France is facing up to Islamism, so why can’t Britain?

Watching Novembre, Cédric Jimenez’s 2022 dramatisation of the manhunt for the perpetrators of the November 2015 Bataclan massacre, what stands out is the gaping chasm between how France and Britain have reckoned with jihadism – an ideological threat that has irrevocably altered both our societies, far more than we would care to admit.

Looking back, the days of the Bataclan attack now feel like something of a fever dream. In 2015, ISIS loomed large. Suicide bombers and Kalashnikov-wielding jihadists attacked western European targets. At the same time, their fellow fanatics taunted us on social media from the Middle East, as they boasted of their new sex slaves and flaunted their public executions. They had hauntingly familiar accents. In Britain at least, the caliphate episode and its deadly reverberations have largely been memory-holed. Perhaps it’s just too difficult to comprehend that nearly 900 of our own citizens defected to an openly genocidal terror state.

France, though, has made a better hash of reckoning with all this. Perhaps this is unsurprising. Between the moment the Kouachi brothers burst into the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine in January 2015 and when Father Jacques Hamel had his throat slit on camera in July 2016, some 239 people had their lives taken by jihadists in France. As many as 2,000 people are thought to have abandoned France for ISIS or other jihadist groups in Iraq and Syria.

France has since held a series of high-profile trials on the massacres at Charlie Hebdo, the Bataclan theatre and the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, where 86 people enjoying a Bastille Day fireworks display were mown down by a truck-driving jihadist. These trials have not only served to pass judgement on the authors of this terrorism against innocents, but have also helped the public comprehend this low-level insurgency and offered a kind of societal closure.

French publishers have followed suit, with high-profile works including Gilles Kepel’s Terror in France (2017), Hugo Micheron’s Le jihadisme français (2022) and La colère et l’oubli (2024), which translates roughly as ‘the rage and the forgetting’, and Hakim El Karoui and Benjamin Hodaye’s Les militants du djihad (2021). All of which have grappled intellectually with the phenomenon of French jihadism and can easily be found in high-street bookstores.

TV and cinema have also played their part. Before Novembre, there was Made in France, the story of an undercover journalist’s infiltration of a Salafi-jihadist cell. The film’s release was delayed not once but twice. It was initially slated for January 2015, until the Kouachis’ rampage against the defenceless journalists and cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo pushed it back to November that year.

Needless to say, Made in France, which depicts a coordinated attack by marauding cells of gunmen wreaking havoc across Paris, was not released on the delayed date either. The promotional materials had to be overhauled, too. Posters showed the Eiffel Tower in the shape of an AK47, with the tagline, ‘A wave of attacks will shake all of France’. Understandably, they were taken down.

There was also 2019’s Exfiltres (Escape From Raqqa), which swapped the Parisian banlieues for the Islamic State’s ‘caliphate’. In it, a young mother abandons her husband and takes her child to Syria for the promise of jihadist utopia, only to discover it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. The film is loosely based on real events. The callous tendency for Western jihadists to weaponise children for their cause is also real enough.

In Britain, Islamist terror attacks tend to be treated as merely tragic. We respond with renditions of ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ and try to move on from them as quickly as possible. In France, jihadist terrorism and the broader challenge of Islamist extremism to society are the subject of regular discussion. Their presence is felt looming over every major public event. They are the subject of fierce debate on France’s many tele-magazine shows.

One factor here is laïcité, France’s official state secularism. This doesn’t mean that public figures aren’t immune from being overly sensitive about religion. Nor does it protect anyone from spurious charges of Islamophobia when discussing Islamism or jihadism, as elsewhere in Europe. But it does mean that there is more cultural weight in opposition to what is ultimately a militant, bullying and hyper-violent expression of religious fundamentalism.

Where the left and centre-left in the Anglo-American world have strictly policed the parameters of debate on jihadism, viewing anyone who questions anything tangentially connected to Islam with suspicion or worse, their French counterparts have been far happier to advertise their opposition to Islamism. Indeed, they express it in the same terms as their opposition to the far right. Both ideologies, after all, are antithetical to dearly held universalist principles.

For all these reasons, it’s hard to imagine similar films being made in Britain about our own jihadism problem. Most TV and movie executives would likely not dare touch a project focussed on Islamism. They certainly wouldn’t be interested in something from the perspective of the authorities, like Novembre. Those British TV shows, films and books that do centre on the police or security services rarely show jihadists as their targets, despite them representing the overwhelming majority of the terrorism caseload in the real world.

Director Cédric Jimenez has been criticised in both French media and la presse Anglo-Saxonne for seeming to side with the authorities. The Guardian called Novembre ‘exemplary’, but only so far as it is a ‘PR exercise for French law enforcement’.

Of course, one notable Anglophone film that does take the perspective of the authorities against jihadists is Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, the story of one CIA officer’s obsessive decade-long hunt for the man responsible for bringing down the Twin Towers. There are inevitable parallels between it and Novembre. Among them, lots of ‘barking at suspects and pointing at maps’, as the Guardian’s Novembre review puts it. But there is also the tension and adrenaline of the two films’ climactic final scenes: SEAL Team Six’s stealth raid on Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound, and French cops’ siege of an equally innocuous Saint-Denis apartment.

In this final crescendo, Novembre arguably outdoes even Zero Dark Thirty. Where SEAL Team Six are cold, calculated and precise, the heavily armed French police who surrounded Abdelhamid Abaaoud and Chakib Akrouh unload several thousand rounds of ammunition into the apartment hideout, knowing their targets would likely have been kitted out with suicide vests.

Unlike in Novembre, the real manhunt for the Bataclan terrorists did not end with the Saint-Denis apartment raid, when the attack’s mastermind, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, and three other perpetrators were killed, and five more captured. It ended in March the following year, when the massacre’s last surviving perpetrator, Salah Abdeslam, was finally captured in his hometown of Brussels. Four days later, another branch of the very same Islamic State commando network blew themselves up in Brussels airport and in the metro system, killing 32 others. In this way, Novembre feels disappointingly like only one small part of the story, but Jimenez nevertheless deserves credit for telling it.

I suspect this story would still be untold had the attacks happened in Britain.

Liam Duffy is an adviser on extremism and counter-terrorism based in London.