Haoues Seniguer
European Eye on Radicalization, July 15, 2022
“… the laws and other measures adopted in France since 2015 have worked: there have been no further mass-casualty terrorist attacks.”
France: The European Union Country Most Affected by Islamist Violence (1979-2021)
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.[1] 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.
Attacks and Collective Emotion
In reaction to this extreme violence, which aroused strong emotions in French society, the state took political steps that have been controversial. The state moved to a more coercive, and preventive, approach to terrorism, strengthening the state of emergency law that was originally passed in 1955 in the context of the Algerian War.[2] A state of emergency was declared on the night of 13-14 November 2015, and some amendments to the law took place within a week. The Interior Minister and prefects now had the powers to prohibit “certain public meetings”, especially if they were protests that disrupted public highways, and were able to order “the closure of public places and places of worship”. The state’s powers to perform “administrative searches” and ban websites and Internet users that advocated or apologised for terrorism were also augmented. The state of emergency decreed in November 2015 was extended multiple times, before ending on 1 November 2017, after the passage of a new law, “Strengthening Internal Security and the Fight Against Terrorism” (SILT), which is the prism through which internal security and the fight against terrorism are now conducted.
SILT, which passed on 30 October 2017, intended to “provide the State with new instruments to fight terrorism in order to be able to put an end to the derogatory regime of the state of emergency”.[3] In a sense, however, the law was deceptive: rather than ending the dérogatoire legal regime of the state of emergency, this legal regime was made permanent in the common law through the SILT Act. The prefect’s police powers have been extended so that (s)he is now able, for example, to “proceed with the administrative closure, for a period not exceeding six months of places of worship for apology or provocation to terrorism”. Furthermore, “the Minister of the Interior may decide on surveillance measures against any person” if there are “serious reasons for believing that his or her behavior constitutes a particularly serious threat to public security and order”. Prefects can also enforce travel bans and order police to inspect any site that is “frequented by a person suspected of terrorism”. During such inspections, “the seizure of documents, objects or data found there” is now a regularized part of the law.[4]
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