The attacks began at the Aigles de la cité car park, a viewpoint overlooking the medieval ramparts of Carcassonne. Lakdim shot two men there, killing one and seriously injuring the other. He stole the injured victim's car and drove into the city, where he opened fire on four police officers who happened to be out jogging, seriously wounding one. He then drove the roughly ten kilometers to Trèbes and entered the Super U supermarket, where the attack shifted from a shooting spree into a hostage crisis. During the standoff, Lakdim declared his allegiance to the Islamic State and demanded the release of Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving suspect of the November 2015 Paris attacks. By March 2018, more than 240 people had been killed in Islamist terrorist attacks in France since the Charlie Hebdo shooting in January 2015. The country had been living under states of emergency, heightened security, and a collective dread that had become, for many, the texture of daily life.

Arnaud Beltrame arrived at the supermarket with the first responding gendarmes. His decision to exchange himself for the female hostage was not impulsive — he left his phone on with an open line so that tactical teams outside could monitor the situation. For three hours, he remained inside with the gunman. When Lakdim shot and fatally stabbed Beltrame, the GIGN tactical unit launched their assault, killing the attacker. Beltrame died of his injuries the following day. France gave him a state funeral, and his act was recognized across the country and internationally as an extraordinary display of courage and self-sacrifice. What made Beltrame's choice so striking was its clarity. He was a 44-year-old career officer who understood the mathematics of hostage situations. He made the calculation, accepted the odds, and walked in anyway.

In the days that followed, investigators found notes at Lakdim's residence alluding to the Islamic State. The attack deepened France's ongoing reckoning with domestic radicalization — Lakdim had been on a watchlist of potential extremists, one of approximately 20,000 names that French security services were attempting to monitor. The question of how a known person of interest could carry out such an attack fueled public anger and political debate. In January 2024, seven people went on trial in Paris in connection with the attack: five accused of criminal terrorist conspiracy, one of a weapons offense, and one of failure to report a crime. The trial was held in the same courtroom at the Palais de Justice that had been built for the November 2015 Paris attacks trial. Carcassonne and Trèbes — places defined for centuries by their medieval history — had been added to the list of French communities scarred by 21st-century terrorism.

In Trèbes, a memorial Mass has been held annually since the attack. The supermarket reopened, as these places always do, because daily life requires groceries and the refusal to abandon routine is its own form of resistance. Beltrame's name has become synonymous in France with a particular kind of heroism — not the heroism of the battlefield, where adrenaline and training carry you forward, but the heroism of a deliberate, clear-eyed choice made in a fluorescent-lit grocery store. His sacrifice does not make the story easier to tell. If anything, it makes it harder, because it forces the question of what ordinary courage looks like when the stakes are absolute. The fifteen people who survived their injuries carry that question with them, as does the woman whose life Beltrame bought with his own.