Thank you Takata for your expanation about the flight directors.
I have been as all of us, appaled by the entire sequence of events.
I firmly beleive (and it has been said elsewhere) that the trim wheel and the THS staying at 13° until the crash is the key explanation to their not regaining control of the aircraft, but I keep wondering about the FD's. As you said, when reengaging, they take the altitude of the time as their new reference, and the horizontal bar will (with the plane diving down ) give an UP order to the pilot, who is trained to follow it.
They(the FDs) should have been switched off on both sides from the very moment when the loss of valid airspeed indications became clear to the pilots : emergency procedure on page 81.
Strangely (to me…they must have a good reason !) Airbus does not ask for the Fds to be switched off in their procedure « Stall Alarm » (page 64) when asking to set ,with TOGA, an attitude of 12.5 degrees (taking off) or 5 at altitude. In those cases, a different order by the horizontal bar could be misleading and unhelpful or confusing.
In fact they (the Fds) were not cut off, so the bars on the displays kept coming on, then off, and one wonders if the horizontal bar, which one is trained to following, was not one of the reasons the flying pilot kept pulling upwards ?