And so all the time the European brain has held onto two contradictory things. The first is the dominant established narrative of a generation: that anyone in the world can come to Europe and become a European, and that in order to become a European you merely need to be a person in Europe. The other part of the European brain has spent these years watching and waiting. This part could always recognise that the new arrivals were not only coming in unprecedented numbers but were bringing with them customs that, if not all unprecedented, had certainly not existed in Europe for a long time. The first part of the brain insists that the newcomers will assimilate and that, given time, even the most hard-to-swallow aspects of the culture of the new arrivals will become more recognisably European. Optimism favours the first part of the brain. Events favour the second, which increasingly begins to wonder whether anyone has the time for the changes that are meant to happen.

Nobody should be surprised that simmering under all this are darker, subterranean fears. Nowhere are these more pronounced than in France which, in the aftermath of the Second World War, suffered the same labour shortages as other Western European countries. The country responded in precisely the same way, opening its borders to workers from around the world. In the 1950s and 1960s, as the effects of French decolonisation in North Africa were felt, it became as impossible for France to stop the inflow of people from its former colonies as Britain and other countries had found in their turn. And the influx of largely poor and ill-educated manual workers gradually changed the culture and appearance of swathes of France, as it did elsewhere.

One subterranean response to this – a response that the French philosopher Bernard Henri-Lévy has posited as the country’s ‘dark specialism’14 – was a concern about population replacement. With the largest Muslim population per capita anywhere in Western Europe and the perpetually looming electoral threat to the established parties from the Le Pen family’s Front National, the boundaries of this discussion and the expression of any such concerns were policed as assiduously as anywhere else in Europe. Yet it was in France that one of the most discomfiting and prophetic treatments of this fear emerged.

THE ‘DARK SPECIALISM’