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In Saturday’s Guardian, Natalie Nougayrède, the former managing editor of Le Monde, wrote that in the days following the slaughter of 84 people in Nice by an Islamic terrorist ‘incidents of open, blatant, anti-Muslim hatred have sparked a new, worrying phase’ in France. She didn’t elaborate on what form this hatred took, nor come up with any examples, but Madame Nougayrède was adamant that intolerance among her compatriots was on the rise following four years of bloody religious mayhem that has left more than 200 dead in terrorist attacks on French soil. Then today comes a new attack, the brutal murder by two Islamic terrorists of an elderly priest as he conducted

Living in France is a lottery. The chances of getting a losing ticket are very slim, but a chance it is all the same. Twenty four hours before the slaughter in Nice, I took my daughter to the Bastille celebrations in the southern suburb of Paris in which we live. The centrepiece of the celebration was a parade through the town centre finishing in the town square. On arrival the kids in the parade leapt up on stage and sang La Marseillaise before trooping off into the embrace of their parents. Next up on stage was a pop band, and as they launched into their first number my 11-year-old daughter

A lorry has ploughed into crowds celebrating Bastille Day by the beach in Nice;  there are reports of at least 80 people killed. I am currently in the city, having watched the fireworks in the crowd on La Promenade des Anglais near the sea, where the attack took place. I was just walking home when the screaming began, and people started running from the main square. The streets were full of people running in panic and sirens ringing: no one, at present, knows what happened. At first there were reports of a dozen dead; now it’s several dozen. One of the papers here, Nice Matin, has published a photograph of a

Last week French minister Emmanuel Macron emerged at the forefront of the Brexit debate, warning that if Britain leaves the EU, it would seriously threaten Anglo-French relations. In particular, he was referring to the Touquet agreement, which allows Britain to carry out border controls – and therefore keep migrants away – on the French side of the Channel. ‘The day this relationship unravels, migrants will no longer be in Calais,’ he said. But if the French want to play that game, I say, let’s play it too. We’ve survived centuries of relatively cordial relations with our nearest neighbours, despite the Hundred Years’ War, various sieges (Calais, Orleans) and multiple battles (Hastings, Trafalgar, Waterloo). Yet 23 June

The new year has not started well for France. On the last day of 2015 – the most traumatic year for the French in decades because of the twin attacks in Paris – president Francois Hollande warned the nation in his traditional New Year’s Eve address: ‘France is not done with terrorism… these tragic events will remain for ever etched in our memories, they shall never disappear. But despite the tragedy, France has not given in. Despite the tears, the country has remained upright.’ Hollande’s warning was borne out within 24 hours. On the first day of 2016 a lone motorist – inspired by Islamic State – drove at a

Several years ago I visited the village of Couillery in Lower Normandy to interview Juliette Girard for a book I was writing about the wartime SAS. She was 80, small, grey and bird-like. She still lived on the farm on which she’d grown up, the same farm where in the summer of 1944 she hid three members of the SAS. The Germans knew the British had parachuted into the area and for nearly two weeks they scoured the countryside. They came to the farm where Juliette lived with her parents; they searched it inside out, but the soldiers had been smuggled out of the back, across a field and into

It is not so surprising if the jihadists in Paris were targeting an international football match. There has for years been a strange relationship between football, Islam and violence in France. The French football team, les bleus, have long been held up as an emblem of harmony and hope in an otherwise bleak multicultural landscape. The world cup winning team of 1998 consisted largely of the children of African immigrants and was celebrated as a great symbol of how the modern multicultural fifth republic could work. Zinedine Zidane, a Muslim boy from Marseilles, was the star of that tournament. Eight years later, when he was sent off for headbutting Marco

This job is getting harder and harder, because it is no longer possible to parody or satirise the blithe stupidity of the liberal London middle class. It now exists in a place beyond the reach of such mocking. Take a peep at David Aaronovitch’s piece today on the problems in Calais. Just have a look, and tell me you don’t think he’s actually taking the piss out of himself. David believes we should let all the asylum seekers in. He thinks that they would make excellent ‘electrical engineers’. Yup, that’s why they’re there, Dave. Itching to get their hands on a junction box, the lot of them. Not a single penny

Today’s attacks in France, Tunisia and Kuwait appear to be Islamic State inspired and designed to mark the first anniversary of its declaration of a new caliphate. I suspect, though, that it is the news from France that will most alarm Western intelligence services. This does not appear to have been some mega-plot involving dozens of people but a small, self-starting operation. The latter kind of attack is far harder to stop. Although, it does appear that one of the suspects in this case was known to the security services. The attack in Tunisia on a hotel will hit that country’s tourism industry hard. It is also a reminder of

It is probably safe to say that the negotiations with Iran aren’t going very well. As the 30 June deadline for a final agreement looms America’s top negotiator Wendy Sherman has just announced that she will resign shortly after, telling the New York Times that it has been ‘two long years’ in that position. Meanwhile the Iranians are now saying that they want the deadline for reaching an agreement extended, with the Obama administration insisting that’s not an option. To make matters worse unconfirmed reports have recently emerged claiming that a delegation of North Korean nuclear weapons experts have been paying regular visits to Iranian military facilities. These being the same

Marine Le Pen, leader of the French Front National, really is determined to muzzle her father Jean-Marie Le Pen once and for all after his latest refusal to shut up about the Holocaust. On Monday, she won round one after it was revealed that her father would no longer stand in the regional elections. During the departmental election campaign last month, Monsieur Le Pen flouted his daughter’s orders and deployed his usual stock put-downs of the Holocaust as, for example, ‘a detail of history’. Marine was furious with her father, the founder and honorary president of the FN, and ordered him to appear before a party disciplinary committee at which,

France is to institute something called a National Secularity Day, which will happen on 9th December every year, when French schools will remind pupils how to sing the national anthem, what the tricolor stands for and generally celebrate the values of the Republic. Odd, isn’t it, that this should sound so much like the reflexive, everyday practice in the United States, where flag veneration and the separation of church and state are hardwired into the consciousness of US children, without impinging at all on the extent of religious observance? Every French school will have to go through this Secularism observance day but it’s painfully apparent which community it’s directed at:

Reports are coming in from AFP that the two hostage situations in France are over. The Kouachi brothers, who are suspects in the Charlie Hebdo shooting, were killed in a raid on a printing works in Dammartin-en-Goele this afternoon. They had been holding one person hostage, who has now been freed. Police launch assault where #CharlieHebdo suspects holed up. Photo Joel Saget #AFP pic.twitter.com/KTPZIFhUiA — AFP Photo Department (@AFPphoto) January 9, 2015 In a separate incident in the Paris suburb of Montrouge, the French special forces stormed a Jewish supermarket at around 4:30pm, where another gunman was holding at least five people hostage. The same gunman is also suspected of killing a policewoman yesterday. Five dead, including