PARIS — At 6 p.m. sharp on Tuesday, Mickel Dagdalar and Maxence Lezeau squeezed behind a tiny bistro table at Le Baromètre, a casual neighborhood hangout on the Boulevard Voltaire. They each lit a cigarette and began sipping at glasses of beer, as the crowd around them swelled.
It was the most typical of Parisian scenes — the sharing of drinks among friends. But after the worst terrorist assault on France in recent history, it was also meant to be an act of defiance, a modern-day symbol of "la résistance."
What better way to declare the endurance of France than to live it up at a cafe?
"This was an attack on our way of life," said Lezeau, shouting to be heard above the noise of clinking glasses and rock music. "With this simple act, we're showing that we are never going to let the terrorists get at the heart of France."
That the bistro was in the 11th Arrondissement, less than 50 yards from where a massacre unfolded at the Bataclan concert hall Friday night, added an edge of poignancy to the gesture.
"They were trying to kill our very culture — the French way of life," said Camille Dancourt, 18, a student at the Institut Catholique, while out with friends earlier in the day. "They will not succeed."
France is still reeling from the shock of Friday's synchronized terrorist assaults, in which attackers killed at least 129 people in a hail of gunfire and explosions at six sites across Paris. Many conversations drift to somber reminiscences about acquaintances lost, or those still recovering in hospitals.
Hardest hit were the 10th and 11th arrondissements, where gunmen opened fire at three restaurants within walking distance of one another before massacring scores of revelers down the street at the Bataclan.
But even as President François Hollande warned that "France is at war," Parisians were mounting their own style of defiance of the Islamic State, the militant group that claimed responsibility for targeting what the group called "the capital of abomination and perversion."
After days of living with wailing police sirens, hovering helicopters and general unease about large gatherings in public spaces, Parisians ventured back into cafes Tuesday night, encouraged by a call on Twitter to show defiance by doing the simplest of French acts: lifting a glass of wine on a terrace.
The hashtags #jesuisenterrace, modeled after the Je Suis Charlie sign, and #tousaubistrot lit up people's phones and sent them scurrying toward the nearest bottle of rouge.
"I can't say that we're not afraid," admitted Dancourt, who lives on the Boulevard Voltaire, a central location of the shootings. "As soon as people hear a loud noise, they look around. And even if we didn't know the victims personally, it's clear that this could have happened to any one of us."
But compared with the terror and repression that the Islamic State represents, Dancourt continued, "We have a fantastic life: We are as free as the air. Their acts make us even more determined to show that we will never give up our freedoms."
Vanessa Lucot, an architect at La Défense business district, who earlier in the day was eating lunch with a colleague under a gray Parisian sky, ticked off the ways of the French, one by one.
"The French are always out on a terrace, drinking a coffee or wine, talking, smoking a cigarette," she said as military men in red berets and fatigues armed with machine guns crossed the skyscraper-bordered plaza.
"We're a little undisciplined. We're a little irritating. We like to do what we want. That's the French way," she said. "They'll never kill that."
Before Friday, lingering at a cafe, kissing on the street, savoring avant garde art or even attending an exhibit on prostitution at the Musée d'Orsay was just a normal facet of French life, Lucot said.
"We didn't see it as a statement of any sort," she said. "Now it's being turned into an act of defiance and a statement of our humanist ideology."
Still, Parisians are on edge. The busiest lines on the city's subway system, the Métro, those crossing the main axes of the city, have been emptying out by midevening, while some areas in even touristy neighborhoods like the Marais, the heart of the Jewish quarter, remain uncharacteristically quiet.
At an outdoor market on the Boulevard Raspail in the 6th Arrondissement, a woman who identified herself only as Mama Bijou said people were still going about their daily routine of shopping for fruits, vegetables and other goods.
"But they're just buying what they need, then getting out of here fast," she said, packing up an array of African wood sculptures as the market closed. "Everyone feels traumatized. But we still have to go on living."
Visitors trying to get into the Luxembourg Gardens on Tuesday found the gates shut at midday, the park quiet except for the sound of police sirens screaming by.
Still, they are French, and defiance seems to course through their veins.
On Tuesday, the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, itself the target of a terrorist attack in January, published a cover featuring a bullet-riddled man, spouting Champagne, under a headline that read: "They have weapons. Screw them, we have Champagne!"
The cover of Les Inrockuptibles, a culture magazine, offered a message of unity. "In the face of terror, Paris belongs to us," the headline read.
Muslims were also out on social media addressing messages of defiance to Islamic terrorists. Many rallied around the hashtag #notinmyname, which features a video showing a montage of young Muslim men and women stating their rejection of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.
"ISIS doesn't represent Islam or any Muslim, because it's totally un-Islamic, because you're killing innocent people, because you're unjust," they say in the video.
As darkness fell, another symbol of resistance lit up the night sky: The Eiffel Tower, painted in the red, white and blue colors of the French flag.
It was adorned with the Latin words "Fluctuat nec mergitur," the ancient slogan of Paris, which translates to "It is tossed by the waves but does not sink."