Soon enough, the basic facts became clear. On 13 November 2015, 10 years ago today, ISIS-inspired terrorists brought death to the city by the Seine. Three suicide bombers struck outside the Stade de France, in the suburb of Saint-Denis, killing one. Yet it was the roving commandos in the city’s heart that were most shocking. Spreading havoc from a rented SEAT Leon, one group of gunmen killed dozens of innocents in cafés and restaurants. Worst of all, though, was the Bataclan, the music venue where 1,500 rockers were attending a concert. Ninety were mown down in the theater as they danced; 132 died overall.

Now, a decade on from the massacre, the killings still seem unreal. Naturally, France does its best to memorialize the slaughter. Last Sunday, some 2,000 runners wended their way from the Stade de France to the Bataclan for the so-called Marche de Liberté (“Course for Freedom”). That’s been shadowed by more official homages. Today, Emmanuel Macron and Mayor Anne Hidalgo will unveil a memorial garden at the Town Hall, and the Eiffel Tower will be bathed in the colors of the tricolor. Yet if all this happens under the rubric of Paris se souvient, Paris remembers, that barren bewilderment endures. For all the official homages, the attacks of November are still barely understood, and closure seems a very long way away — bad news for the Republic and the capital both.

In some ways, of course, France has found closure. Quite aside from the commemorations and vigils this week, there have been innumerable films and books covering the mayhem from every possible angle. One striking recent example is Paris, 13 Novembre 2045, written by the sociologist Amélie M. Chelly. Her novel follows the survivors of the attacks and the nightmares that haunt them. More prosaically, the Abécédaire du 13 Novembre, edited by Catherine Brun, covers the atrocity from a kaleidoscope of different directions, covering everything from songs to poems to graphic novels.

Then there were the trials of 20 people charged with involvement in the 2015 attacks, an epic affair lasting 10 months from September 2021. The longest criminal trial in modern French history, it encompassed over 300 lawyers and represented 2,500 plaintiffs, and was greater in scale than even the 1987 trial of Klaus Barbie, the former Gestapo officer and infamous “Butcher of Lyon” during the Second World War.

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Beyond their simple vastness, the trials exposed France to countless tales of tragedy. Among the stories was that of Maia, a young architect, who was sitting that fateful night at an outdoor café with Amine, her Moroccan husband. When the attackers came, Amine was killed instantly; Maia was stunned by the sudden silence when the firing finally stopped. Then she heard the gasping and wheezing of a young man she did not know. He was leaning on her, squeezing out his last breath. Maia later said that she would never forget him, but also that she would never know his name.

Beyond these stark personal revelations, incomprehension arguably endures on a societal level. In part, this is explained by the subsequent direction of French politics. For sure, there have been further Islamist attacks, yet the full-scale confrontation between France and jihadi, promised by ISIS among others, never materialized. This was partly due to the hard-headed police and military response to potential threats. A much-improved intelligence service doubtless helped too. Among other things, that involved tightening communications with other agencies, especially the Belgians whose laxity had created a security “black hole” exploited by the terrorists.

All this has arguably meant that France has yet to fully reckon with the ideology that underpinned the 2015 attacks — an ideology which, as an article in the ISIS magazine Dabiq paraded in the aftermath, involved sharing photos of semi-naked corpses. Perhaps more telling was the article’s English headline: “Just Terror!” Amid the gloating, this represented a genuinely new slant on terrorist violence. What ISIS announced here was that indiscriminate murder was not merely a weapon of war, but also a perverted form of justice. It represented a shockingly direct challenge to both Western morality and the West’s conception of justice, based as it is on secular and utilitarian principles.

France, for all its secular earnestness, has yet to truly level with this fact. Certainly, political Islam remains a question to which no one has provided an adequate answer. For the far-Left, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, it’s simply a matter of integrating Islam into a non-sectarian Republican program: an impossibility given Islamist extremists violently oppose the very concept of the Republic. The far-Right, for its part, talks openly of “a war” against “foreign religions”: specifically targeting Islam. But, again, this is mere shadow boxing. Actually tackling France’s internal enemies would, among other things, involve targeting a sophisticated propaganda network and a prison system that fosters the formation of Islamist cells. Stuck in the middle, Macron applies more and more hardline secular principles, even as senior civil servants lately warned of Islamist “entryism” into the French state.

