The 1980s were dominated by Tehran-sponsored terrorism as the mullahs ruling Iran tried to force France to submit to their demands through violence in Paris. With a series of terrorist attacks, mostly carried out by Lebanese Hezbollah elements recruited and trained by Iran, the mullahs succeeded in obtaining what they wanted. President François Mitterrand agreed to release $1 billion of frozen Iranian assets, enabling Tehran to return to the arms bazaar with well-lined pockets.

France also toned down its support for Iraq, then at war with Iran, and, more importantly from Tehran’s point of view, expelled the key figures of anti-mullah opposition in exile in Paris. French police also adopted a tolerant attitude as agents sent by Tehran murdered 17 Iranian opposition figures, including a former prime minister, a former deputy minister of education, a former chief of the general staff, and half a dozen intellectuals.

By the 1990s the idea that terrorism pays, at least in France, was taken as a given by many observers. By then, the torch had been passed to a new generation of home-grown terrorists, young men and women born and raised in France but brain-washed into a deep hatred of everything to do with France and the West by years of propaganda from radical Islamist groups and mosques financed by oil-rich Arab states and led by imams recruited in the Maghreb and West Africa.

Again, the French government responded with appeasement. The number of permits for building mosques and setting up Islamic schools jumped dramatically and French foreign policy was granted an even greater pro-Islamic profile in the context of the notorious “politique Arabe de la France”. Paris ended up violating the French Republic’s secular credentials by setting up a National Council of Muslims of France, mostly composed of radical Islamist groups but financed by the ministry of the interior. The group’s very title indicated that the state was prepared to recognise being a Muslim as an identity quite distinct from being French. One was not dealing with Frenchmen who happened to be Muslims but with Muslims who just happened to be in France and owed the French nation no loyalty, even if their family had been there for generations.

More than a decade later, the present prime minister Manuel Valls recognised the bizarre arrangement as a form of apartheid based on one version of a religion, divided into scores of “narratives”.

The terrorism that hit France in 2015, in January against Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket and in November against a number of targets in Paris, is of a new kind for a number of reasons.

To start with, all previous Islamist terrorist attacks were inspired if not actually organised by foreign powers, including the USSR, Egypt, Syria, Libya and Iran. Even the attacks carried out by various Palestinian groups ultimately came under the umbrella of their respective patrons in Arab capitals. The 2015 attacks were ideologically sponsored by Islamic State (IS), a non-state entity regardless of its lofty name and pretention to the status of caliphate.