President Francois Hollande has vowed France will "never yield" to terror in an emotional tribute to three police officers shot dead in an Islamist killing spree.
The Marseillaise anthem rang out under grey skies on Tuesday as a grim-faced Hollande pinned the country's highest decoration, the Legion d'honneur, onto coffins draped in the red, white and blue flag, surrounded by weeping families and uniformed colleagues.
"Our great and beautiful France will never break, will never yield, never bend" in the face of the Islamist threat that is "still there, inside and outside" the country, said Hollande.
The country has been shaken to its core by the bloodshed that began with a jihadist assault on the satirical Charlie Hebdo magazine last Wednesday and ended in a bloody hostage drama at a Jewish supermarket two days later.
Seventeen people, including journalists, police officers, Muslims and Jews lost their lives in the attacks.
The supermarket killer, Amedy Coulibaly, and the Charlie Hebdo gunmen, Said and Cherif Kouachi, were killed in quick succession in two police blitzes on Friday.
Two policemen, Franck Brinsolaro, 49 and Muslim officer Ahmed Merabet, 40, were killed during the attack on Charlie Hebdo.
The third police officer Clarissa Jean-Philippe, 26, originally from the French Caribbean island of Martinique, was gunned down by Coulibaly the next day when she arrived on the scene of a car accident he was involved in in the southern suburb of Montrouge.
At the Paris police headquarters pallbearers marched slowly through the square to the strains of a funeral march past a huge Tricolore flag fluttering lightly in the breeze.
"They died so that we could live in freedom," Hollande said of the police officers.
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