of terrorism which is due to open in Suresnes, near Paris, by 2027. While I was working on my thesis, a decade ago, it seemed obvious to me that the immediate social responses to a terrorist attack and the memorialisation of that same attack—whether or not it is remembered, commemorated, etc.—were two different processes. My initial assumption was that social responses belong to the immediate aftermath, the hours, days or maybe weeks that follow; while memory, on the contrary, is what comes afterwards, in the following months and years. But, little by little, I began to question this assumption. I began to ask myself: when do social reactions end and memory begin? After a year, six months, or six weeks? Maybe even just six days? Is it possible, after all, to draw a clear line between the two?

Thus, I have come to realise in recent years that the reactions to a terrorist attack and its memorialisation are actually part of a single social process, that they form a continuum. From the very first moments after an attack, the very fact that we post messages on social networks, that we take to the streets, that we begin to gather and place objects and messages in tribute to the victims at the sites of the attack, are all already part of a phenomenon of memorialisation—what we might call immediate memorialisation. This immediate memorialisation is a way of expressing that this event, which has already passed, still recent indeed, but past nonetheless, does not pass for us in the phenomenological sense of the term. We dwell on it instead. We are not indifferent, and this implies that we begin to commemorate, to recall memory, as soon as it occurs, on that very evening and in the days that follow. In the streets of New York, in the days following the 9/11 attacks, a slogan came up again and again that clearly express this concern: ‘Never forget’ (Fraenkel, 2002, 2011). What I'm talking about in Shell Shocked, in fact, is then already memory. Besides, one might notice that heaps of messages and objects in tribute to the victims on the sites of the attacks, from which I drew most of my empirical material, are labelled as street, grassroots or ephemeral memorialsFootnote 4…

The question I would like to explore here is therefore the following: what is this process of memorialisation that begins as soon as the attack occurs? How does it work exactly? How can we grasp it sociologically? I will begin by specifying what I understand by ‘immediate memorialisation’ and distinguish the different forms it takes. I will then trace how we move from an immediate memorialisation to a longer-term memorialisation, and in what way the usual distinction between ‘individual’ and ‘collective’ memory does not seem relevant to grasp it. Indeed, this process actually articulates not two, but three levels, which I will illustrate with examples from my research on the various attacks that have struck major European cities since 2001. Finally, I will conclude by showing how this way of conceiving the memorialisation of past attacks helps to better understand the way we react to new attacks. To give just one example: there is no doubt that the French would not have experienced the 2015 Paris attacks as they did if they had not had the memory of 9/11 in their minds.

Social Responses to Terrorist Attacks in European Cities: An Emblematic Case of ‘Immediate Memorialisation’

The street memorials that spontaneously formed, in Paris as elsewhere, in reaction to the attacks of January and then November 13, 2015, were much discussed, in academic and social contexts alike. Never before had the Place de la République seen such an aggregation of messages, flowers and various objects around its central statue in memory of the victims of a terrorist act (Gensburger & Truc, 2020). However, these were far from the first attacks suffered by France and its capital, and there is evidence that those perpetrated by anarchists in the nineteenth century had previously aroused waves of emotion and gatherings among the Parisian population comparable to those seen in the aftermath of the 2015 attacks (Merriman, 2009; Salomé, 2010). Perhaps memorials of this kind had already appeared around the sites of the attacks on the occasion of these gatherings (after all, funerary uses of public writing have been attested to since Antiquity). But here the archives are lacking to affirm this with certainty. Future historians will not have this problem for the events that have plunged France and Europe into mourning since 2015, because many archive services have undertaken the task of collecting the contents of these street memorials, as had already been done after the 9/11 attacks in the United States and the Madrid and London bombings in 2004 and 2005, respectively (see, for example, Sánchez Carretero et al., 2011; Bazin & Van Eeckenrode, 2018; Arvanitis, 2019).

This is undoubtedly the main difference in comparison to the nineteenth century: not so much in the nature of the reactions that terrorist acts produce in Western societies today as in the value that we attribute to them. The terrorist ordeal is experienced directly, in the present, as a historical event, which must be documented by the archive as much as possible—which also requires, for example, the rapid collection of oral testimonies. This is clearly a manifestation of the ‘presentism’ of our time. According to François Hartog (2016), the two characteristic dimensions of this presentism—memory and heritage—, are to be found here. The terrorist attack and its victims are immediately the object of commemorations, but even more so, these commemorations themselves are now constituted as historical heritage, whose material traces must be preserved. This phenomenon, which is attracting increasing attention, can of course be observed for other types of events, such as air crashes, natural disasters, or the deaths of famous people. However, it is terrorist attacks that have given rise to the most obvious and massive manifestations in France and Europe in recent years.

