French President Francois Hollande paid tribute to 37-year-old Xavier Jugele, who was killed last week when an assailant opened fire with an assault rifle on a police van parked on the most famous avenue in the French capital.
Hollande said the French people must "support the police. They deserve our esteem, our solidarity, our admiration."
In a message to the presidential candidates, Hollande also asked France's future government to "provide the necessary budget resources to recruit the indispensable people to protect our citizens and give them means to act even more efficiently."
Hollande recalled that France's police and military forces are deployed on French territory and abroad to fight terrorism in Iraq, Syria and in Africa's Sahel region.
This is "a combat that will last, a combat that will be fought until the threat is definitively over. That combat will be long, demanding, difficult but, I am certain, victorious," the AP cited him as saying.
Far-right candidate Marine Le Pen and centrist Emmanuel Macron, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo and former president Nicolas Sarkozy were also present at the ceremony at the Paris police headquarters.
