It is as if France has been frozen in horror, its institutions paralyzed, its politics halted, its leaders unable to respond. Monday’s slayings at a Jewish school in Toulouse were a wholly new outrage – and yet, in the poisoned political atmosphere of southern France, there was a disturbing sense of inevitability.

The revelation Monday afternoon that at least one of the two pistols used in the Jewish-school slaying was the same one used in the previous week’s murders of three soldiers – two of them Muslims of North African immigrant backgrounds – suggested that this was an act driven by dark beliefs cultivated in the current French air of distrust.

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