December 3, 1983: more than 100,000 people converge on Paris to take part in the “March for Equality and against Racism,” more popularly known in France as “la Marche des Beurs,” to underline the heavy participation of French citizens and other residents of North African provenance. This demonstration led to the creation the following year of the organization SOS Racisme by those close to President Francois Mitterrand.
August 26, 1995: Paris Metro bombings perpetrated by Khaled Kelkal and his associates from the Algerian GIA. First wave of jihadist terror on French soil—followed by seventeen years of quiet until the Merah killings of March 2012.
March 2004: a law is passed in the French National Assembly prohibiting the wearing of “ostentatious” religious signs in French public schools.
October–November 2005: riots in disenfranchised banlieues throughout the whole of France after the accidental deaths of two Muslim boys hiding from police in a power station and the landing of a tear-gas grenade near a crowded mosque in Clichy-Montfermeil on the outskirts of Paris.
May 6, 2007: Nicolas Sarkozy is elected president of France.
November 2010–February 2011: the onset of the Arab Spring, a series of antigovernment demonstrations and a popular uprising against autocratic governments in the Arab countries of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria.
March 11–19, 2012: a series of shootings over nine days in the southern French cities of Montauban and Toulouse targeting French soldiers and Jewish civilians and leading to the death of seven people, including three soldiers (two of Muslim descent) and three Jewish children. The perpetrator, a twenty-three-year-old French citizen of Algerian descent named Mohammed Merah, had been a petty criminal and embraced extreme Salafist views several years before this attack. He claimed ties to al-Qaeda, although this is disputed by French authorities. Merah is killed in his apartment on March 22 by French police after attempts to negotiate failed.
April 22, 2012: François Hollande is elected president of France.
June 10–17, 2012: French parliamentary elections. Both votes witness a massive vote for the Socialists by electors who identified themselves as Muslims.
May 24, 2014: Ex-con and French jihadi Mehdi Nemmouche attacks visitors to the Jewish Museum of Belgium upon his return from the ISIS caliphate in Syria.
January 7, 2015: the Kouachi brothers massacre the staff of Charlie Hebdo.
January 9, 2015: Amedy Coulibaly attacks the Hyper Cacher supermarket in Porte de Vincennes.
January 11, 2015: a huge demonstration takes place in Paris protesting the January 7–9 attacks; this is the largest demonstration in French history.
April 19, 2015: Sid Ahmed Ghlam is arrested for planning an attack on a church in Villejuif.
August 28, 2015: Ayoub el-Khazzani tried to use a submachine gun on passengers on the Thalys train from Amsterdam to Paris.
November 13, 2015: Attacks on the Stade de France, several restaurants, and the Bataclan music hall in Paris leave 130 dead.
June 13, 2016: A police officer and his wife, a police secretary, are stabbed to death in their home in the town of Magnanville, France, thirty-four miles west of Paris, by Larossi Abballa, a twenty-five-year-old French citizen of Morocco living in their neighborhood. Abballa had been convicted in 2013 of associating with a group planning terrorist acts. During his attack, Abballa starts a Facebook Live broadcast on his mobile phone, pledges allegiance to ISIS, and gives out a list of people to be killed by jihadis. He is killed by French police in a gun battle at the scene after attempts to negotiate his surrender fail.
July 14, 2016: Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a thirty-one-year-old Tunisian man residing in Nice, drives a cargo truck into a crowd of Bastille Day celebrants on the Promenade des Anglais. Eighty-six people are killed—thirty of them Muslims, including ten children—and 434 are injured. The attack ends following an exchange of gunfire during which Lahouaiej-Bouhiel is killed by police. ISIS claims responsibility for the attack. Although the attacker’s relationship with ISIS is unclear, French investigators discover that Lahouaiej-Bouhlel had become a sympathizer of ISIS shortly before his planned attacks.
July 26, 2016: two young men armed with knives storm a Catholic Church in the town of Saint-Etienne-Du-Rouvray in Normandy, taking several hostages and killing an eighty-five-year-old priest, Jacques Hamel. French police shoot and kill the nineteen-year-old attackers—ex-con Adel Kermiche and Abdel Malik Petitjean—shortly thereafter. French investigators reveal that both young men attempted to enter Syria to fight on the side of ISIS the previous year.