Whether they realised it or not they were responsible for bringing a crisis to bear on their country. Every year the facts changed. Every year the same political class, through successive governments of every stripe, continued to see an ever greater upsurge of the foreign-born population of France. Throughout this process the official statistics continued to cover over the change that politicians said was not happening but which the population could see with their own eyes. This was not all badly intentioned. Thanks to an old law intended to prevent any future Vichyite possibilities, throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s the Republic collected neither ethnic, racial nor religious numbers for the make-up of the French population. During the mid-2000s the law in France relaxed. But analysis of the existing population, never mind projections about future demographics, remained a fraught political matter in France more than in almost any other country. Even as the Muslim population rocketed towards being the highest per capita in Europe, and only expected to grow in the years ahead, any demographer in France who did not understate all future population changes would be tarred with the brush of assisting the far right. For instance, one highly respected demographer, Michèle Tribalat, had her professional reputation badly tarnished when the ‘well-connected’ demographer Hervé Le Bras dismissed her as ‘the National Front darling’.24

It is easy to assume that the facts don’t lie. But in immigration statistics, let alone demographic projections, they often do – and nowhere more so than in France. It can hardly be a surprise that in a country where the facts have become so malleable, portions of the population might believe their eyes over the statistics, with consequences that have yet to be imagined. Raspail and Dumont were not correct in their 1985 prediction that in 2015 Islam would be the dominant religion in France. At least not numerically speaking. An Ipsos poll released by France’s leading liberal publication, L’Obs, on 4 February 2016 revealed that among high-school students in France 33.2 per cent identified as Christian whereas 25.5 per cent identified as Muslim. But nobody could any longer deny that in France it was Islam that had the wind in its sails. The same poll revealed that less than half of the non-Muslims surveyed (and just 22 per cent of Catholics) described their religion as ‘something important or very important’ to them. Conversely, among young Muslims 83 per cent said their religion was ‘important or very important’ to them.25