Less than a fortnight after the attacks Manuel Valls, the French Prime Minister, said that France would not accept more than 30,000 asylum seekers over the next two years. After a meeting with Chancellor Merkel in Paris, Valls pointedly announced, ‘It was not France that said “Come!”’ Whereas Chancellor Merkel continued to insist on the importance of sticking to a quota system for each country, Mr Valls told journalists, ‘We cannot accommodate any more refugees in Europe, that’s not possible.’ His office later said that there had been an error in translation and he had intended to say that Europe could no longer take ‘so many refugees’.

As in Britain and other European countries, the French public were right to be sceptical of such rhetoric and pronouncements. On everything to do with immigration and integration they had heard the same thing for decades. As the percentage of the population that was foreign-born continued to grow every year, French politicians like their counterparts across the continent had competed to sound tougher than each other on the matter. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, François Mitterrand and their colleagues had vied with each other to sound as though they were each more stern than the other on these issues. In 1984 Jacques Chirac, then the mayor of Paris, had publicly warned, ‘When you compare Europe with the other continents, it’s terrifying. In demographic terms, Europe is disappearing. Twenty or so years from now our countries will be empty, and no matter what our technological power, we shall be incapable of putting it to use.’

In 1989 it was a socialist Prime Minister, Michel Rocard, who said in a television interview on the matter of asylum that France ‘cannot welcome all the misery of the world’. Rocard went on to boast of the number of people he said his government had turned away and vainly promised more expulsions in the years ahead. Just like Mitterrand before him, Rocard played what was by then a clever electoral manoeuvre of the French left ahead of elections. All these pronouncements were part of a political game. Few of them had any impact in reality.