It’s hard for me to separate the external changes Paris might have undergone from the internal ones I’ve felt in myself, but more importantly in my family. The anxiety is palpable. My youngest children, boys of 11 and 8 have both been having nightmares since the attacks, the 11 year-old often dreaming that his younger brother is shot or harmed by a terrorist at school while he looks on powerless. They came home for the holidays in December each with a leaflet put out by the Education Ministry about what to do in the event of a terrorist attack, and my youngest kept checking that I had read it. On the other hand they both joke now about not-very-bright people blowing themselves up in suicide vests.

My eldest two are of the Bataclan generation and live a stone’s throw from where the November attacks took place. My daughter who knew people who were killed had to take time off work and my son, a philosophy graduate, who has never been interested in religion, now believes that the biggest intellectual challenge of his life is to combat Islamist ideology by spreading ideas of tolerance.

I’ve lived in this beautiful city for thirty years and have experienced along with Parisians plenty of terror campaigns that can all be viewed through a geopolitical lens. In the 80s it was what we now know to be a series of bombings and assassinations backed by Khomeini’s Iran to force France to honour a nuclear energy contract made with the Shah. In the 90s it was spillover from the Algerian civil war. Now it’s fallout from the chaos in the Middle East but that no longer feels like a sufficient explanation. What feels different about these latest attacks is that we seem to be feeling them in our bodies, in our nervous systems, infecting our sleep, so that we don’t look for geopolitical reasons this time but for existential ones. People’s questioning runs along the lines of, what have we done to them that they hate us so much? How can we live better, safer lives? At their dinner parties my Parisian friends are not talking politics as they would have done in the past but wondering how best to live.

It’s not easy to make generalisations about something as nebulous as the feeling of a city after a collective trauma, but people do. The American-born French writer, Julian Green argued that the ignominies of the Nazi Occupation on a population that was wedded to the pursuit of pleasure and, unlike Londoners in The Blitz say, ill-equipped for adversity, left a nasty scar on the city and made post-war Parisians rude and selfish. What strikes me most about the atmosphere in this city since November 13th is a new gentleness and thoughtfulness among the people. Shaken to the core, perhaps Parisians no longer have the stomach for the brash invulnerability for which they’re famous.

I’ve also observed that the particular generation of Parisians that was targeted by the attacks reacted in the aftermath in new and uplifting ways. The mass demonstrations after Charlie Hebdo were wonderful in many ways but they were not new. Demonstrating  is what the French do best. By contrast, after Nov 13th there is a feeling that the young – though sadly not the political cast – are searching hard for new ways to respond to this horror, ways that include grass roots initiatives, which make use of the diffusing power of the Internet. This is a profound and radical departure in a culture used to the state providing all the solutions. What November 13th showed the educated young in France is that the State does not have the answers, nor does that mythological entity le peuple, but they, as individuals working together, do.

Provided, that is, that the French state lets them.