Ok, now I'm going to be REALLY paranoid

Just last week I noticed that my apartment (on the 5e etage) doesn't have fire alarms. Having been raised an overly cautious American, I have it ingrained in my head to have fire alarms all around the house and to change the batteries when you change the clocks. Well, after asking my landlord and a couple French colleagues, apparently not having fire alarms is the standard. They just don't think about it, they said. Fire alarms only exist in office buildings.

What?

Well how do you wake up if there is a fire in the middle of the night? To me, that is the huge benefit of fire alarms. They are not for when I'm awake; they're for when I'm sleeping, and I need to be woken up to get out of the building! So, I've been somewhat paranoid about this for a week now, and had been thinking I'd go on a quest to find some battery operated fire alarms to stick on my wall.

So fast-forward to this morning: I'm sleeping and for some reason I wake up, and all I smell is smoke! First, I think maybe one of the wall heater units has overheated, but when I check those, I don't see anything out of the ordinary. So then I check my kitchen - no smoke there. I must be imagining things. So I go back to bed. But as I lay there, I really smell smoke, I can't just be making this up. So I go out to my balcony ... still don't see anything ... then I look up over the building - and there is lots of thick black smoke!

AAAH! So I proceed to Officially Freak Out. There are no fire alarms - how do I know if the smoke is from my building or another one? How would anyone contact me to let me know? How do you know if you should evacuate or what? So I grab my coat and figure I'll just go outside and see (thinking that if I stayed in my apartment and had my breakfast, and there really WAS a fire in the building, I would be eternally kicking myself.).

So I go outside, and find a whole bunch of firetrucks across the street behind my apartment, and lots of smoke pouring out of the roof of that building, and some people on their balconies in their pajamas not seeming to know if the fire was in their building or not.

At this point, I think I have the right to be paranoid about this whole fire alarm situation. If you have any insight into this phenomenon, or how one is alerted about fires in France, please let me know! This also reminds me that I need to look up all of the emergency phone numbers here, because my instinct of 'Call 911' is not going to be of much help in a crisis.