PARIS — Arthur Dénouveaux's memories of Nov. 13, 2015, aren't exactly hazy. Nor are they perfect.
"What I remember from that night are a few very clear pictures," he says.
Dénouveaux was one of around 1,500 people inside the Bataclan concert hall to see the American rock band Eagles of Death Metal, when gunmen linked to the Islamic State opened fire.
What he remembers next are fragments.
There was the muzzle flash coming out of the gunmen's Kalashnikovs. Being pushed to the floor as the crowd scrambled. A girl "completely lost," staring toward the shooters before others pulled her down.
Then Dénouveaux remembers crawling outside.
"Finding myself under the night sky in Paris," he says, "and saying to myself, 'Hey, I'm free again.'"
Across Paris that night, 130 people were killed at cafés, the national soccer stadium and the Bataclan. Ten years later, France is still wrestling with how to remember the deadliest attack on its soil in modern history and how to live with it.
The country has built an extensive system of remembrance. There have been books, documentaries, plaques and memorials across the city. A landmark 10-month terrorism trial ended in 2022 with the conviction of 20 men, including the only surviving member of the group that carried out the attacks.
On Thursday, President Emmanuel Macron visited each of the attack sites before inaugurating a new memorial garden behind Paris City Hall. At the Place de la République this week, people placed flowers and lit candles at a makeshift memorial.
For some, like Paris resident Anaelle Baheux, who lives just steps from one of the cafés attacked that night, these rituals still matter.
"It's reassuring to see that people didn't forget what happened," she says.
But even as the rituals deepen, new research shows the details of that night are already fading from collective memory — and a study is offering insights into why some people recover from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, more easily than others.
Denis Peschanski, a historian, has been co-leading a 12-year study examining how the Nov. 13 attacks are remembered across French society. The project has followed nearly 1,000 people — survivors, victims' families, first responders and ordinary citizens — interviewing them at regular intervals to track how their recollections change over time.
"It's an interesting question, why did people forget," Peschanski says.
He says one pattern stands out: While most people still remember the Bataclan vividly, their recollections of what happened at the cafés and the national stadium are "foggier," if not forgotten altogether.
For survivors from those sites, Peschanski calls this a "double peine" — a double punishment. They live not only with trauma, but also with the feeling that their part of the story has faded from public memory.
Alongside the national memory study, a team of neuroscientists has spent the past decade studying trauma on an individual level, tracking about 200 survivors through regular MRI scans and psychological assessments.
Pierre Gagnepain, one of the lead researchers, says early treatment approaches often discouraged the idea of intentionally trying to suppress traumatic memories.
"For a long time, people thought that suppression was not good, that trying to block memory made things even worse," Gagnepain says. "People used to say it would cause even more intrusive memories."
But their initial findings suggest the opposite: suppression can, in fact, be part of recovery.
"What's important to understand is that forgetting — or suppression — doesn't mean you don't remember what happened to you," Gagnepain says. "It's about making the memory less present, less vivid, less accessible. People can still describe what they went through. It's just that the memory becomes less intrusive, less invading."
The science suggests that memory blurs not because people don't care, but because the mind adapts.
MRI findings from this study show that when memory control networks begin to recover — meaning when certain neural connections are strengthened and the brain's ability to inhibit intrusive thoughts is restored — survivors of traumatic events are less likely to suffer persistent intrusive symptoms of PTSD.
But not everyone. About a third of survivors in the study remain "chronic" cases, stuck in a state where fear and memory remain tightly linked.
Bataclan survivor Arthur Dénouveaux wasn't part of the MRI research, but he recognizes the distinction. He says his personal memories remain accessible without overwhelming him.
"You know, I can touch them. I can feel them," he says. "It's not just something out of thin air. My body was there. My mind was there."
For the past decade, Dénouveaux has served as president of Life for Paris, a support group created weeks after the attacks to help survivors navigate medical care, bureaucracy and years of legal proceedings that followed.
From the start, he says, the group intended to disband after the 10th anniversary.
"It feels like that point in time when you can say, 'No, I'm not a victim anymore. I have been a victim. I used to be a victim,'" he says.
That doesn't mean forgetting — for Dénouveaux or for France. Moving forward, he says, is its own kind of healing.
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