Paris mayor on Olympic terror threat: ‘We cannot have a city paralysed by fear – we won’t

We meet in the mayor’s office in the glorious 19th-century Hôtel de Ville: an office that is famously larger than the president’s at the Elysée, in a building twice the size of the White House, with spectacular views of the Seine.

Inside, with its marble staircases, its elaborate cornicing, its gilt, mirrors, statues, alcoves and stained-glass windows, you could be in a mini-Versailles. Yet far from being the aloof character I was led to expect, Hidalgo is warm and chatty – and hers isn’t a showcase office, but clearly where she deals with her daily duties. (She is, after all, responsible for a little over two million inhabitants, with a municipal workforce of more than 50,000 and a budget of €11 billion.) The desk is adorned with a cluster of Lego figures and covered with books, files and papers. And for all its grandeur and the magnificence of the art lining the walls, the room has a lived-in feel.

As well it might: Hidalgo has been here for 10 years. And anyone tempted to think of hers as a cushy gig should remember that during her tenure, Paris has lived through a series of Islamic terrorist attacks – on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, and a kosher supermarket in January 2015, and in November that same year at the Bataclan concert hall – the Seine bursting its banks (in 2018), a fire gutting Notre-Dame cathedral (in 2019) and a global pandemic.  

Hosting the Olympics has enormous meaning for any city, but for Paris and France, it’s especially significant. Its decade horribilis was one of the main reasons Hidalgo was so determined to win, and she hopes the Games will both give Paris “a global visibility” and prove that what she describes as the “masculinist model imposed everywhere on the planet” is outdated. “I would like our Olympics to show that there is another way to live intelligently, in peace, while respecting all living things.” 

It was specifically the spate of attacks that began at the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo that made up her mind, she tells me. In the days, weeks and months after the January 2015 terrorist attacks claimed the lives of 17 people, Hidalgo saw how “lost” and “confused” young people were, how badly they needed “something powerful, a driving force that would bring everyone together – and I told myself that the Olympic Games are the most unifying event in the world”. A staccato nod. “And that we have to go for it.”