'POUR L'ÉTERNITÉ' read the front page headline on L'Équipe the day after France's triumph at the World Cup in 1998 and for a little while everybody really did seem to believe the national sense of joy and togetherness that the team has generated might endure forever.

These past few weeks, there has been less sense in the streets and train stations, cafés and bars of a people having embarked on a journey together although in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower in the Paris fanzone on Thursday night there was not the slightest hint of the divisions that seem to characterise the country these days.

They had to close the doors and start turning people away because they were not sure what point between 80,000 and the legal limit of 90,000 spectators they had reached and there was little evidence of anyone having come to cheer the Germans on. Certainly there was utter mayhem in the moments just after Antoine Griezmann put the hosts ahead from the penalty spot just before half-time and again when he wrapped things up in the second half.

"I don't think there was any special feeling at the start but I think that changed over the last couple of games," says Hervé Penot, a reporter from L'Équipe who was covering the game in Marseille, "and you have to remember that it was not special from the start in 1998 either. That was a great group of players and it was the World Cup but still it took a little while into the tournament before French people really started to become excited.

“This time the excitement is there again but not, I think, but not the wider expectation. Eighteen years ago the team seemed to represent all of France and people thought when they won that it might change the country for the better although they began to realise they were wrong within a few months. Now, nobody expects football to change politics. The right have become strong and even France winning this tournament is not going to change that.”

The fanzones were a particular concern for the organisers with some fearing that they might be perceived as being softer targets than the games themselves but security was tight here, comparable to that at the stadiums in terms of searches and the high profile presence of sometimes heavily armed police.

Inside there was no apparent sense of apprehension at all but there were relatively few families or kids; this was a crowd akin to the type you would find at a music festival, mostly men but a lot of women too, mainly in their late teens and early to mid twenties.

"I have friends back at home with kids who decided not to come and it's a real pity," says Carol Sakko (née O'Leary, from Kimmage in Dublin), who moved here 40 years ago and has been working as a volunteer at the fanzone throughout the tournament. "There's so much here for kids, but you couldn't tell them to come, you couldn't be sure, although personally I never thought that anything would happen somewhere like here where the security is good and it has been great, I've felt completely safe."

“We have three days to go but so far we are happy,” says Jean-Francois Martins, deputy mayor of Paris for Sport and Tourism. “We had to arrange things in the most complex context imaginable; there are the social problems, the security and the difficulties at Uefa and Fifa but we struck a good balance between security and ambiance and it has been the celebration that we had hoped for. It has gone well, there have only been the sort of problems that we expected.”

Those included a minor stampede during the game between Poland and Portugal in which 100 people suffered minor injuries after a man with fireworks – or a fight – nobody even seemed entirely sure afterwards, exposed the underlying nervousness amongst many of those who had come.

“People have enjoyed it,” acknowledges Penot, “but there is not the same sense of freedom because of what happened. In 1998 people were freer in their minds but now nobody knows for sure that a bomb won’t go off or something else bad won’t happen. How can you be, it’s impossible and so of course that affects the mood even a little bit.”

After Griezmann got the second here, it is impossible to imagine really how the mood could have been any better. It’s been a slow burner and there are no grand delusions this time around but at least some of the spirit of 1998 has returned to France.