As the field of memory studies develops, more and more research is now exploring the various forms taken by the memorialisation of events that have just passed, or even not yet completely passed, in the sense that their effects are still felt at the moment they are commemorated. At the same time, this research sheds light on the articulation of memorialisation with forms of patrimonialisation that constitute the memorialised event as a historical event, where it becomes important not only to commemorate the victims, but also to preserve the traces of the event itself. In this sense, we can distinguish at least four domains in the immediate memorialisation of an event such as a terrorist attack: (a) popular memorialisation, which manifests itself from the very first hours through these street memorials generally perceived as ‘spontaneous’ and ‘ephemeral’—two qualifiers that have long been discussed (Margry & Sánchez-Carretero, 2011; Bazin, 2022); (b) institutional memorialisation, made up of ceremonies, as well as monuments or commemorative plaques that can appear sometimes very quickly after the event; and (c) cultural memorialisation, through books, films, songs, television broadcasts, etc., in which the memorialised event becomes an object of public interest. Finally, there is also (d) heritage memorialisation, through the creation of archives, exhibitions and even museums dedicated to the event, which are part of the process while enabling us to take account of the other three dimensions.

Rather than four distinct phases that follow one another in time, these are four dimensions of the same process that unfold synchronously and constantly interact with one another. Institutional commemoration ceremonies are organised while popular memorials still occupy the streets and archive services undertake to collect their contents. The ways in which the attack is memorialised through these ceremonies may be openly contested or criticised within these memorials, while survivors’ accounts or portraits of victims are published in the press or in books that can be found in street memorials as well as in institutional ceremonies, and have a wider influence, along with the political and media narratives of the event, on the memory that each of us, including survivors and victims, retain of the event over time. And when the time comes to think about the design of a permanent memorial to the victims, with which public authorities intend to replace the street memorials, it is not uncommon to draw inspiration from the elements of the street memorials that have been collected and preserved by archivists, museum curators or researchers (this was done, for example, at Atocha station in Madrid after the 11th March 2004 attacks). All these interactions between the different dimensions of immediate memorialisation are what makes the phenomenon so complex and invite us to look at it more closely than we usually do.

At least three questions can be raised about this phenomenon. The first relates to the nature of the events that are the subject of such immediate memorialisation. It has already been said that these are ‘historical’ events, but we also often hear and read about ‘traumatic’ events. It is generally as if the fact that an attack is subject to immediate memorialisation (even though this is not the case for all attacks) is in itself proof of its traumatic character on a collective level. In fact, trauma is commonly defined in psychology as a dysfunction of the individual memory: the memory of an event experienced in the past constantly returns to our mind, in an uncontrolled way, until it invades the present. Does this therefore mean that there is a ‘collective trauma’ wherever there is an immediate memorialisation? And how does the awareness of experiencing a ‘historical’ event as it unfolds, characteristic of presentismFootnote 5, and this traumatic dimension articulate? Does the phenomenon of immediate memorialisation that can be observed in our contemporary societies after certain events reflect a tendency to confuse what is historical with what is traumatic?

This first question leads to a second, concerning the relationship of researchers to events that are the subject of immediate memorialisation. Historians know how important the question of their emotions can become as the temporal distance between them and their objects of study shrinks. This is the difficulty of contemporary history. Researchers are human beings like any others who can be flabbergasted, horrified, or upset—even traumatised, in the clinical sense of the term—by a terrorist attack. It is therefore important to ask what leads them to take it on as an object of study. This is all the more important, as researchers in the humanities and social sciences are generally themselves central actors in the immediate memorialisation of an attack, whether they are involved in the front line of efforts to collect the testimonies of survivors or the archiving of street memorials, or whether they are asked to comment on the event in the media. More than ever, the need is felt here to question the researchers’ preconceptions about the event they are dealing with (concerning its ‘traumatic’ or ‘historical’ character, for example) and to go through empirical investigation, without which they run the risk of giving in to a self-centred analysis. The danger for academics in these circumstances, as we know, is to want to analyse the present without having investigated it in the sole light of the past, and thus to fall into risky historical analogies, which often ignore that they are themselves forms of immediate memorialisation of the event.

