Nice marks 10 years since Bastille Day truck attack killed 86, with ceremonies and enduring psychological scars

Ten years after a 19-ton truck ploughed through Bastille Day crowds in Nice, the city is holding a day of commemoration that includes a presidential visit, a drone display, and 86 beams of light marking the moment the attack ended. Behind the public rituals, however, thousands of children and medical staff who lived through the horror continue a painful process of recovery.

A day of official remembrance

President Emmanuel Macron will preside over a ceremony at 18:00 on the Promenade des Anglais, followed by a show involving 2,016 drones. At exactly 22:34, the time when police shot dead the attacker Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel after his rampage along nearly 2 km, 86 blue beams will be projected into the sky. The commemorations risk being overshadowed by France’s World Cup semi-final the same evening, a clash that prompted Mayor Eric Ciotti to ask FIFA for a minute of silence before kick-off.

The weight carried by children

Of the 86 dead, 13 were children or adolescents. In the years since, the Lenval paediatric hospital in Nice has received around 10,000 patients connected to the attack and provided regular long-term follow-up to more than 1,000. Dr Michèle Batistta, a psychiatrist at the hospital, described a catalogue of symptoms: sleep disturbances, separation anxiety, delays in language acquisition and an inability to explore the world. One patient, Rose, was 3 years old and in her pushchair when the truck struck. She has spent a decade learning to manage her anger and stress.

I wanted to understand how one manages trauma in the passage from the world of childhood to adulthood.

Journalist Franck Fernandes, who was on the promenade that night and has now directed a documentary titled "10 ans", spoke to four survivors who were children in 2016. He said he deliberately avoided asking what they saw, fearing it would reawaken their trauma. Instead he documented the slow, uneven path to rebuilding a life.

A city that feels its grief is ignored

Nice’s suffering has long been overshadowed by the 2015 Paris attacks, a sentiment voiced by former mayor Philippe Pradal.

This memory is, in our eyes, insufficiently taken into account and above all insufficiently respected.

Posters bearing the names of the dead, mountains of soft toys and a municipal exhibition titled "Memory, Mirror of Our Humanity" have tried to fill the gap. The attack claimed victims of around twenty nationalities, yet many in Nice believe the national gaze rarely lingers here.

Art as a form of survival

Writer Thierry Vimal lost his 12-year-old daughter that night. He described the moment he returned to writing the next day as an existential imperative, and later transformed his courtroom notes from the 2022 Paris terrorism trial into a play that drew standing ovations. Artist Célia Viale, who lost her mother, took months before she could create again. Both describe their work not as therapy but as the only language left for making sense of loss.

In the Vieux-Nice apartment where Vimal now lives, he recalls the scene at Lenval hospital, a building he imagines as a great white-and-blue ship besieged by journalists. That image, he says, became the first scene of his book.