25 years ago today, I learned something about France worth remembering.

I have the covers in front of me as I write. Libération, September 12, 2001, gives its entire front page to the towers going down under a wall of dust, and one line: 11 SEPTEMBRE 2001. Nothing else. Nothing else was needed. Here in the Cantal, La Montagne, the regional daily, led that morning with "La guerre à l'Amérique." War on America. A paper in the middle of the Auvergne understood at once that this was not only New York's grief. And in Le Monde, an editorial by Jean-Marie Colombani, written overnight, under a headline that went around the world: "Nous sommes tous Américains." We are all Americans. He wrote that the French owed America their liberty, and therefore owed her their solidarity.

French magazines kept the vigil for months. Paris Match put James Nachtwey's photograph of an exhausted New York fireman in the ruins on its cover. L'Express closed out the year with the towers still standing — no other image had marked France more. A year later, Le Figaro Magazine still gave the story forty pages.

The government moved just as fast. Flags to half-staff. A national day of mourning, and at noon the whole country stopped — traffic pulled over, people stood still in the street for three minutes of silence. Within the week Chirac was in Washington, then New York, the first foreign head of state to stand at Ground Zero. We disagree sometimes. But I live part of the year among French neighbors, and the reservoir of goodwill is real: Lafayette and Rochambeau at Yorktown, a copper lady in New York Harbor, a gift from this country, the American boys in the sand at Omaha Beach. 🇫🇷🇺🇸