Up to 7,000 French soldiers will be deployed until at least Monday as part of Operation Sentinel, launched after the 2015 Islamist attacks. President Emmanuel Macron decided on Friday to strengthen anti-terrorism security in an extraordinary security meeting this afternoon at the Elysée Palace, hours after the knife murder of Dominique Bernard, a French teacher at a high school in Arras, in the north of the country. The far right has linked the attack to immigration and criticized Macron for his alleged laxity towards foreign Islamists stationed in France.
The Arras attack, which the Interior Ministry has linked to the escalation of war in the Middle East, has put the country on alert, three years after another high school teacher, Samuel Paty, was beheaded by a radical Islamist of Chechen origin. The Louvre Museum and the Palace of Versailles, the top tourist attractions in Paris along with the Eiffel Tower, were evacuated on Saturday and remained closed for the rest of the day. The Louvre received a message that “posed a risk to the museum and its visitors,” it said in a statement.
Macron said on Friday in Arras that another attack near Paris had been dismantled on the same day. The head of the Interior Ministry, Gérald Darmanin, also announced on Friday that the anti-terrorism alert level had been raised to the maximum level.
The deployment of up to 7,000 soldiers is not new. Operation Sentinel, decided after the attacks on the satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo and the Jewish supermarket Hyper Cacher, consisted precisely of the deployment of 7,000 soldiers plus 3,000 in reserve. For years, the image of armed soldiers patrolling urban areas was common. The quota was then reduced. There were now around 3,000, meaning the number will more than double.
Professor Bernard was murdered at 11:00 a.m. on Friday at the Gambetta-Carnot Institute, where he worked, by Mohammed Mogouchkov, a man born in Russia 20 years ago and a former student of the center. The Mogoushkovs are originally from Ingushetia and not Chechnya, according to Le Monde, which was published on Friday. They arrived in France in 2008 and applied for asylum. The Arras attacker’s older brother was convicted in 2023 for association with a commando that was preparing an attack. Mohammed himself was booked and monitored by the secret services.
The National Rally has called for the resignation of Minister Darmanin. The leader of this right-wing extremist party, Jordan Bardella, denounced “a moral, political and security failure” by the authorities for not expelling the Mogouchkov family. “We must put an end to a crazy, deregulated immigration policy that has imported the world’s conflicts into the country of France,” Bardella said. Éric Ciotti, leader of the conservative Los Republicanos party, called for the restoration of the state of emergency. Macron is feeling pressure from the right and the far right.
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