Any public appetite for such porous external borders began to diminish. So too, once the news of the terrorist cell’s free movements in and out of France on the night of the attack, did the appetite for an entirely borderless continent within Europe. Yet two days after the Paris attacks Jean-Claude Juncker insisted at a press conference in Antalya, Turkey, ‘There are no grounds to revise Europe’s policies on the matter of refugees.’ He went on to explain that the Paris attackers were ‘criminals’, not ‘refugees or asylum-seekers’, adding, ‘I would invite those in Europe who try to change the migration agenda we adopted. I would like to remind them to be serious about this and not to give in to these basic reactions which I do not like.’ Whether he liked it or not, public and political attitudes were shifting. If the advantages for a Parisian heading to Brussels for the night had always been obvious, people were now also recognising the risks of a system that allowed a Belgian Muslim to head to Paris for the evening, and return home later the same night, unharassed. The Paris attacks accelerated a process of swift reversal that was already underway. Norway hastily began to change its asylum policy, and within a fortnight of the events in Paris even Sweden announced that it would henceforth be introducing checks at its borders. From now on people entering the country would need to show some form of identification. This was announced as though nobody had ever heard of such a thing before. As Sweden’s Deputy Prime Minister, Åsa Romson of the Green Party, made this announcement, she broke down in tears.

For his part, President Hollande announced that France was at war ‘at home and abroad’. The country immediately stepped up its bombing campaign against Isis positions inside Syria. But the abroad part was the easy bit. The hard part was the home bit. A state of emergency was immediately declared and continued indefinitely. In the aftermath of the attacks the French police carried out 168 raids in two days across the country. A raid in Lyon turned up a rocket-launcher. A raid in Saint-Denis culminated in a woman blowing herself up with a suicide vest. One of the Bataclan bombers turned out to live in the shadow of Chartres Cathedral. As in the aftermath of the previous January’s attacks on the offices of Charlie Hebdo and the kosher supermarket, French politicians were aware that this was a moment when there was a specific security concern on voters’ minds. But they were also aware that the French public might well be dwelling on deeper issues to do with how their country had ever arrived at such a situation.