Mr. Cazeneuve’s summer offering, the new bill aimed at strengthening “provisions relating to the fight against terrorism,” is a timely reminder: if there is one area in which France intends to maintain its position as European leader it’s clearly antiterrorism. This fact doesn’t receive the recognition it calls for, unfortunately, but French antiterrorism is by far the most productive in Europe—that is, if one grants that the “terrorist” is not something existing in a natural state but is actually produced, through an extravagant set of discourses, procedures, and stagings, deploying a police and judicial apparatus whose results are measured, recorded, and rewarded. In this way, according to a recent Europol report, in 2013 France produced twenty times more terrorists than Germany and three times more than the U.K.
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