France

All eight defendants have been found guilty over the July 2016 lorry attack in the southern French city of Nice in which 86 people were killed.

Seven men and a woman were sentenced by a special court in Paris to jail terms ranging from two to 18 years.

Three were convicted of association with a terrorist, while five others were found guilty of supplying weapons.

The attacker, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, was shot dead after driving a lorry into crowds on Bastille Day.

Callac as a microcosm of an immense question of civilization now at stake in Europe.

A small town nestled among cow pastures. The café run by a social club, abandoned buildings, only elderly around. So when city council members heard about a program to “rejuvenate” the city, it seemed like a winning lottery ticket.

We are in Brittany, France, but we could be in Italy.

Except that what city leaders saw as an opportunity for rejuvenation, for others was evidence of a “Great Replacement” of French natives. The theory of the “Great Replacement” came to Renaud Camus during a visit to one of these small country towns, Vémars, in the Val d’Oise, at the home of François Mauriac. Camus saw the suburbs with veiled women, the aesthetic change of the province.

October 15. The corpse of a 12-year-old girl hidden in a big plastic box is discovered on a sidewalk in the eastern part of Paris. The victim’s name was Lola. She was the daughter of the caretakers of the building where the murder took place.

Witnesses, fingerprints and images from surveillance cameras quickly lead police to arrest a woman. She confessed but said she had absolutely no remorse. The details she gave, confirmed by the autopsy, are that she gagged Lola with tape, undressed her, tied her to a chair, raped her with objects, partially cut her throat, put the blood in a bottle and drank it, smoked a cigarette, then finished slitting Lola’s throat and beheaded her. The woman stabbed the corpse multiple times before placing it in a plastic box, and took it down to the street.

The first wife of the Prophet Muhammad was honored on a street sign.

One does not have to believe in the theory of the “great replacement” to take seriously the gradual disappearance of the French from towns where immigrants democratically took power.

Like in the town of Stains, just north of Paris, where the mayor, Azzédine Taïba, and alderman, Maïmouna Haïdara, back the initiative of community activist Houria Seddiki to name a street after the first wife of the Prophet Muhammad. There was no opposition to speak of, at least in local politics, as all 12 members of the left-wing city council are of Arabic and African origin — not a single one carries a traditional French name.

In Paris, a trial is taking place concerning the 14 July 2016 attack in Nice when a man drove a truck into a crowd of families attending a firework display. The three-month trial, due to end in early December, is of eight associates of Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel accused of assisting him in the attack, when a 19-tonne cargo truck was deliberately driven into people celebrating Bastille Day on the Promenade des Anglais. A total of 86 people were killed, including 15 children. More than 450 were injured. You’d think it would be a big deal. You would be wrong.

I’ve been reporting on the trial for the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. In the church-like Palais de Justice, where the public can watch the trial on large screens, the average attendance is around six. One afternoon there were only two of us, me and a sweet-faced old lady whispering a melancholy but urgent commentary to herself.

In France there is a continuing uproar over the torture, rape, and murder of 12-year-old Lola Daviet by an Algerian woman. “The suspect had boasted about selling body parts,” one investigator told Le Parisien. “Evidence suggests that the girl was taken into the basement of the flat, where she was tortured, and raped, before being strangled and having her throat cut.” The woman had then stuffed her body in a suitcase and dragged it to the street.