Yet amid these high-flown political tensions, it’s perhaps Paris itself that has most struggled to come to terms with the Bataclan. At the end of the last century, the Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo wrote an influential essay called “Paris, Capital of the 21st Century”. Following Walter Benjamin, he argued that Paris could regain its Belle Époque position as “Queen of the World” — by opening itself to outside, non-European cultures. The massacres of 13 November shattered such heady utopianism, revealing the multi-ethnic capital as riven by hatred, especially in its forgotten banlieues where the French-born terrorists lived. This lays bare the identity crisis as the heart of modern France: how a secular, democratic Republic can contain the factions that loathe it.

To be fair, some are still trying to grapple with the attacks. One good example is “Programme 13/11”, an interdisciplinary research program under the auspices of the Sorbonne. Directed by the historian Denis Peschanski, it is gathering first-hand testimony for future generations. Peschanski himself has called the scheme a kind of “living monument” — even as he believes that, somehow, the savagery of the terrorists can be met with the “sciences” of the French academic system.

Perhaps: yet there is scant evidence to show that many radical French Muslims have been “deradicalized” by such initiatives. That’s shadowed by other traumas: a so-called “French Intifada” may not have happened, but the country has continued to be wracked by jihadi terror, from the 2016 Nice truck attack to the 2020 beheading of teacher Samuel Paty. It all points in the same direction: towards a deepening trauma across France’s collective memory.

Yesterday, every Paris resident received a special edition of À Paris, the city’s listings magazine. Inside, Anne Hidalgo addresses her public, proclaiming a message of “liberty and hope”. But as a Parisian myself, I can say that few of us really believe this — the wounds are still too raw.

For France, the time of hashtag solidarity and “Don’t Look Back in Anger” has passed. After years of terrible bloodshed on its streets, the usual lines and excuses are well worn out among French audiences. Now, France is clearly staking out its position: that the jihadist terror they’ve endured — more than any country in Europe — is a product of the growth of Islamist ideology inside its own borders, and the cultural chasm it creates.

In a speech to honour the slain schoolteacher, the French President himself could barely hold back his emotions, while in private he is said to be ready for a “fight to the death” with Islamists. His interior minister has denounced “Islamist barbarism” and said it’s time for Islamists to feel the fear and shock of France’s actions, not the other way around. The public, too, wants real action.

While most ire is directed firmly at the Islamist murderers and their apologists, a portion of French anger is reserved for la presse Anglo-Saxon. A growing number of people, both in and out of government, feel that their country is being madly misread and misrepresented in the Anglosphere.

Among what little discussion of Macron’s campaign against Islamism in France there has been, it’s not unusual to find accusations of pandering to the far-right, electioneering, attempting to reform Islam, and enforcing hard-line secularism, or even state atheism. Macron’s policies on such a complex and sensitive issue are of course open to criticism, but they are none of these things, nor are they a knee-jerk reaction — he’s been talking about this problem for years.

Macron is not chasing a bogeyman. What he describes as “Islamist separatism” in France is a problem more developed than just about any other Western country, but there has been little recognition of this starting point. Neither has there been much recognition that Macron wants to tackle France’s own culpability in the social fault lines — the racism and the inequality that afflicts too many in the banlieues.

This problem though, goes much deeper than jihadist terror. According to expert Gilles Kepel, whose thinking is influential on Macron, the Islamist ecosystems thriving in the banlieues are inculcating children with a sense of hostility towards French values and culture. By the time kids make it to school, they are caught in a disorientating riptide between Islamists and the state school system’s efforts to impart the values of secular France. Whether one agrees with Macron’s proposals or not, as these kids emerge into adulthood, the potential for an unprecedented social rift could prove a looming disaster for the Republic.

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When Samuel Paty was decapitated in the street in broad daylight for trying to teach his students a civics lesson, the New York Times ran with the woefully misleading headline “French Police Shoot and Kill Man After a Fatal Knife Attack on the Street”. The attack — in which the assassin who had just cut someone’s head off was shot by gendarmes — was awkwardly framed through the lens of liberal America’s anxieties over police violence, and it didn’t get much better from there.

