Why is Paris the crucible of IS terror?

TERRORISM is a Parisian invention. While Friday’s rampage was truly awful, it was also an echo of the past and so much terrible bloodshed on the city’s streets.

The bloodcurdling Islamic chanting of today’s killers might be new, but the perverse mentality which motivates such slaughter is rooted closer to home than the Middle East.

Of course, France’s role in fighting back against Islamic jihadis across North Africa and in the Middle East infuriates the leaders of IS. But their anger would be impotent without home-grown terrorists such as the men who staged the Charlie Hebdo massacre in January.

Paris pioneered both callous terrorism and the ruthless pursuit of those responsible.

The world’s first ‘truck bomb’ was ignited on the streets of the city on Christmas Eve, 1800. Its main aim was to assassinate Napoleon. A horse-drawn cart loaded with explosives missed him but killed and maimed scores of other people. Collateral damage on such a grand scale gave Napoleon’s secret police the opportunity to round up the plotters and hundreds of other dissidents.

The legacy of that incident came back in the 20th Century, with the IRA’s sinister strategy in Belfast, and turmoil and bloodshed in Beirut.

The random killing of people rather than politicians was also born in Paris, towards the end of the 19th Century. Then, the French capital was already the world’s centre of tourism. And then, as now, Paris had an international profile. An atrocity there made headlines everywhere.

Paris had fallen victim to a spate of random attacks on restaurants.

The killers claimed to be anti-capitalist. Anarchy – not a caliphate – was their goal.

The bombers of the 1890s mouthed different slogans from today’s Islamist murderers, but what motivated them was eerily similar.

Then, tourists were flocking to the brilliant new boulevards. Paris is probably the only place where urban planning on a grand scale has produced something genuinely beautiful – but it came at a cost. The city’s planners demolished old workingclass quarters to create the streets that charm us today but in doing so, they pushed hundreds of thousands of poor Parisians into far less salubrious areas.

Today, the poor of Paris are much more likely to be the children of immigrants from North Africa. But the social problems which spawn bitter and twisted resentment among young Muslims today are not so different from what sent a few young men off the rails in the Belle Epoche.

It was socialism then, but it is Islam now, that sparks the rage of the embittered inmates of Paris’s vast concrete suburbs. The Muslim populations are, of course, a legacy of the bitter war for France’s former colony, Algeria, in the 1950s.

France is home to about five million North Africans who came to seek their fortunes with the old colonial master. After being disappointed by independence, they felt let-down by their new lives too.

Last week was the anniversary of a particular deadly episode in the Parisian suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois.

November 8, 2005, was the last time a state of emergency was declared in France. Police were chasing some North African juvenile delinquents when they tried to hide in an electricity sub-station.

Two of them were electrocuted. Across France, their contemporaries went on the rampage.

Racial tension poisons French society, and so does religious antagonism. Official France prides itself on its secularism. Islam does not fit in with its vision of itself.

The danger is that ordinary French people may lose patience. The French government is not clearly in charge. One more deadly provocation could set off the kind of internal race war which is the sinister goal of the IS masterminds.

Past terrorists in France’s long history of violence against civilians never found a popular base. Let’s pray that excessive zeal now in pursuit of anyone still alive responsible for Friday’s massacre doesn’t set off another confrontation in the Muslim suburbs.

If Paris gave us terrorism, there is a more optimistic lesson, too: the futility of it. With the exception of Algerian anti-French terrorists fighting for independence in the late 1950s, I cannot think of any terrorist group in France which achieved its goals. Even the Algerians won independence after they dropped attacks on French civilians because they were counter-productive.

Waves of terrorism are forgotten once the smoke is cleared and the victims are buried. Forgotten too is the fact that terrorists achieve nothing but death for the innocent and usually for themselves. That won’t comfort the bereaved but it is a thought worth keeping.

The rage of the impotent is a cruel dead-end for all concerned. After all, can anyone say what Friday night’s killers wanted?

A roar of ‘God is great’ before unloading a Kalashnikov is hardly going to convert France to Islam.

It is more likely that France will act to crush IS than the terrorists will conquer Paris.