Guest from Europe Evening while France commemorates the 5 years of the Paris and Saint-Denis attacks, Manuel Valls looks back on this night of horror.

Prime Minister at the time, he remembers quickly realizing that it was not a question of a simple attack, but of an "act of war".

INTERVIEW

An event that neither the Prime Minister nor the man in the suit will forget.

While France commemorates this Friday the five years of the attacks in Paris and Saint-Denis, which left 130 dead and 413 injured, Manuel Valls returns to this dramatic evening.

Invited from Europe Evening, the one who was then Prime Minister remembers having understood the evening of the attacks that "we were rocking the era".

A defining moment for both politics and man. 

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"The will to attack who we are"

If his first thought goes above all to the victims and wounded of November 13, to "these young people destroyed by Kalashnikov bullets", Manuel Valls admits: he did not "come out unscathed" from these attacks.

For him, this evening marks a change, a tipping point between two eras.

"We could know again, after a period of recklessness, forms of war."

A fight all the more "terrible" that the enemy comes from "our bosom".

"It came and it always comes from us," notes Manuel Valls, alluding without naming them to the attacks of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine and Nice.

But if the times have changed, "the will to attack what we are, (a civilization, a democracy, a culture) and the will to break up, to create ruptures in our society" are the same, points out he. 

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"An act of war"

Further proof of the violence of the drama of November 13, Manuel Valls still remembers perfectly the way he learned that France had just suffered "an act of war".

"I have in mind the call of a journalist from

Le Monde

who lived just above the bar of the restaurant La Belle Equipe, one of the terraces struck by the terrorists. I was at my home and while he spoke to me about what was happening, I understood from what I already had for information on the Stade de France that we were facing a multi-site attack. "

As the night wore on, and "the horror of these attacks rose again", the government understood that what was taking place was not a simple attack, but "an act of war".