The French State’s Instruments for Combating Islamism: Responses and Shortcomings
Over the last four decades, France has been affected by multiple terrorist attacks by groups claiming to act for Islam. There were eighty-two such attacks between 1979 and 2021. These attacks cost the lives of 330 people, not counting the many injured.
Between 1979 and 2000, there were twenty-four attacks that killed thirty-two people; between 2001 and 2012, there were eight attacks that killed eight people; and, finally, between 2013 and May 2021, there were fifty attacks that killed 290 people.
This makes France the country in the European Union most afflicted by Muslim terrorism overall, however, it is notable that the pace of attacks and attempted attacks in the name of Islam has varied, with a notable acceleration since January 2015, when the staff of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo were massacred. Later that year, the Islamic State murdered 130 people and injured 413 in one night at the Bataclan and other targets in Paris.
In the wake of this spike in Islamist terrorist attacks seven years ago, France’s state moved to target Islamism in all its forms and manifestations, rather than exclusively terrorism.
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