Justice
An Assault on Ordinary City Life
Nice’s famed Promenade des Anglais is specifically designed to attract pedestrians in search of a stroll along the waterfront.
The perpetrator of Thursday night’s deadly attack on Nice would have had difficulty choosing a more evocative setting.
The Promenade des Anglais, where a 31-year-old suspect drove a truck two kilometers through crowds gathered for Bastille Day celebrations, isn’t just any street. It’s a kind of open-air living room that’s at the very heart of France’s fifth largest city, and the part of Nice that its many visitors most tend to flock to. This attack, which has claimed at least 84 lives and critically injured dozens more, may have had some element of motive that has not yet been spelled out. But fundamentally, it was an assault on ordinary city life.