Beyond this, the third and final question that inevitably arises is that of the articulation between individual and collective memories. How does the memorialisation of the attacks on a collective level influence our individual memory of them? Of course, this question is not new. But the novelty and complexity of the phenomenon under consideration here invites us to approach it from a new angle.

From Immediate to Long-Term Memorialisation: A Three-Level Social Process

When it comes to the study of such a process of memorialisation of any event, terrorist or otherwise, it is indeed very common to distinguish between ‘individual memory’ and ‘collective memory’. But if I have not done so until now, it is because this distinction seems to me likely to obscure things rather than enlighten them. If ‘individual memory’ shall be diverse—each individual having their own, lodged in their brain—it is less clear for ‘collective memory’. Quite often, without any given precision, ‘collective memory’ is presented as a unique and singular memory, implicitly confused with national memory, especially in the work of some historians, since Pierre Nora’s Realms of Memory. How can one deny that there is an American memory of 9/11, and therefore probably also something like a French memory of 13th November 2015? But is such an American memory really the memory of all Americans?

That is a problem, so to speak, as old as sociology. Émile Durkheim tried in his own way to settle the question from the outset, by positing that the collective is a sui generis reality, distinct from the sum of the individuals that make it up. In this sense there is a ‘collective consciousness’, which would constitute the object of sociology in its own right and cannot be reduced to the individual consciousnesses tackled by psychology (Durkheim, 1982). Although this solution made it possible to establish sociology as an autonomous discipline, at least in France, it quickly reached its limits in the study of certain phenomena such as memory. Maurice Halbwachs thus undertook the task of softening and refining the Durkheimian epistemological framework to show how life in society influences all our memories, including the most personal and intimate ones. To this end, he developed an analytical perspective in terms of ‘social frameworks of memory’, which makes it possible to show how what we call ‘individual memory’ and ‘collective memory’ intersect and form a continuum (Halbwachs, 1992). There is no ‘collective memory’ that can be understood as anything other than a memory shared by individuals within a multitude of groups, and there is no ‘individual memory’ that is not influenced by the collectives in which we take part—the nation being only one collective among others—and not necessarily the most influential.Footnote 6

Thus, rather than reiterating this divide between ‘individual memory’ and ‘collective memory’, it is actually more useful to consider that the process of memorialisation combines since the very first moments after an attack not two, but three levels, where the four dimensions distinguished above are deployed and articulated. There is (a) the level of official public memory, defined and implemented by the public authorities by means of memorial policy instruments (ceremonies, public speeches, monuments, medals, etc.). This is mainly the dimension of what I labelled earlier as ‘institutional memorialisation’, but which can also be related to ‘cultural memorialisation’ (the Paul Greengrass’ movie ‘United 93’ and other TV-movies about this flight whose passengers rebelled against the terrorists’ feeds, for example, the official public memory of 9/11) or to heritage memorialisation (when an official memorial-museum is created). This level should not be mistaken with (b) the level of various group memories within society and even transnational, shared within a number of more or less formal and institutionalised social groups: victims and survivors’ associations, bereaved families, professional groups such as first responders or journalists, but also neighbourhood networks at the sites hit, etc. Traces of this can generally be found from the earliest manifestations of popular memorialisation (i.e. street memorials), but also in the products of cultural memorialisation (in particular the books published by representatives of some of these memory groups), and through the occasional contestation of official public memory (through the organisation of competing ceremonies or the creation of alternative memorials, to gain public recognition of particular group memories). Finally, there is the level of individual memories, i.e. the memories that each individual in the affected society and beyond may actually have of the terrorist attack, whether they were a direct victim or witness or experienced it through the media. Analysing the interactions between these three levels while paying attention not to reify them, but rather to highlight the way in which they constantly influence each other over time, through the four dimensions I identified before: this is what constitutes the very object of a sociology of memory, in my opinion.

The Halbwachsian problem of the ‘social frameworks of memory’ refers very directly to the interaction between group memories and individual memories. In this case, it invites us to understand how our membership of different social groups influences our memories of terrorist attacks—the fact that we remember certain attacks more than others, and certain circumstances or aspects of an attack more than others—and how these memories are constantly reconstructed and reworked on the basis of the memory narratives that circulate in the communities of memories in which we take part. At the same time, it invites us to recognise that for every attack, group-specific memories exist only insofar as they are shared and maintained by individuals, and which may therefore evolve or even disappear as new individuals enter, and others leave such groups. For example, there is a memory of 9/11 that focuses on the heroic deaths of over three hundred firefighters in the collapse of the World Trade Centre towers, held by both the New York Firemen's Professional Association and the parishes to which many of the deceased firefighters, who were Catholics of Irish or Italian origin, belonged. The same is true of the 13th November attacks in Paris: the memory kept by the Bataclan survivors grouped within the ‘Life for Paris’ association is not the same as that of other victims, struck on the terraces of Parisian cafés or at the Stade de France that same evening. More generally, it is likely that rock music fans and concert hall regulars were more marked by the Bataclan attack than by the other events of that evening, while for some residents of the affected neighbourhoods, it was rather the attack on a café or a restaurant that was familiar to them.

