The murder last week of French priest Father Jacques Hamel at the hands of two homegrown jihadis in a church near the Norman port city of Rouen marked just the latest in a series of terrorist attacks that have convulsed France. This one, though, carried unsettling echoes from a chapter of French history much older than that of imperial France.
As Prime Minister Manuel Valls explained, the terrorists’ goal was clear: “By attacking a priest in a Catholic Church, they sought to turn the French against one another and provoke a war of religion.”
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