France vs Islamism: how does Macron hope to prosecute his war?

France is under attack. Two weeks ago, Samuel Paty, a middle school teacher, was decapitated in a leafy suburb of Paris after showing his students cartoons of the prophet Mohammed published by Charlie Hebdo in 2015. Last week, there were three killings at the Basilica of Notre-Dame in Nice, and after that, an Orthodox priest in Lyon was shot and gravely wounded. ‘Tell my children I love them,’ were the dying words of Simone Barreto Silva, a 44-year-old mother of three and herself an immigrant, killed in Nice.

France has gone to ‘war’ with Islamic ‘separatists’, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin has claimed. The police have been rounding up the usual suspects, but with 20,000 individuals on the watch lists of the intelligence services, and hundreds of radical mosques breeding more, these are gestures.

Yet if this is a war, the Republic is hardly winning. Darmanin admits there will be further attacks, and is thin on the details of how they will be countered.