A formal ceremony was organized in the cour d’honneur of so-called Les Invalides in Paris.
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France’s military provided the only images of the ceremony – held a short distance from the Eiffel Tower.
Referring to the victims, he said: ‘It is because they represented freedom that they were massacred’.
“These women, these men, embodied the happiness of life,”Hollande continued”. And they carried on with their lives.
In the deathly silence in the courtyard of Les Invalides the names and ages of 130 victims were called. Mr Hollande stared straight ahead, before finally rising to speak.
The speech was dedicated above all to the dead and France’s young.
He also chaired meetings with his European allies, U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss how to build a strong global coalition to defeat IS in Syria and Iraq.
“I have confidence in the generation to come”.
French citizens across the country decorated their homes with the French tricolor flag in tribute to the 130 people who died in a series of attacks across the capital.
François Hollande, arriving to the national anthem La Marseillaise being played by the Republican Guard, attempted to address the trauma of a nation.
Hollande said 13 November, when gunmen and suicide bombers attacked bars, restaurants, the Bataclan concert hall and the Stade de France stadium, was a date that would always be remembered in France. “They say the flag is imbued with new meaning; it means togetherness, not military conquest or politics….” It was this joy that they wanted to bury with the blast of their bombs.
“Suddenly, we’re asking ourselves what it means to be French, to live in France, something we do daily without giving it a second thought”, Huguet said after clambering down to answer a question about what it means to be French in the aftermath of the bloodbath.
Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian national of Moroccan origin, also boasted of the ease with which he had re-entered Europe from Syria via Greece two months earlier, exploiting the confusion of the migrant crisis and the continent’s passport-free Schengen system, the sources said on Friday. “We believe that we would better create a single, united coalition as it would be easier, simpler and more efficient to coordinate our work that way”. Without rest, it will protect its children. But many more wounded survivors were still in hospital, several in intensive care, unable to attend. We will love and miss him forever.
Hollande’s voice and the music were the only sounds inside the Invalides, filled by hundreds of people.
“When the French President asks me to think hard about what more we can do, then it is a responsibility for us to think hard about it”, Merkel told journalists on Wednesday. “The silence was everywhere and you could hear a pin drop”.
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The interior ministry said 312 people – including the 24 green campaigners – have been put under house arrest in France since the state of emergency was declared on November 14.
