On November 13, 2015, three gunmen opened fire in the Bataclan concert hall at 50 Boulevard Voltaire in Paris and subsequently held the venue under a three-hour siege. This was the largest in a series of coordinated terrorist attacks that eventually killed 130 people and injured 500. During the aftermath of these attacks, expressions of mourning and trauma marked and invariably transformed the urban landscape.

Sarah Gensburger, a sociologist working on social memory and its localisation, lives with her family on the Boulevard Voltaire and has been studying the city of Paris as her primary field site for several years. This time, memorialisation was taking place on her doorstep. Both a diary and an academic work, this book is a chronicle of this grassroots memorialisation process and an in-depth analysis of the way it has been embedded in the everyday lives of the author, neighbours, other Parisians and tourists.

On November 13, 2015, three gunmen opened fire in the Bataclan concert hall at 50 Boulevard Voltaire in Paris and subsequently held the venue under a three-hour siege. This was the largest in a series of coordinated terrorist attacks that eventually killed 130 people and injured 500. During the aftermath of these attacks, expressions of mourning and trauma marked and invariably transformed the urban landscape.

Sarah Gensburger, a sociologist working on social memory and its localization, lives with her family on the Boulevard Voltaire and has been studying the city of Paris as her primary field site for several years. This time, memorialization was taking place on her doorstep. Both a diary and an academic work, this book is a chronicle of this grassroots memorialization process and an in-depth analysis of the way it has been embedded in the everyday lives of the author, neighbors, other Parisians and tourists.

Gensburger’s finely attuned sociological gaze finds the city not in the paralysis of terror’s shadow, but rather active in mobilised memorialisation, and deserving of our attention.
Andrew Hoskins, University of Glasgow

This book is unusual—in style, content, and tone. The material is inherently fascinating, and the questions at the heart of the book are crucial. This is a terrific, unique book.
Scott Straus, University of Wisconsin–Madison

The book is a highly important study of a year in the life of a
‘terrorised neighbourhood’, which powerfully demonstrates the continuation of daily life and periodic contestations of public space – a neighbourhood which refuses to be defined by terror.Charlotte Heath-Kelly, Memory Studies 13(3), June 10, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698020914019b