These have been terrible days in France. On Thursday, a 15-year-old girl was stabbed to death and several of her classmates wounded at a private school in Nantes. It was an attack of singular ferocity. The victim, who was stabbed 57 times, was killed by a fellow pupil, a boy her own age. According to police, he had no ‘clear motive’ for his crime.

On Friday a 20-year-old, named by police as Olivier H, walked into a mosque in southern France and told Aboubakar, a 24-year-old of Malian origin, that he would like to pray. Aboubakar, who performed odd jobs in the mosque, led Olivier into the prayer room and together they knelt. Olivier then produced a knife and stabbed Aboubakar to death. As he filmed the death throes of his victim, the killer insulted Allah and stated his intention to kill again. A huge manhunt was launched, but late on Sunday night Olivier handed himself in to police in Florence, Italy.

Cases of murder, attempted murder and rape have all risen in recent years

The third death to shake France was that of an off-duty police officer. The 33-year-old brigadier was assaulted as he left a bar in central Paris in the early hours of Sunday morning and died a short time later.

President Emmanul Macron reacted on social media to the murders of the schoolgirl and also Aboubakar. ‘Racism and hatred based on religion will never have a place in France,’ he tweeted on Sunday. ‘Freedom of worship is inviolable.’

Racism and religious hatred have been sweeping France for years, since Mohammed Merah filmed himself shooting dead three Jewish schoolchildren in 2012. Hundreds have died, the vast majority killed by Islamist extremists, like those who massacred 130 Parisians in 2015 or the man who murdered 86 people at Nice on Bastille Day 2016.

There have been some anti-Muslim attacks, but Friday’s appears to the most serious to date. In response, several hundred people gathered in Paris on Sunday afternoon in what was described as a ‘rally against Islamophobia’. One of those present told reporters that ‘Islamophobia has become normalised’, and as a result, the atmosphere in France is ‘more and more tense’.

In fact, government figures released in February revealed that acts characterised as ‘anti-Muslim’ fell from 242 in 2023 to 173 in 2024. In contrast, the number of anti-Semitic acts recorded in 2024 was 1,570.

Nonethless, the protestor at Sunday’s rally was correct in describing the atmosphere in France as ‘more and more tense’. A recent poll in a Sunday newspaper reported that 42 per cent of the country ‘fear the outbreak of civil war’.

This is not a surprise. In the spring of 2021, a group of retired senior army officers published an open letter warning Macron that the country was edging towards civil war. This was followed a few weeks later by a similar letter, this one signed by serving soldiers.

The situation has only deteriorated in the subsequent four years. The drug cartels are more powerful and violent than ever; 49 people were killed in Marseille in 2023 as the cartels fought for control of the city, and since then the mayhem has spread across France. This weekend, there was a shootout in Rennes and three separate gunfights in Grenoble.

But arguably the most disturbing element is the alarming rise in youth violence, motivated neither by religion or drug trafficking. In 2023, a teacher was killed in her classroom by a 16-year-old pupil for no discernible reason; earlier this year, a 23-year-old confessed to murdering an 11-year-old girl as she walked home from school. Asked why he had stabbed Louise to death, Owen told police he’d had an ‘online altercation’ playing a video game and wanted to vent his fury on someone.

Official statistics reveal what a teaching union described as an ‘alarming’ rise in classroom violence; between 2022 and 2023, incidents soared by more than 50 per cent. Many education specialists link this rise to the Covid pandemic, and particularly the two draconian lockdowns imposed on the French. At the time, Macron flippantly admitted it was ‘hard being 20 in 2020’. In fact, studies have found that those whose mental health suffered most during lockdown were 13- to 18-year-olds.

Cases of murder, attempted murder and rape have all risen in recent years. This is perhaps the most damning indictment of Macron’s France. Next week will be the 8th anniversary of his election as president. In that time the Republic has declined economically, diplomatically and structurally, with the health and education systems on the wane.

Yet it is the rampant lawlessness that most bitterly embodies the feebleness of the youngest president of the Fifth Republic. France no longer feels like a safe country. It feels like a savage one.