The scarring might normally go unnoticed, but Aca Pavlovic knows where to look. He shuffles over to a lamppost on the corner of Impasse de la Cokerie and twists aside an advertisement for wholesale paint supplies to expose the damage beneath. The bite marks could have been chiselled out, so deep are they cut into the metal, with whole chunks gouged from the frame. Some are instantly recognisable as the impressions of nuts and bolts. Elsewhere the blemishes are more rounded and sharp to the touch, the result of ball-bearings tearing into the post.
Pavlovic has twice been back to the Stade de France but, as he runs his fingers over the pitted surface, delicately tracing the indentations, emotion spasms across his face. He has not cried here before, but the memories are raw. “Look at that, look at what it did to the lamppost, and imagine what it did to us,” he says, his muttered stream of consciousness competing with the rumble of mid-afternoon motorway traffic on the nearby A86. “People had been evacuated from McDonald’s, lots of people. But he followed us across the road. He had chosen us as his victims. And this is where he detonated his bomb ... No. I don’t want to look at this any more.”
It takes time for him to regain his composure, but he has a story he wants to tell. Pavlovic is one of the forgotten victims of the terrorist atrocities of 13 November 2015, the deadliest on French soil since the second world war. The focus tends to be drawn towards the Bataclan theatre or the café terraces of the 10th and 11th arrondissements in central Paris, where 129 of the night’s 130 victims lost their lives. But his tale is also significant, not least because the target of that evening’s first wave of attacks – so often dismissed as a botched job in the context of events elsewhere – had been the Stade de France.
The venue will host seven matches at the European Championship, including the opening fixture between France and Romania next Friday. It is the stage where Aimé Jacquet’s multi‑ethnic lineup, inspired by Zinédine Zidane and Marcel Desailly, Lilian Thuram and Didier Deschamps, claimed the World Cup in 1998. That team were emblematic of a newfound French unity, a spirit of “Black‑Blanc‑Beur” (blacks, whites and Arabs). Regardless whether that facade of social harmony has subsequently been exposed as a deception, not least in the aftermath of Eric Cantona’s comments to the Guardian last week, this is where Deschamps’s current Bleus aspire to hoist the European trophy on 10 July.
And yet it is also where one person was killed, and Pavlovic and 53 others seriously wounded, when three suicide bombers blew themselves up in the shadow of the arena while the national team, with the president François Hollande among a crowd of 79,000, were defeating Germany in a friendly a little under seven months ago. This is a nation dismayed that French nationals had been among the ranks of militants who had killed their compatriots. The events of that Friday night ensure France host their third European Championship under a state of emergency, declared by the government in November but extended to cover the tournament.
They will implement the biggest security operation for a sporting event in the nation’s history over the next month, acutely aware that investigators have since questioned whether the attacks at Brussels airport and on the city’s Métro system, which killed 32 people in March, had originally been intended for Euro 2016. The theory is that the Franco-Belgian terror cell had been panicked into acting early following the arrest of Salah Abdeslam, the last surviving Paris attacker. Concerns over security will be a recurring theme at the finals, but France needs this tournament to be a success.
The authorities have consoled themselves that a greater tragedy was averted at the Stade de France. At least one of the three terrorists had been turned away that night because he did not possess a ticket, his attempts to blag entry dismiss
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