In Le Monde, Hugo Micheron, a leading jihadism expert, slammed “hallucinatory” American coverage, writing that: “the progressive media appear uncomfortable with the facts. In the New York Times and the Washington Post, the two most influential newspapers on the left, the term ‘jihadism’ never appears.” Indeed, in some American coverage there is barely an admission that Islamic extremism is a real problems confronting France. The term “Islamism” is rarely found, unless directly attributed to Macron, as though a mere figment of his imagination. The American coverage, Micheron wrote, “illustrates the ongoing polarisation of American politics, and an increasingly distanced relationship with freedom of expression”.

As other articles bizarrely warned of rising nationalism and a French “crackdown on Islam,” President Erdogan was launching his own international version of the agitprop campaign that got Samuel Paty killed, this time against the entire nation of France.

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Commenting on the media amplification of Erdogan’s portrayal of France as hostile to Muslims, prominent journalist Caroline Fourest told me: “This is American soft power helping Islamist soft power.” In an interview with L’Express, Fourest said: “The Anglo-Saxon press does not care. It understands nothing about the French situation and only reflects the American situation… The cultural misunderstanding runs deep.. It’s a form of cultural imperialism, a desire to push the French model into the American.”

Fourrest is not the only one to complain of cultural imperialism. There is a sense in France that ideas largely imported from elite US university campuses — the likes of intersectionality and identity politics — run counter to French universalism and undermine France’s efforts to tackle its unique social challenges in its own way. To then be hectored by liberal America on how to do community relations on top of this unwanted ideological import, especially in 2020, has left a sour taste in the mouth.

Not all Anglophone media is the same, and to its credit, the FT spoke to French teachers on the ground, where one admitted to not feeling safe. “If I have to show a film with a nude scene, a couple embracing, there’d be shouting,” she told the paper: “not the normal teenage stuff, real aggression, kids saying it’s not allowed.” But elsewhere the issue has been framed as if it was just an extension of the English-speaking world’s identity politics debate, a misreading that ignores reality on the ground in Paris and elsewhere.

Many American and British commentators are struggling to see past Macron’s campaign, other than its relation to what they see as a beleaguered minority community — whereas Macron’s government sees Islamism as the domestic growth of a supremacist, totalitarian political ideology that threatens the Republic and prevents citizens from accessing the rights and protections guaranteed to them. An inherently political problem, and not one of race or religion.

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Nor is the French sense of betrayal confined to the press. Erdogan has accused Macron of mental instability and compared the situation of French Muslims to that of Jews in 1930s Germany (notably, Paris’ Grand Mosque vehemently disagrees), yet the early silence from the British Government compared to other European leaders was deafening, and certainly not lost on French diplomats.

France has just witnessed one of its schoolteachers decapitated for blasphemy in the street in the year 2020, yet it is somehow coming out of this situation as the menace, the deliberate provocateur bringing all this violence on itself. This is despite most of the appalling atrocities France has suffered having nothing to do with Charlie Hebdo whatsoever.

France is its own country with its own history and its own complex challenges, and it has every right to defend itself against Islamist subversion and jihadist atrocity. While the accusations of colonialism and islamophobia are expected from Imran Khan and Erdogan, perhaps not so from France’s friends. The next time our countries face these horrors — which we will — no doubt France will be more generous and understanding with us than we have been with her.

France has now been waging war in the no man’s land of the Sahel for six long years. Barkhane began on 1 August 2014, with a mandate for counter-insurgency ops across Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger — an area the size of Europe. But in the Sahel, the terrorists can run and they can hide. Initially, the French deployment was 4,500 troops — with the Legion heavily committed, as always — but this year President Macron boosted the troop numbers of President Hollande to 5,100. Political Left to political Right, Barkhane is a French commitment. For now.

Ostensibly, the French work alongside the Sahel’s national armies and the peacekeepers of the United Nations’ Minumusa stabilization mission in Mali. For months Paris has been trying to build support in Europe and the West for a multinational special ops “Task Force Takuba”. Only Estonia and the Czech Republic have confirmed allocation of personnel; Britain, meanwhile, contributes a paltry three Chinook helicopters to Barkhane; Denmark two Merlin helicopters; the US declines the invitation to the party, again and again.

