Of course, there are still plenty of useful idiots who sit around singing “Imagine” and others who go around with signs saying “Je suis Paris” and circulate petitions to build a memorial to the victims of this latest “tragedy” (but without mentioning its perpetrators, as if it were an act of nature or God, like a flood or a tornado). But there has been a slight change. One hears much less about not “offending” Muslims, and this is clearly — well, fairly clearly — not just because “innocent people” (rather than Jews, journalists, cartoonists, etc) were targeted; nor does one hear the phrase “innocent people” used in that juxtaposition. There are signs that the French are slowly waking up to the fact that this is not about Jews, or journalists, or about what anyone has done to give offence, and that just chanting “laïcité” and “La République” is not enough: we must take them seriously. This means insisting that French Muslims act like French citizens and respect the institutions of the country they live in. It also means realising that France cannot go on permitting the existence of lawless Muslim ghettoes which have effectively opted out of French society and French law, and insisting that something be done about them. Of course nothing will be done; for one thing, it is far too late.

But a year after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, people are asking questions: why, for instance, did it take the police three hours to storm the Bataclan theatre? There is talk — as there was not after Charlie Hebdo attacks, although, God knows, even then there was good cause for it — about the failure of French intelligence and policing, the failure to keep tabs on known radicals, on radical imams, on the no-go areas in the suburbs, on known terrorist cells in France and Belgium. There is talk, too, about the most spectacular failure — the fact that one of the terrorists was stopped three times and then released and allowed to go happily on his way, and later to fly to Syria — but the more general failure of French intelligence since last January remains central. This is (somewhat) encouraging. People are no longer satisfied with the mouthing of platitudes. This is reflected in a new surge of support for Marine Le Pen’s Front National (not noticeable after Charlie Hebdo), and both the Socialists and the centre-Right know this. Whether they will take effective action or continue to mouth platitudes is another matter.

Those failures have been denounced on the internet by the sister of one of the victims, who is outraged that in France you can, among other things, “have  known links to a terrorist organisation and still go back and forth to Syria quite freely”. She is also outraged that nothing is done about imams preaching violence at the 89 French mosques known to be radical. And she is, as far as I can see, widely read and supported. Perhaps the climate is changing. Unfortunately Obama meant climate in the literal sense when he said that the hour when it will be too late to do anything “is almost upon us”. The people who left shoes in the Place de la République (presumably rich enough to be able to afford to sacrifice a pair of shoes) apparently share his vision of “submerged countries”, “abandoned cities” and “floods of desperate peoples seeking the sanctuary of nations not their own”. The majority of the French are well on the way to sharing it as well (except for the bit about submerged cities), though we think it will come about because of uncontained and unfought radical Islam, not climate change.