On January 5th, Florence Aubenas, a senior reporter for Liberation, the newspaper I read every morning, was kidnapped off the streets of Baghdad. Her abduction first made the front page of the paper on January 8th, the day I arrived to Paris.
Yesterday, she landed safely back in France, greeted off a government jet by Jacques Chirac. Her ordeal lasted 158 days.
The French are extremely good at certain things and now handling a hostage crisis has to be added to the list. From the day I arrived, the whole journalistic community (led by Liberation) never let up in their support of Florence. At every opportunity the Great Media Wheel just begged to move on, to bury the Florence story until her eventual (and magical) release, but it never happened. Her name and that of her fixer, Hussein Hanoun, appended every TV report from Irak. Newspapers published their faces everyday.
And there were artistic events, fairs, candlelight vigils, and displayed portraits all over France to keep the support alive. I took part in a rollerblade skate (the one that takes place every Friday night) where the many thousands of participants were provided with Florence and Hussein t-shirts.
So with all that mobilization, all that build-up, millions of people, like myself, spontaneously cried on hearing the news yesterday. I met some ex-pats at a café in the 10th and got to tell them and everyone stopped their conversations mid-sentence, shocked then ecstatic. It was the buzz of Paris. And a few hundred meters away, at Place de la Republique (near the Liberation headquarters), the big portraits of the now former hostages were taken down to a jubilant crowd of hundreds. And it turned into a street party. DJ's came out to spin.