On does not choose its heroes. Although… Images of the saviour, “the man with the backpack”, looped on June 8 and 9, as did these videos, shared on social networks, despite warnings, of a man who stabs a baby in his stroller, facing a panicked woman, in the Pâquier park, in Annecy.
We will learn that Lilian, 19, a pedal boat rental company, with a municipal agent with a shovel, as well as other witnesses to the knife attack on June 8, also tried to stop the assailant. Result: six injured, four seriously; children under 3 years old. A few meters away, a class of high school students had alerted the emergency services and spontaneously formed a human barrier to prevent other children from witnessing this horror scene. That, the pictures do not show.
“Dread” is then on all news channel banners. The perpetrator, a homeless Syrian refugee, granted asylum in Sweden, is in police custody. In front of the police station, the special correspondent of BFM-TV tirelessly repeats for hours, to the word, the same information. Abdelmasih H., who shouted “in the name of Jesus Christ” during the attack, “rolled on the ground” and a psychiatrist must decide. “Not much should come out of this hearing. » No motive, no explanation. The experts on the set quibble about the sanity, the motivations of the attacker and the lessons to be learned: unbalanced, simulator? Islamist terrorist posing as an Eastern Christian? What about immigration in all this?
a normal guy
Fortunately, Henry is there. First of all on CNews, June 9 in the morningthen on BFM-TV in the afternoon, the 24-year-old young man, French flag on the sleeve of his T-shirt adorned with a strange logo, delivers his “exceptional testimony”that of a pilgrim who has been touring France’s cathedrals for a few months (he was, moreover, before the events, the subject of a portrait in The Dauphine Libere). A normal guy who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Calm, humble and smiling, recalling that he was not alone in acting, Henri d’Anselme recounts his act of bravery in front of a Bruce Toussaint who was both dumbfounded and admiring: “I am not a hero, any Frenchman would have reacted like me. »
“The man with the backpack” no longer belongs to himself, because he fulfills a double function. First, that of the figure of the hero, bringing the nation together around common values and giving it hope in the face of barbarism, which targets young children, an unprecedented event since the Toulouse massacre of March 2012 (when Mohammed Merah killed three children from a Jewish school). Like, before him, Lieutenant-Colonel Arnaud Beltrame, killed in March 2018 during the attack in Trèbes (Aude), or Lassana Bathily, rescuer of hostages at the Hyper Cacher at Porte de Vincennes, in Paris, in January 2015, Henri d’Anselme joins the pantheon of ordinary heroes.
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