And, of course, the one million people Raspail had prophesied would come was an underestimation. The numbers when they came, not on huge ships but in flotillas of countless small boats, carried numbers far in excess of his dystopian vision. And this was before the migration crisis. By the time the crisis began in earnest, France was already taking in that number of people every few years. The official figures said that legal immigration into France was at 200,000 a year, but around a similar number were believed to be entering the country each year illegally. In private some French officials will quietly admit that the only reason they have managed to avoid German levels of immigration over recent years is the widespread perception among migrants that France is a racist and unwelcoming country. It is a reputation that even the most left-wing officials do not find unhelpful to have at times such as these.

While in 2015 Marianne was not covered in the Muslim veil, the country had seen things Raspail had never predicted even in his worst nightmares. He would never have considered portraying Muslim captains on numerous migrant boats in the Mediterranean hurling Christian passengers overboard because of their faith. He would never have dared to record some incomers slitting a priest’s throat at the height of the Mass. Nor would even he have predicted that on a Sunday morning in 2016 in Saint-Denis, while the priests were inside celebrating Mass for the remaining congregation, those priests and the tombs of the French kings had to be guarded from outside by multiple heavily armed soldiers. Not for the first time in Europe, the worst prophets of doom turned out to have understated their case.

7. They are here

7

They are here

At the time she gave her Potsdam speech in October 2010, Angela Merkel seemed to have made an important concession about the past and even signalled a change of direction for the future in the relationship between Europe and its immigrants. Yet within just a few years those much-applauded statements seemed almost entirely meaningless. In the speech the Chancellor admitted that Germany had failed to integrate the people who had arrived to date. In 2010 Germany had a total of 48,589 people apply for asylum.1 Just five years later Merkel allowed (if leaked internal estimates from the government were correct) up to 1.5 million people into Germany in the space of one year alone.