France Loses a Soccer Championship, but Achieves a Rare Unity

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/11/world/europe/uefa-euro-2016-france.html

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PARIS — Among the 90,000 soccer fans watching the final of the European Championships on huge screens set up in front of the Eiffel Tower, it was Portugal’s supporters who were jumping in jubilation at the end, as their team won, 1-0.

The French were subdued. But while it would have been better to win, many there said that the soccer tournament, which was held in France, had been a rare moment of unity in a divisive time and that they could be proud of making it to the final.

“Only soccer can do this,” said Amir Hallouz, 20, who had come from the Paris suburb of Colombes with a group of friends to watch the game. “It brings everyone together.”

Mr. Hallouz gestured at the crowd of people: They were white and black, a few were Asian and some were Arab. But they were all speaking French, a reminder of just how international the country is. Many had come in mixed groups, refuting the frequent image in the media that there is a white France and a nonwhite France, and that the two are separate.

France has had a difficult 18 months, starting with terrorist attacks on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and on a kosher grocery store in January last year, and then another set of attacks in and around Paris on Nov. 13, which killed 130 people, 90 of them at the Bataclan concert hall.

Three of the bombers in those November attacks blew themselves up just outside the Stade de France, where Sunday’s championship game was played.

Those attacks were in many people’s minds as they went through security at the fan zone in front of the Eiffel Tower.

“The security could be better,” said Christophe Soares, 20, whose family is Portuguese but who was brought up in France. (He was rooting for Portugal.)

“A person could smuggle in something in their shoe,” he said. Then he shrugged and added that he was not afraid to come on Sunday. “It would be worse to lose my liberty,” he said.

Still, by the end of the evening, which included several just-missed shots at the goal for France, there was disappointment, too. France had been expected to win, but the victory had not come to pass.

Sophie Jugan, 30, a medical administrator at a Paris hospital, chose to watch the game in the same neighborhood of bars and cafes that had been attacked on Nov. 13. “People needed to enjoy themselves a little and this is what we did,” she said.

“It makes more sense with everything that happened to watch it here — it is good to see all the cafes filled with people,” Ms. Jugan added.

Many did not want to be reminded on the day of the final about the terrorist threat. Instead, they saw the game as a chance to erase the memory of a painful period.

“We try not to think about those bad things that happened,” said Anaelle Samama, a nursing student who cheered for France, although the friends she had been watching with were rooting for Portugal. “We have all been longing for a party, for just a party. We want to leave those bad things in the past.”

Even France’s loss was not so bad for many. There is a large Portuguese population in Paris and a lot of intermarriage. Gwenaelle Coelho and Marwin Thiebot — she of Portuguese descent, he French — had brought their 7-year-old son to watch the game. He had the red, white and blue of the French flag painted on one cheek and the red, green and yellow of Portugal’s on the other.

“It brings everyone together,” Ms. Coelho said. “We are all here, we can’t lose.”