Barkhane is France’s show. No one else has the stomach for counter-terrorism in the dust and heat and the vastness of the Sahel, not after Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. The other countries of the West barely report the operation, let alone support it. Barkhane is France’s lonely war.

The financial cost to La Belle France of Barkhane is a breath-sucking 600 million euros per annum. After all, soldiers need to be fed, equipped, and supported by Mirage 2000 jets, Tigre attack helicopters, Reaper drones, and conveyed by 380 trucks and 500 armoured vehicles. The cruel desert is endless.

So is Operation Barkhane, which has become France’s never-ending war.

The insurgency in the Sahel began in Mali in 2012, when a Tuareg separatist uprising was exploited by al-Qaeda-linked extremists who seized cities in the north. With Mali tottering on the brink of collapse France, the former colonial power, began its military intervention, driving the jihadists from the urban centres. This success turned to catastrophe, however, because the militants morphed into mobile formations operating in rural areas, where they proved as easy to kill as the wind. The insurgency spread to central and southern regions of Mali and then into Burkina Faso and Niger.

The  jihadists in the Sahel come in 57 varieties, but the majority of their attacks are attributed to Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wa al-Muslimeen  (JNIM), which formed in March 2017 and has sworn  allegiance to al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. Since May 2019,  rival Isis has  given its imprimatur in the Sahel area to Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), a split from Boko Haram.

Whether umbilically linked to Isis or Al-Qaeda, the jihadists make the sands run with blood.  More than 4,000 people were reported killed in jihadist attacks in the Sahel in 2019, and tns of thousands were displaced. The violence vortexes, year on year; recently the U.N, and Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that the Sahel insurgency now threatens the countries of West Africa.  The central states of Mali are in anarchy.

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There is no ambiguity about Operation Barkhane. Paris does not dress it up as “peace-keeping” or “stabilisation”; French officials insist that Barkhane’s priority is counterterrorism and does not baulk at the targeted killing of key jihadist leaders. So far, two of the five founding leaders of  JNIM have been “neutralised” (but read “assassinated”). In order to pursue these aims, the French have negotiated a perhaps unprecedented military rite of passage whereby their forces can conduct offensive operations in other sovereign nations. Under this deal UN Security Council resolutions authorise French troops to “use all necessary means.”

According to the press communiques of the Ministère des Armées, there are tactical victories over the jihadists almost every month. Certainly, the pace of operations in the tri-border zone of Mali-Burkina Faso-Niger has increased since Macron doubled down on troop commitment. In January this year, French troops were killing a militant a day in the Liptako-Gourma area of the tri-border; since Barkhane began around 700 jihadists have been captured or killed.

Sometimes, though, the blood flows the wrong way. French operations in the Sahel have led to the death of 43 French military personnel, most recently Tojohasina Razafintsalama of the 1 RHP (1^st Regiment de Hussards Parachustistes), killed in Mali on 23 July. Two other “red berets” were wounded in the same suicide attack by a jihadist driving a truck load of explosives. In the obligatory communiqué from the Elysee, President Macron said he “bows with deep respect to the sacrifice of this soldier, who died in the accomplishment of his mission in the service of France”.

And so half-way down the world the French are fighting the War on Terror that the rest of the West has retreated from. There is a terrible innocence to Barkhane. The French commander of Barkhane, General Pascal Facon has declared he can “easily” defeat the Islamists. “We shouldn’t underestimate them,” he said, but “we shouldn’t give them too much importance either.”

This is agonisingly naïve. Seven hundred jihadists may have been taken out of play, but that still leaves about 6,000 terrorists in the Sahel, and they know the lie of the bad lands. The combat patrols of the French rarely do. They drive hundreds of miles from their “temporary advance bases” deep in the desert, bouncing up and down in steel armoured cars and personnel carriers, in temperatures topping 40 degrees, seeing nothing but sand and acacia trees through their wrap-around sunglasses.

For hour after hour. There is looking for a needle in a haystack; then there is looking for jihadists in thousands of square miles of the Sub-Saharan Sahel. The red dust kicked up by the convoys can be seen for miles. The jihadists get prior warning, and melt away with  their AK-47s. Just recently, a French combat engineer was interviewed on television following  a search for a jihadist weapons cache, ending with the inevitable reply “the search didn’t find anything today”. It has become the mantra of  French officers interviewed about Barkhane — “We didn’t find anything”. They smile for the camera, but you can sense the frustration.

