A police officer watches people gathering around a floral tribute for the victims killed during a deadly attack, on the famed Boulevard des Anglais in Nice, southern France, July 17, 2016. Laurent Cipriani /Press Association. All rights reserved.Another attack hit French soil last week, confirming that the country is at present Europe's number-one terrorism hotspot. At around 10.30pm, a large white truck was driven by a young man for two kilometres along the packed Promenade des Anglais in the French Riviera city of Nice, crushing everyone in its way.
The result was a massacre in which at last 84 people, including several children, died. They had gathered to watch the fireworks display on France's national day. Hundreds of people were also injured, some of them very seriously. The driver, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a 31-year-old Tunisian resident in Nice, was shot dead inside the vehicle. Bouhlel was known to the police for petty crimes, but not to the intelligence services.
The circumstances of this carnage, in a popular resort near the peak of the holiday season, carry high symbolism. For Nice was commemorating the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, the foundational event of the French revolution. The day also marks the Fȇte de la Fédération in 1790, celebrating the end of tyrannical rule and the beginning of republican monarchy. The massacre was thus perpetrated at a moment when the unity of the French nation, and the three tenets of its republican motto --liberté, égalité, fraternité -- are of special significance.
