France is marking the 10th anniversary of the attack by Islamist gunmen on the Bataclan concert hall in Paris. They opened fire on 1,500 people on a night of co-ordinated terror attacks that also saw explosives detonated at the Stade de France.
The attacks, which left more than 130 people dead, were the “worst assaults” in France’s post-war history, said The New York Times, and they “inflicted lasting damage on the nation”.
The slaughter “forever changed the country and its politics”, said Politico, “tipping the balance of protecting civil liberties versus ensuring public safety in favour of the latter”. A “slew of laws” were passed, including increasing the state’s “surveillance powers” and its “ability to impose restrictive measures” on its population.
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The then president François Hollande called the attacks on 13 November 2015 an “act of war” and declared a nationwide state of emergency. But that “legal framework” gave the government “the power to ban protests and deter other forms of activism”, said France 24. For example, several dozen climate activists were placed under house arrest in 2015 for the duration of the Cop21 conference in December that year.
There will be "grief, poignancy and dignity” across France today, said Gavin Mortimer in The Spectator, but there will also be “delusion” among the “political elite” because France "is not united; it is divided”. Since 2015, France’s security service has “thwarted” 80 Islamist terror plots but there have been 50 attacks, 19 of which were “fatal”.
“Arguably,” said Andrew Hussey on UnHerd, “France has yet to fully reckon with the ideology that underpinned” the attacks. It represents a “shockingly direct challenge” to “Western morality and the West’s conception of justice”. France, “for all its secular earnestness”, has “yet to truly level with this fact”.
The nation could have descended into hate, but it has “held firm”, “clinging” to the slogan “you will not have my hatred”, said l’Opinion. A “litany” of subsequent attacks failed to trigger a witch-hunt against Arabs, just as the 13 November jihadists failed to “unite the Muslim community around them”.
What next?
Although Islamist terror remains a threat in the West, “much has changed” since 2015, said the BBC. The “disappearance” of Islamic State as a “major force” in Syria and Iraq means that the “wherewithal to conceive, plan and carry out complex terrorist projects is greatly diminished”.
The intelligence services have “become highly effective in controlling online radicalisation”, said Middle East expert Gilles Kepel, and are able to foil plots that are “often not very sophisticated”.
