Close to 120 people filled the stately room on the Boulevard Voltaire last Saturday for a nuptials that very nearly never happened. Maisie Dubosarsky, 28, married Simon Fieschi, 31 – she, an Australian literature major from Sydney University who sought the cultural inspiration of France, and he, the Parisian native who on January 7 was shot at point blank range as he sat behind his desk at the office of satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.

The massacre took place just blocks from where the happy couple were now being showered in rice and good wishes. Many of the onlookers cried as the young lovers said "oui" and the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, pronounced them husband and wife.

But there was no walk down the aisle at this wedding. Fieschi is still learning to walk again, having spent most of the past eight months in rehabilitation. He rightly considers himself lucky to be alive: 12 colleagues and comrades died that day, in an attack which has had a lasting impact on Paris and France.

When the shots rang out through the 11th arrondissement, Dubosarsky was 16,000 miles away in Sydney visiting family (including her mother Ursula, the celebrated children's author).

She received a late night text message from an Australian friend: "Which newspaper does Simon work for?" Thinking it odd, she typed "Charlie Hebdo" into Google. The BBC was reporting that at least 10 people were dead in a mass shooting at the newspaper's small office.

"I knew he was there, I knew where he sat ... and if there were 10 people dead then what chance in hell did he have of being alive?" Dubosarsky tells the Herald. "I was in complete shock. I was shaking all over."

We are speaking on the day after the wedding reception and Fieschi is next door in his bedroom receiving physical therapy. It's part of a gruelling, five-day-week program that may or may not see him recover the ability to walk unaided. But he is already progressing much further than his doctors expected.

"They told us that it was all dead from the chest down," Dubosarsky recalls. Fieschi was shot from less than a metre away, the bullet missing his windpipe but piercing the spinal fluid. A build-up of pressure killed the nerves, while the bullet exited through his shoulder blade, leaving his left arm in severe pain.

He spent a week in a coma and then a month in an intensive care unit, at one point telling Dubosarsky that he would be a burden to her and she would be "better off" without him. She says that once she knew he was still the same person on the inside, there was never any chance of abandoning him. "There was never any doubt, ever. Not one second."

The pair had been together 18 months at the time of the shooting, having met through a mutual friend in the summer of 2013. Their first date was at Paris-Plages, an annual event run by the mayor that turns the Seine into a series of beaches.

For Dubosarsky, who moved to France in 2012 as a freelance editor, Fieschi was everything she was looking for in the cosmopolitan capital: intellectual, funny, worldly and "extremely charming".

As for Charlie Hebdo, where Fieschi was the webmaster and social media manager, Dubosarsky was initially less wrapped.

"I had always thought that they were just drama queens," she says. The newspaper's significance and notoriety far outweighed its modest print circulation of 60,000 copies a week. Dubosarsky says she regarded her then-boyfriend's colleagues as troublemakers, needlessly making fun of minorities.

"I didn't understand," she says. "I thought that what they were fighting for already existed. And that's where I was f***ing kidding myself."

Charlie Hebdo is a target of Islamic extremists due to its cartooning of the Prophet Mohammad, which is considered blasphemous. Its office was firebombed in 2011 and police were guarding the building on the day of this year's attack.

The wedding itself was considered a security risk due to the congregation of Charlie Hebdo staffers, who have regular bodyguards. There was a large police presence, with officers patrolling the block outside the Town Hall, and armed guards keeping watch inside.

"They were the awkward guys in suits not really mingling with the other guests," Dubosarksy says.

She says it can be difficult for foreigners to appreciate the role of the newspaper in underpinning the French ethos of liberty, equality and brotherhood. It is a left-wing publication but has a reputation for fearless satire of many subjects and its commitment to free expression. In the aftermath of the massacre, French President Francois Hollande said the paper's staff had "died because of their vision of France, namely freedom".

The Charlie Hebdo massacre was not the only terrorist attack France endured that week. Two days later, the same gunmen conducted a siege north of the capital (where they were shot and killed), while an associate murdered four hostages at a Jewish supermarket.

Stephen O'Sullivan, a 59-year-old translator who has lived in Paris for almost four decades, says the social and political consequences of those events have been severe and are most likely irreversible in the medium term.

"There has been a sharp rise in xenophobic attitudes in general, and anti-Semitic and Islamophobic behaviour in particular," he says.

"This 'them and us' situation has pushed many voters to define themselves as being white, Christian and French rather than inclusive European citizens and this in turn has given a huge boost to the political fortunes of the far-right National Front led by Marine Le Pen."

The gunmen, brothers Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, were both French nationals and their rampage was a wake-up call for France and a major test for the socialist president Hollande.

"The main result of the attacks has been a weary acceptance that home-grown Islamic terrorism is here to stay and that other attacks are inevitable," O'Sullivan says.

But no such fear was evident the day after the wedding, when hundreds of thousands of Parisians and visitors poured on to the city's grandest boulevard, the Champs-Élysées, to celebrate its first ever car-free day. Charlie Hebdo staff had lobbied for the initiative, in which private cars were banned for the day in certain districts of the capital. Years in the planning, they found a champion in mayor Anne Hidalgo.

Officiating the marriage, the mayor joked and entertained, but was also sweet and solemn in her praise for Fieschi's bravery. He was the Frenchman's Frenchman, she said, but Dubosarsky was the most Parisian Australian.

"They learned together the extraordinary richness of Paris and of each other as they shared and confronted a dreadful experience," Hidalgo told the audience.

Fieschi's resilience and recovery has mirrored that of the city. And after a brief honeymoon in Italy, life for the newlyweds will go on as it has been; incredibly difficult, but full of joy.

"It has just been this amazing time, surrounded by so many people who are happy for us," Dubosarsky says.