When it comes to the public commemoration of an attack, it is the interaction between these different group memories and official public memory that is at stake. It is increasingly common for the public authorities of Western countries hit by terrorism to turn to victims’ groups to ask them their needs and demands in this respect, or even to simply give them control over the organisation of ceremonies. Thus, the main ceremony publicly commemorating the 13th November attacks takes place every year on the square in front of the town hall of the 11th arrondissement of Paris on the initiative of ‘Life For Paris’, now in partnership with the association ‘13Onze15’, and when political representatives take part in it, they are not allowed to speak, in accordance with the wishes of these associations, who are concerned with not politicising the memory of the event.

However, giving them such control over public memory presupposes that there is a minimal consensus among the victims on how the event should be commemorated, which is neither obvious nor systematic. On the contrary, it is not uncommon for conflicts to arise around public memory of a terrorist attack between groups, including victims, who have not only different but rival memories: this is what I directly observed in Spain after the 2004 Madrid bombings, where people could be seen arguing in the audience of the first official commemoration ceremonies and where commemorative events were organised by memory groups on the same day and at the same hour as official ceremonies (Truc, 2011; Truc & Sánchez-Carretero, 2019). Commemorative events can therefore be used by certain groups to challenge the official public memory of an attack and to question public authorities. This can happen when such groups feel that not enough light has been shed on the causes of the attack or that justice has not been properly rendered to its victims, as for example in the case of the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires or that of the 1980 Bologna massacre in Italy (Tank-Storper, 2019; Tota, 2002). Therefore, it is also possible that public authorities deliberately avoid maintaining the memory of an attack or do it in the most discreet way possible (Heath-Kelly, 2016).

Since 9/11, however, the most frequent case, at least in Western societies, is where attacks are the subject of a ‘duty to remember’. Assessing the scope of such an injunction leads to a consideration of the interaction between official public memory and individual memories. While the study of the other two interactions I have previously mentioned can be carried out using traditional methods of investigation, such as semi-structured interviews or ethnographic immersion in associative groups, this one is more difficult to grasp. To question individuals head-on about their relationship to the memory of an attack within the framework of public commemoration leads in fact to nothing more than, at best, conventional answers on the ‘importance’ of that memory, which simply echo the official memorial discourse. This is what we would see in, for example, a television report on a commemorative event of an attack when journalists ask members of the audience why they are there.

In order to understand the ordinary relationships to the memory of attacks that are under public injunctions to remember, it is therefore important to opt for methods of investigation that minimise the risk of the injunction being overstressed by the investigation protocol itself. This is what I tried to do with two colleagues, Sarah Gensburger and Sylvain Antichan, in our study of the memorialisation of the 13th November attacks. On the second anniversary of these attacks in 2017, while commemorations were taking place in Paris, we proposed that our students to go in small groups to meet passers-by on the Nanterre University campus, in the centre of Saint-Denis (not far from where the police assaulted the presumed terrorists five days after the attacks) and in the vicinity of the commemorative ceremonies in the centre of Paris, using two different methods: either an informal interview, or a projective test in which the respondents spoke from an iconographic support, a method already used in the field of memory studies by Marie-Claire Lavabre (Lavabre & Dos Santos, 2017). In the first case, it was a matter of engaging passers-by in conversation by simply asking them about the day’s date: ‘Hello, do you know what day it is?’ In the second case, they were asked to take a moment to share their reactions to a series of photographs, representing various commemorative actions, some linked to the Paris attacks and others not, and ending with a photograph of a military patrol in an urban crowd. In both cases, the investigators had to be careful not to recall the 13th November attacks themselves from the outset.

