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.”
The premier’s remark has a special resonance in France. In the mid-16th century, French Catholics and Protestants, each convinced that God was on their side, began a civil war that waxed and waned for nearly three centuries. Is it possible that Catholics and Muslims are about to launch a similar conflict? Has France — from the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of 1572 to last week’s attack in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, from one massacre to another, one religious war to another — truly come to this?
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