Extremist attacks wounded Paris. Here's why city turned to 2024 Olympics to heal

For the mayor of Paris, the city's journey to next year's Olympic Games included an epiphany born of brutality: the slaughter of 17 people by gunmen acting in the names of al-Qaida and the Islamic State group.

Anne Hidalgo says the 2015 attacks at a provocative satirical newspaper and a kosher Parisian supermarket were "truly fundamental" in steering her to the idea of bringing the Games back to the French capital for the first time since 1924. With the country outraged and hurting from the bloodshed, she saw the Olympics as an opportunity for France to rebound and heal.

"What really scared me at that moment was to hear young people, even children, explain that the terrorists were heroes and that Charlie was guilty of having pushed freedom of expression too far," Hidalgo says, referring to Charlie Hebdo, the newspaper that repeatedly caricatured the Muslim Prophet Muhammad.

"I said to myself that things were really, really, really bad, and that we absolutely had to find something that also provides perspective, momentum, to young people, to the country. And the Games can be this unifying moment."

Rarely has that need been more pressing for France, a country that has lurched from crisis to crisis since 2017, when Paris was chosen to host the Games. And seldom have the Olympics been as eagerly anticipated, coming after the global losses and separations caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and against the backdrop of war in Ukraine.

The picture-postcard city aims to use its charms to wow audiences, starting with an unprecedented waterborne opening extravaganza on July 26, 2024.

But the context, in France and beyond, is tricky.

Rioting across France last month, triggered by the fatal police shooting of a teenager in the Paris