https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/12/islam-and-the-french-soul/
In search of narratives that have defined the West of the twenty-first century, a renewed emphasis on the nation-state and Islamic terrorism are the two that immediately come to mind. The latter found starkest expression in the Twin Tower attacks of 2001, the former in the decision of the British people to leave the European Union and of the American people to elect Donald Trump in 2016.
France has been touched by a resurgence of nationalism. The question in French presidential politics today is not which two candidates will make the second and final round, but who will compete against Marine Le Pen and thus be handed the keys to the Elysée. But Islamic terrorism has touched France more acutely than any other Western nation, to the extent that Le Pen’s inevitable loss can no longer be counted upon.
Since the beginning of the last decade, France has witnessed an unending train of terrorist attacks, each seeming to trump the last in depravity and devastation. These include the murder of three paratroopers, a rabbi and three young schoolchildren in 2012, the Charlie Hebdo and kosher supermarket sieges in January 2015, the November attacks of the same year which resulted in the death of 131, the lorry attack on the Nice promenade which killed eighty-six and the Strasbourg Christmas market attack in 2018.
In the last month alone, a twenty-five-year-old Pakistani refugee stabbed four people—seriously injuring two others—outside the former offices of Charlie Hebdo after the magazine reprinted the Mohammed cartoon which led to the first attack on the publication in 2015. Last week, an eighteen-year-old Chechen, also a refugee, beheaded a history teacher, Samuel Paty, who had shown his students the same cartoon in a class on freedom of expression.