The jihadists find the patrols, however. The threat of ambush, in the desert and in the villages, is ever present. The jihadists may wear flip-flops but they mount viciously effective military operations, taking out the armoured personnel carriers with rockets; in January they attacked a static army base at Chinagodrar in western Niger, killing 89 soldiers and staff.

The Islamists can afford to spend lives and they can afford to spend money, being more than amply funded by crime. According to the Institute for Security Studies, these activities “mainly take the form of trafficking in weapons, drugs, motorcycles and fuel, along with cattle rustling, artisanal gold mining and poaching”.

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Neither should it be supposed that the militants lack popular support. The national governments of the “Group of Five for the Sahel” — Chad, Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger — are blighted by corruption and incompetence, and some in the villages think “Better the Islamist devil you don’t know very well than the governmental one you definitely do.” Unsurprisingly, the Islamists also frame Operation Barkhane as Imperialism Redux, so that the French are in danger of handing the Islamists the most dangerous weapon of all, the propaganda narrative of A War of Independence.

In terms of military evolution, France is where America was in 2001 with Afghanistan. No exit strategy, no plan other than fighting war with war. Meanwhile, the armies of the “G5 Sahel”’, supposedly supportive of Barkhane, are under-trained and under-equipped. On one training exercise, the French instructor discovered that his Malian army students had no idea what a compass was.

Barkhane, and its lack of effectiveness in bringing resolution, is starting to take its toll. Anti-French demonstrations in Bamako, the Malian capital, were regular fixtures before Covid, with Macron depicted as Hitler on placards.

Still, there is something distinctly, forlornly heroic about the operation. The French have a dislike of Islamism that is visceral, reflexive. The French are also psychologically comfortable in playing soldier in the Sahel. Last year in a bar in Saint-Maixent, where the French army has its NCO training base, I asked a corporal what was the purpose of Barkhane? He replied with a one-word answer “Bataclan.” His mate nodded over his glass of 1664 lager.

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The theory is that, by fighting the jihadists in the Sahel-Saharan strip (“SSS” in military jargon), they will be unable to mount terror attacks in France like that of 13 November, 2015. Maybe, but only a fool would discount from France’s war ambitions the stopping of the flow of migrants to Europe caused by Malian instability, and protection of French uranium sources in the region. The French have admirably lofty philosophies, but they understand realpolitik.

Only a fool, too, would disavow the imperial murmurs that still occur in the heart of France. Macron may come over all Monsieur Union européenne, but France has an unrequited longing for its colonial past. You only have to watch the weather report on France 2  TV to see that; after giving the meteo for The Hexagon it proceeds to give the forecast for “France d’outre-mer”, the lingering imperial outposts, as far away as New Caledonia in the South Pacific. Or indeed, watch the annual Bastille Day display of military might parading down the Champs-Elysées.

In the vastness of the Sahel France gets to play out colonial memories as neo- imperial dreams. But this is the tragedy of Barkhane, that France most ambitious military effort since Algeria is turning into a nightmare, her own personal Afghanistan.

In the 1980s, the chairman of the newly-privatised Renault was the École Polytechnique and MIT graduate Raymond Lévy, at the same time that the General Confederation of Labour (CGT), the hard-line Communist union, was headed by Henri Krasucki, a Polish-born metalworker and Résistance hero. When the time came for the annual collective wage bargaining sessions, commenters often remarked that Krasucki’s first job had been on the Renault shop floor, never that he and Lévy shared an “ethnicity” — a word that didn’t exist in the political discourse at the time anyway.

In contrast, the past two decades have seen murderous attacks against French Jews in the streets, in their homes, in their synagogues and in the districts where many of them had settled back in 1962, at the end of Algeria’s victorious independence war. Insults, bullying and worse against Jews became common in the classrooms of the difficult banlieues around large cities, where Muslim pupils are the majority, forcing an exodus of Jewish families to calmer areas, and some 50,000 people in the past decade to Israel. A smaller number have moved to London.

