After the attack, Paris is slowly coming to terms with a new vulnerability

Two weeks after the November 13 attacks here, many of the memorials around the monument in the Place de la Republique are bedraggled, the hand-drawn signs rain-soaked, the candles exhausted, the flowers dropping their petals.

On the plinth, which bears a 31-foot bronze statue of Marianne, the embodiment of the French Republic, there are even more tattered posters that read, "Je suis Charlie," remnants of the solidarity after the January attacks in which Islamist extremists struck the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket.

The assaults two weeks ago, however, were different - random killings of 130 people at a concert, outside a soccer game and on the terraces of cafes and clubs. While the authorities at first flooded the streets with police officers and soldiers to reassure the public, they are less visible now, with more infrequent patrols of tourist spots and transport hubs. Security guards at some stores still inspect customers' bags and ask them to open their coats, but that scrutiny appears to be fading, too.

But as Paris memorialised the dead on Friday in a solemn ceremony, it remained a city in shock - tetanisee, as the French say. The Champs-Élysees, with its magnificent Christmas illuminations and the Cartier store looking like a massive present with a bright red ribbon of lights, is unusually empty. Tourists have cancelled their trips, and locals have rushed to get home, away from another potential target.

Paris is only slowly coming to terms with the idea that this assault by Islamic State supporters, many of them French-born, is unlikely to be the last.

Bouchra Wagner, 45, owns two market stands with her husband at the Marche des Enfants Rouges, near the Bataclan concert hall that was one of the attackers' targets. Born in Casablanca, she has been in France for more than 20 years.

"We are all in mourning," she said. "It has become part of our daily life; we are living with it now."

Another attack could occur, she said, "whenever, wherever."

Bruno de Frias, 30, was at Le Carillon bar with his girlfriend and two friends when the terrorists started shooting and escaped through the kitchen. "Everyone is telling me to see a psychologist, but I just don't have time," he said. "But it's deep in here," he added, pointing to his middle, and the memories come back "like flashes."

"People are afraid," de Frias said. "It makes me feel worried about the city."

A florist, he said he has been selling "tonnes of white roses" for those who want to remember the dead of the Bataclan massacre by placing tributes at the foot of Marianne. Now, he said, "we've started to see more and more people buying flowers for gifts."

"It's good, it means Parisians are going out again," he added. "I think we all want to move on."

A small older woman hovered near the statue of Marianne, fumbling with her umbrella and her purse. She brought a candle to honour the dead, but it was too wet that day, she said, so she would come back later.

"I came also to pay respect to the victims of 1939-44," she said. "The victims of the Holocaust are the same," casualties of the same kind of hatred. Her name, she said, is France Cohen, and she is 78; her father, who was Jewish, was deported during World War II and she reunited with her parents only after the war.

The recent violence is a reminder of the bloody history of Paris - the Revolution, the Commune, the German occupations, the bombings around the Algerian war and later. Paris may be, for many, the dream of a sweet, bourgeois life, with elegant aesthetics and fine food, but beyond the patterned cobblestones, it is also a city that has had long experience with enduring trauma.

There is another Paris, too, the Paris of the banlieues, the poor, heavily immigrant suburbs, many of them mostly Muslim and black. Clichy-sous-Bois, where the deaths of teenagers fleeing the police set off nationwide rioting 10 years ago, remains one of the poorest towns in France, with unemployment around 40 per cent and half the population under 25.

Only 10 miles from central Paris, there is still no major road or mass transit station despite a decade of promises, and it usually takes 90 minutes to commute each way. In the 10 months since the Charlie Hebdo attacks, when Prime Minister Manuel Valls called the situation in places like Clichy "territorial, social, ethnic apartheid," there has been some new investment.

A tram line connecting Clichy to the main suburban railway at Aulnay-sous-Bois is finally under construction, scheduled to open by the winter of 2018, according to the mayor, Olivier Klein, with a subway stop planned for 2023. Some redevelopment has occurred, with old housing projects ripped down for newer construction. "Security is also better," said an older Algerian-born man playing cards, who declined to provide his name.

©2015 The New York Times New Service

Attackers had planned more strikes

Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who was behind a terror attack in Paris on November 13, had plans to strike Jewish targets and to disrupt schools and the transport system in France, Reuters reported, citing unidentified people close to the investigation.

Abaaoud, who was killed during a police raid in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis on November 18, had boasted of the ease with which he had re-entered Europe from Syria via Greece two months earlier, the sources said, Reuters reports.