The carnage in Nice was just the first of a set of attacks that occurred almost daily in the summer of 2016. The Monday after the Nice attack a 17-year-old asylum seeker called Mohammed Riyad pulled out an axe and a knife on a train in Bavaria, Germany, shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ and started hacking at his fellow passengers. He seriously injured five people before he was shot dead by police. It transpired that the attacker had sworn allegiance to Isis. It also transpired that although he had claimed to be from Afghanistan when he had applied for asylum in Germany, recordings of him speaking suggested that he was in fact from Pakistan. If France was bad at discussing these matters, Germany proved worse than anywhere. In the public discussion that followed the train attack Germany’s Green Party MP Renate Künast questioned why police on the train had killed the attacker rather than shooting to injure him.

The following day one Mohamed Boufarkouch shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ (‘Allah is the greatest’) and stabbed a Frenchwoman and her three daughters (aged 8, 12 and 14) near Montpellier in France, apparently for dressing ‘immodestly’. The perpetrator had been born in Morocco. A few days later the child of Iranian immigrants in Munich, Ali David Sonboly, killed nine people in a shooting spree beginning with seven teenagers in a McDonald’s restaurant. His motives remain obscure. A couple of days later a Syrian asylum seeker used a machete to hack a pregnant woman to death in Stuttgart in what was reported to be a crime of passion. The next day another Syrian asylum seeker, Mohammad Daleel, was turned away from a music festival in Ansbach, Bavaria, because he did not have a ticket. It turned out that he was carrying a bomb packed with nails and screws, which he eventually detonated outside a wine bar. A little over 24 hours later two men shouting the name of Isis entered a church in Rouen during Mass, took the nuns and congregation hostage and slaughtered the priest, Father Jacques Hamel. A nun who was present said that the two 19-year-old killers – Adel Kermiche and Abdel Malik Petitjean – smiled as they slit the priest’s throat with a knife, let him bleed to death, and recorded themselves chanting Arabic slogans over his dying body. The final words of the dying priest were ‘Go away, Satan.’