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Things have got so bad that a yet-unpublished report commissioned by Ronald S. Lauder, the former U.S. Ambassador to Austria, rates France as the most dangerous place to be a Jew among 11 European countries.

This comes as no surprise here. Since the 1990s, as satellite Arab channels, and later the internet, started spreading the anti-Semitic propaganda that’s the norm in the Middle East, the French state was slow in acknowledging the existence of a problem, and even slower in responding. (One rare exception was the 2004 banning of the Hezbollah-financed Lebanese Al-Manar channel, where, among many comparable offerings, one 12-episode series followed a complicated plot culminating in Jews slaughtering the gentile children they’d kidnapped to make Matzo bread for Passover).

Warnings from sociologists, teachers and social workers, in numerous interviews, speeches and books, went unheeded or scorned. As a result, quite a few of the children brought up within this closely-insulated vortex of hatred ended up joining ISIS in Syria, or, like Mohamed Merah who in 2012 shot point-blank Jewish children in their Toulouse primary school, brought terror to France.

This, as well as the 2015 Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan killings, finally roused the French authorities to declare the fight against anti-Semitism a national priority, especially as the Hebdo massacre was followed by an attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris. Yet more horror was to come in 2017 with the horrific murder of 65-year-old Sarah Halimi in Paris. She was tortured and killed by Kabila Traoré, a 27-year-old young neighbour she’d known all his life, the murderer calling out “Allahu Akbar” and, finally, “I have killed the shaitan” (devil).

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Not only did it take time to reclassify the murder specifically as an anti-Semitic hate crime: when the case finally came to court last year, the judge ruled Traoré “psychologically irresponsible” and sent him out to hospital treatment. (France has her share of activist judges — civil servants here — who often find sociological excuses not to sentence delinquents harshly.)

What’s new (“old-new”) is the recent resurgence of a more ancient form of anti-Semitism, born on the far-Right and now often shared on the far-Left. This seems to have left the country strangely unmoved. The rise of conspiracy theories has been charted by sociologists, who find that 22% of the French now believe in some sort of Jewish world-domination conspiracy: this proportion doubles to 44% among the Gilets Jaunes movement. (In fairness it is not just the Jews; large numbers of French people also believe in conspiracies involving the Freemasons and Illuminati.)

Emmanuel Macron, a non-practising Catholic who once worked for two and a half years for the merchant bank Rothschild et Cie, was routinely abused on Gilets Jaunes banners and posters showing him standing in front of a Star of David, surrounded by hooked-nosed Jews, captioned “Rothschild’s man”.

The Gilets Jaunes movement has abated, but similar slogans appeared in union marches against the pensions reform: they are all over the internet and in online comments on the websites of mainstream newspapers. Perhaps more than anywhere else, French anti-Semitism manifests itself across the political spectrum.

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French authorities are at fault here, not because of institutional anti-Semitism but rather that French elites, so resistant to change, are still locked in 1960s ideas. Terrified of being accused of Islamophobia, they have, Left and Right, rejected for two generations the kind of law and order policies that voters clamour for (which explains Marine Le Pen’s swelling support, even without a credible platform). Half-hearted attempts by Nicolas Sarkozy, and later statements by the short-tenured hardline Les Républicains leader, Laurent Wauquiez, were nearly unanimously condemned by commenters and the rest of the political class.

As a result, France accepts a level of petty crime (quaintly called incivilités, as of someone eating the cheese course with their hands) that’s unheard of in the rest of Europe, from the regular burning of thousands of cars on holiday nights annually, to robberies, muggings and vandalism. State school teachers are often attacked by parents angry at their children’s bad marks; nurses and doctors are set upon in hospital emergency services; night bus drivers beaten up by gangs of youths in difficult areas, or simply threatened by clusters of passengers who refuse to pay.

What pushback there is from the police is due to local courage among the teams on the ground, who receive little thanks from their superiors. The feral youth created by this terminal attitude of laissez-faire targets Jews first, but many in France are uncomfortably aware that if Jews went away, they would be next. Until France decides to replace declarative posturing at the top with actual enforcement of the law at the citizen’s level, France will remain the most dangerous place to be a Jew in Europe — and the late 20th century will seem like another age.