In the decade since the Bataclan attacks in Paris, France has averaged nearly one deadly terrorist attack every six months, demonstrating the scale to which radical Islamism has transformed the fabric of the nation.
On November 13th, 2015, a series of coordinated jihadist terror attacks in Paris took the lives of 137 people and injured hundreds more, as suicide bombers struck outside of a football match, gunmen opened fire on cafes and restaurants, and Kalashnikov-wielding men stormed the Bataclan theatre, taking hostages and mowing down concert goers at an Eagles of Death Metal performance.
Since those fatal attacks, France has remained captive to a steady wave of Islamist terror, including just last week when a man shouting the jihadist war cry “Allahu Akbar” rammed a car into pedestrians on the sleepy French island of Oléron, leaving five injured.
According to paper of record Le Figaro, since the 2015 attacks, France has experienced 19 fatal terror attacks. During the same time, nearly 50 more non-fatal terror attacks also took place, while over 80 Islamist terror plots were foiled by police.
Just this year, three attacks have been formally recognised as being terror-related, including a January attack in Apt that saw one person injured, a February attack in Mulhouse that left one person dead and seven injured, and a September attack in Lyon that saw one person killed.
The paper noted that the Islamist threat to France primarily comes from young males, with 70 per cent of those arrested over foiled plots since 2023 being 21 years old or younger.
In comparison to the highly planned attacks by organised militant jihadists, the attacks by the younger cohort of Islamist radicals appear to be more reactive in nature, such as in response to world events like the war in Gaza. Indeed, according to Le Figaro, over half of the foiled terror plots over the past two years have been either motivated by the war or to target the Jewish community.
Meanwhile, ISIS and other jihadists continue to proliferate propaganda and recruitment videos on social media platforms targeted at young and impressionable people in France, such as Telegram and TikTok.
This week, the head of France’s Directorate General for External Security (DGSE) intelligence agency, Nicolas Lerner, said: “Between 2013 and 2018, terrorist organisations were structured, hierarchical, and centralised. Today, abroad, we are facing fragmented terrorist structures and more isolated individuals carrying out their projects, who are therefore more difficult to detect.
“Within our own borders, the challenges are no less significant, as our services must anticipate the actions of individuals who are radicalised online very rapidly, without ever having attracted attention.”
“In our Western societies, certain, albeit small, segments of youth—sometimes psychologically fragile, sometimes experiencing personal failures, sometimes alienated from French society and its values, or searching for their identity—are eager for ultra-violent content. Moreover, they are not necessarily jihadists. We have seen profiles exhibiting a kind of hesitation, drawn to morbid violence more than to a particular ideology. Islamist propaganda thrives in this receptive environment,” Lerner warned.
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