For more than a hundred years, France has celebrated July 14, 1789 — the day the citizens of Paris stormed the hated Bastille prison, freeing four forgers, two lunatics and an aristocratic sexual deviant, but setting in play great forces of history which would destroy the divine right of kings to rule and establish the principle of the equality of humans, and sever religion from the state. It will now also be marked as a day of mourning, to remember the more than 80 people killed on Nice’s Promenade de Anglais, as they celebrated France’s secular heritage. Little is known about the attacker, who is thought to be a French national of Tunisian origin, with a record of criminal acts. Though Islamic State social media accounts have exulted at the killings, there is no evidence the group was directly involved — and in critical senses, it does not matter. French President François Hollande has blamed the killings on “Islamist extremism”. He is right to identify a political ideology, rather than a religion or group, as the adversary.
France’s aggressive, often controversial, efforts to keep religion out of the public space — for example, by prohibiting Muslim headscarves, along with Christian crosses, Jewish skullcaps and Sikh turbans in schools — makes it a kind of polar opposite of the Islamic State’s effort to impose God’s order on earth. Thus, in September 2014, Islamic State spokesperson Muhammad al-Adnani ordered followers to kill any “disbelieving American or European — especially the spiteful and filthy French”. Thus, in January, 2015, al-Adnani asked the world to “know that we want Paris, by Allah’s permission, before we want Rome, and before Spain, after we blacken your lives and destroy the White House, Big Ben, and the Eiffel Tower”.
The Islamic State is, at its core, an agent of counter-revolution against the ideals of the French Revolution, which have spread across the world. Today, as the world gazes at the carnage in Nice — coming just eight months after the attacks in Paris, at the end of a long line of massacres that have bloodied cities from Malaysia to the United States — it may well be that more slaughter will follow. As a territorial entity, the caliphate is collapsing, under relentless military assault. The Islamic State is now preparing, like al Qaeda before it, for a long war of attrition that has no geographic core. It has planted the seeds, and is witnessing the harvest: Hate is a robust plant, and needs no special soil, nor a gardener’s tending, to flower.
