Unimaginable horror comes to Nice on le Quatorze Juillet

Once again, France is in mourning. Once again, it has been the hapless victim of a monstrous islamist attack. The death toll in Nice after a madman, understood to be 31-year-old French citizen of Tunisian origin, drove a 40-tonne truck through a throng of men, women and children enjoying the fireworks on Bastille Day is at least 84, and likely to rise.

Last year, in Paris, following two large-scale Islamist attacks, which killed hundreds, a state of emergency was proclaimed that has now been extended for a further three months. Then, guns were used. On this occasion it was a lorry, as lethal as any assault weapon and almost impossible to stop.

The latest target was carefully chosen: Le Quatorze Juillet – Bastille Day – recalling the catalytic event of the French Revolution, when the people of Paris rose up to assert an end to despotism and the dawning, however bloody it proved, of the new age of liberty.

The result will linger equally in the nation’s memory. Nice in the hour before midnight was a scene of the utmost horror. The driver drove his truck, at high speed, for some two kilometers along the famed Promenade des Anglais, mowing down anyone in his path. He swerved in pursuit of those who fled before him; he mounted the pavements to scythe through the crowds, sending people flying, crushing them beneath his wheels.

Minutes earlier, the fireworks – feux d’artifice – had lit up the Mediterranean sky; now the streets below turned red with blood.

Shocked police officers, acting with pathetic heroism, fired scores of bullets through the killer’s windscreen, eventually shooting him dead, but not before he had accomplished his mission. The identity of the man responsible for the carnage is a matter of little significance. It is what he represented that matters: hatred for France, hatred of the its people; a deep loathing of the western way of life.

The screams of the people, recorded by French television and hundreds of mobile phones, will now haunt President François Hollande and his ministers, representing for them the impunity with which terrorists can attack their country and the impotence of the state’s response.

Because, what is to be done? Short of rounding up France’s six million Muslims and shipping them to North Africa, all Hollande can do is to further reduce the very liberty of which Bastille Day is the symbol. Laws will be loosened, not tightened. The Intelligence agencies will be charged with identifying anyone in France, of whatever origin, who might be considered a threat to the public good. The police and the gendarmerie will be joined on the streets of the Republic by troops and special forces. Concerned citizens, in an echo of the excesses of the Revolution, or the darkest days of the Nazi occupation, will feel empowered to spy on their neighbours and to report their suspicions.

Somehow, the decency of France will prevail. The people are angry. They are shocked and terrified. But they are not about to descend as a mob on their Muslim fellow citizens. Instead, they will turn their rage on Hollande and his government, who surely cannot expected to be re-elected in next year’s elections.

Hollande – as his political opponents, including Marine Le Pen, will be quick to remind him – has to take the blame. The buck stops at his desk in the Elysée, from which, during an interview with French television this week, he was forced to defend the fact that he spent nearly €10,000 last year on having his hair done.

But the President – who today, defiantly, announced that French military actions in Iraq and Syria would continue uninterrupted – has done everything that could reasonably be done. So, one presumes, has his interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve, as well as the security agencies, the police and the gendarmerie. The Right could do no more. The Far-Right would only make things worse. Short of turning France into an armed camp in which people fear dawn raids and the knock at the door, he can only hope to stand firm and to hope for some kind of magical breakthrough.

The great mass of French Muslims are as horrified by what happened last night in Nice as their Christian – actually, secular – fellow citizens. It may be in the name of Islam that the attack took place, but all most Frrench Muslims want is a job, somewhere to live, and an education for their children. The French know this. But they also know that deep within the Muslim community a worm of evil has inserted itself, leading to the outrages of Charlie Hebdo, the Bataclan concert hall and, now, the Promenade des Anglais.

Reconciling these two truths is a task that has so far defied all analyis and every remedy. So today France must start again.

The mourning has begun. The funerals lie ahead. The Government and its security forces are on the highest-possible alert. What happens next will effectively be more of the same. It is, it seems, the fate of France.