PARIS — Dozens of world leaders including Muslim and Jewish statesmen linked arms leading more than a million French citizens in an unprecedented march under high security to pay tribute to victims of Islamist militant attacks.
At least 3.7 million people demonstrated throughout France, the Interior Ministry said, adding that 1.2 million to 1.6 million people had marched in Paris and about 2.5 million people marched in other cities around the country.
The ministry said it was the biggest popular demonstration ever registered in the country. Some commentators said the last street presence in the capital on this scale was at the Liberation of Paris from Nazi Germany in 1944.
President Francois Hollande and leaders from Germany, Italy, Israel, Turkey, Britain and the Palestinian territories, among others, departed from the central Place de la Republique ahead of a sea of French and other flags. Giant letters attached to a statue in the square spelt out “Pourquoi?” (Why?) and small groups sang the “La Marseillaise” national anthem.
Some 2,200 police and soldiers patrolled Paris streets to protect marchers from would-be attackers, with police snipers on rooftops and plain-clothes detectives mingling with the crowd. City sewers were searched ahead of the vigil and underground train stations around the march route are due to be closed down.
The silent march — which may prove the largest seen in modern times through Paris — reflected shock over the worst militant Islamist assault on a European city in nine years. For France, it raised questions of free speech, religion and security, and beyond French frontiers it exposed the vulnerability of states to urban attacks.
Two of the gunmen had declared allegiance to al-Qaida in Yemen and a third to the militant Islamic State. All three were killed during the police operations in what local commentators have called “France’s 9/11.”
“Paris is today the capital of the world. Our entire country will rise up and show its best side,” Hollande said in a statement.
“Fantastic France! I am told there could be as many as 1.3 million to 1.5 million of us in Paris,” Francois Lamy, the lawmaker charged by the ruling Socialist Party with organizing the rally, tweeted.
In London, several landmarks, including Tower Bridge, were due to be lit up in the red white and blue colors of the French national flag in a show of support for the event in Paris. Fifty-seven people were killed in an Islamist militant attack on London’s transport system in 2005.
Seventeen people, including journalists and police, were killed in three days of violence that began with a shooting attack on Charlie Hebdo, a weekly known for its satirical attacks on Islam and other religions, as well as politicians. It ended on Friday with a hostage-taking at a Jewish deli in which four hostages were killed.
Overnight, an illuminated sign on the Arc de Triomphe read: “Paris est Charlie” (“Paris is Charlie”).
A video emerged of a man resembling the gunman killed in the kosher deli pledging allegiance to the Islamic State and urged French Muslims to follow his example. A French anti-terrorist police source confirmed it was the killer, Amedy Coulibaly, speaking before the action.
“We’re not going to let a little gang of hoodlums run our lives,” said Fanny Appelbaum, 75, who said she lost two sisters and a brother in the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. “Today, we are all one.”
Zakaria Moumni, a 34-year-old Franco-Moroccan draped in the French flag, agreed: “I am here to show the terrorists they have not won — it is bringing people together of all religions.”
Among many children brought along to the march, Loris Peres, 12, said: “For me this is paying respect to your loved ones, it’s like family … We did a lesson about this at school.”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, British Prime Minister David Cameron and Italy Prime Minister Matteo Renzi were among 44 foreign leaders marching with Hollande. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu — who earlier encouraged French Jews to emigrate to Israel — and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas were also present.
Immediately to Hollande’s left, walked Merkel and to his right Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita. France has provided troops to help fight Islamist rebels there.
In a rare public display of emotion by two major world leaders, cameras showed Hollande embracing Merkel, her eyes shut and forehead resting on his cheek, on the steps of the Elysee before they headed off to march.
After the leaders left the march, Hollande stayed to greet survivors of the Charlie Hebdo attack and their families.
While there has been widespread solidarity with the victims, there have been dissenting voices. French social media have carried comments from those uneasy with the “Je suis Charlie” slogan interpreted as freedom of expression at all cost. Others suggest there was hypocrisy in world leaders whose countries have repressive media laws attending the march.
The head of France’s 550,000-strong Jewish community, Roger Cukierman, the largest in Europe, said Hollande had promised that Jewish schools and synagogues would have extra protection, by the army if necessary, after the killings.
France’s Agence Juive, which tracks Jewish emigration, estimates more than 5,000 Jews left France for Israel in 2014, up from 3,300 in 2013, itself a 73 percent increase on 2012.
Far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen, whom analysts see receiving a boost in the polls due to the attacks, said her anti-immigrant party had been excluded from the Paris demonstration and would instead take part in regional marches.
In Germany, a rally against racism and xenophobia on Saturday drew tens of thousands of people in the eastern German city of Dresden, which has become the center of anti-immigration protests organized by a new grassroots movement called Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West.
Separately, a building of the newspaper Hamburger Morgenpost, which like many other publications has reprinted Charlie Hebdo cartoons, was the target of an arson attack and two suspects were arrested, police said on Sunday.
Turkish and French sources said a woman hunted by French police as a suspect in the attacks had left France several days before the killings and is believed to be in Syria.
French police had launched in an intensive search for Hayat Boumeddiene, the 26-year-old partner of one of the attackers, describing her as “armed and dangerous.”
But a source familiar with the situation said Boumeddiene left France last week and traveled to Syria via Turkey. A senior Turkish official corroborated that account, saying she passed through Istanbul on Jan. 2.