The first finding of this mini-survey was that, apart from those people interviewed in the vicinity of the commemorative ceremonies, none of the respondents spontaneously made the link between the date of the day and the attacks of 13th November. This surprised our student interviewers, who were very aware of the public injunction to remember, especially as only two years had passed since the attacks at the time and the media were still covering their commemoration to a large extent. In the face of the projective test, it was also the case that some of the people interviewed did not see at all what the photographs of previous commemorations of these attacks corresponded to. The second observation we were able to make was that, as soon as the attacks of 13th November were mentioned, very precise memories came back to some respondents but not to others, generally depending on their relationship to the places hit by the terrorists that evening. For instance, a mathematics and physics teacher in his forties, interviewed on the Nanterre campus, explained to us that he had never been to the inner centre of Paris and confessed his embarrassment at ‘not feeling concerned’ by the attacks. Similarly, some students began to explain: ‘I'm too lazy to go out in Paris, I prefer to stay in my suburbs’, or ‘I don't hang around the Bataclan or in those areas, I don't hang around République. I'm not a Parisian’. Others, on the contrary, who lived in Paris or were more used to going out for leisure, detailed how much the memory of these attacks had affected them and the fear they had felt afterwards of being targeted in turn, whether it was during a visit to Eurodisney or on their way to the Sorbonne.

From (The Memorialisation of) an Attack to (The Social Response to) Another: A Never-Ending Process?

In the same way as our lifestyles and living spaces, the memory we have of certain past attacks, more than others, directly determines the way we respond both individually and collectively to new attacks in the present. It is this idea that I would like to conclude with, to come full circle. What I mean by this is that the memorialisation of certain attacks is also a resource when we try to make sense of a new terrorist attack that occurs suddenly—and in this manner it has a very direct influence on the way we respond to it. This is particularly true for cultural memorialisation: books, films, TV documentaries, songs, etc., which make certain attacks stick in our minds more than others, and with a certain narrative, certain details and certain images, more than others. That was very clear, for instance, when a major European city, in this case Madrid, was hit by a mass attack for the first time since 9/11 in 2004. This attack, which is still the deadliest that Europe has ever seen on its soil, was immediately presented in the media both in Spain and in other European countries, particularly France, as a ‘new 9/11’, a Spanish and European 9/11. This says as much about our immediate reaction to this event as it does about the place occupied by 9/11 in our memories (Truc, 2017: 38–56).

9/11 itself, when it occurred, was interpreted in the light of a historical event that was deeply rooted in American memories: the attack on Pearl Harbor. 2001 marked the 60th anniversary of that attack. Its public commemoration was massive at the time, and the blockbuster of the year in cinemas was ‘Pearl Harbor’, produced by Disney Studios and starring Ben Affleck. It thus seemed obvious to most Americans that 9/11 was a ‘new Pearl Harbor’ (Chéroux, 2009).Footnote 7 The fact that it was perceived as such implied that it was equated with an act of war, and therefore determined social reactions to this attack in a bellicose mode. However, there were other possibilities to imagine: as I explain in the first chapter of my book Shell Shocked, at the same time in Europe, this historical analogy with Pearl Harbor did not hold, and the 9/11 attacks were instead experienced as a ‘crime against humanity’, calling for a concerted global response within the framework of international law, concerned with preserving world peace (Truc, 2017: 22–37).

When Paris was hit by Islamist terrorists for the first time since 9/11, with the massacre of the editorial staff of the newspaper Charlie Hebdo on a January morning in 2015, the reference to the memory of 9/11 again made headlines. The newspaper of reference Le Monde, in particular, ran the headline ‘Le 11-Septembre français’ (The French 9/11)—with the immediate effect, whatever one may say or think, of implicitly equating the event with yet another battle in a war that the West and Islamic terrorists have been waging since 11th September 2001. The analogy caused quite a bit of debate, including within the newspaper's editorial staff, until the attacks on 13th November occurred a few months later. Because this time they were simultaneous indiscriminate attacks, rather than targeted assassinations, occurring in the heart of the French capital, and because they killed ten times as many people, some people felt that these attacks were the real ‘French 9/11’, and not the Charlie Hebdo attack. The lexicon of war was omnipresent in November 2015, both in the discourse of the media and that of political representatives, starting with the head of state (Truc et al., 2018; Veniard, 2018). Since then, the polls we regularly conduct in the framework of the ‘November 13 research program’ to find out which attacks the French remember most indicate that the attacks of November 13 tend to eclipse the memory of September 11.Footnote 8

If tomorrow, therefore, by misfortune, a new mass attack were to strike France, it is not impossible that we would speak of a ‘new November 13th’, as we once spoke of a ‘new September 11th’… This is how our societies live with the peril of terrorist attacks, from the immediate responses these attacks provoke to their memorialisation, and vice versa.