It is characteristic of France’s self-absorption that what started as a national sense of outrage at the latest Islamist killing on our soil soon evolved into a bitter scuffle between present and past tough-talking Home Secretaries. Last Friday, Dominique Bernard, a 57-year-old French literature teacher at a state Lycée in Arras, was stabbed to death by a 20-year-old Chechen former pupil, Mohammed Mogouchkov, shouting “Allahu Akbar” as Bernard tried to prevent him from entering the school’s main building. Three years almost to the day, it felt like a terrible repetition of the killing and beheading of another teacher, Samuel Paty, in a west Paris suburb.

That had shocked the country to its core — long known as the Republic’s Hussars, teachers had been explicitly tasked to foster Republican values with the advent of universal public education. Bureaucratic spinelessness and police inefficiency ensured not much has been achieved since, a fact papered over by grandiose talk about “our values”.

Then, as now, the Ministre de l’Intérieur was Gérald Darmanin, who for the last week has been engaged in a slanging match with one of his predecessors, the Socialist Manuel Valls, each accusing the other of weakness in front of the Islamist threat. Both come from immigrant families and both are a strikingly similar type, performative hard men who vow they will protect the country. Each has been trying to outdo, or rather out-talk, the other on law and order, especially terrorism and immigration — and both are failing.

Darmanin, once a Sarkozy boy who during the 2017 presidential campaign tore into Emmanuel Macron as a “bobo-populist” and “sheer poison”, nevertheless agitated for a job in his cabinet, which he got as Minister for State Finances. In the second Macron term, he got his dream promotion to Interior, and began a well-publicised anti-terrorism drive. He closed militant mosques, announced the expulsion from France of 231 “radicalised foreigners singled out by the security services”, and in general broadcast an image of proper police work. How effective that was is unclear (by the end of 2020, only 48 of those on his list had actually left France).