France’s estimated 6 million Muslims-8 percent of the population-are at the core of a contemporary reckoning over national identity in a country that holds fast to laïcité, or state secularism, the 1905 legal principle that separated church and state and mandated the state’s neutrality on religion. French academics have clashed over the drivers of radicalization, but significant evidence points to their non-religious undertones. More recently, that debate has been grafted onto the fight against Islamist extremism, and this month’s attacks in the southern cities of Carcassone and Trèbes, committed by a man of Moroccan origin who was naturalized in 2004, have further deepened public anxieties. “For French public opinion, organizing Islam needs to be a security question” and assuage fears that, according to a January survey, preoccupy the nation. According to a February survey, 43 percent of the public considers Islam “incompatible with the values of the Republic.” That’s down from 56 percent in 2016, but is still a testament to just how divisive Islam has become, complicating any attempt to institutionalize or manage the religion in a way that is both politically palatable and doesn’t alienate Muslims themselves. According to a 2016 survey, barely a third of French Muslims even know what it is, and its opaque leadership structure disproportionately represents entities tied to Algeria, Morocco, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.

The lessons drawn from recent terrorism challenge the notion that an inherently moderate French Islam-if it’s even possible to create one from the top-could serve as a bulwark against extremism. Still, the recent attack has led some opposition politicians to demand a “ban on Salafism.” It’s unclear what that would entail and whether it would be legally feasible, not to mention effective as a counterterrorism measure. Yet it’s no surprise that, in trying to institutionalize Islam, French officials outsourced religious affairs. According to Hakim El-Karoui, a fellow at the Institut Montaigne think tank and one of the experts Macron intends to consult, the state should enable the emergence of a French Islam, not create one itself. One of the scholars Macron plans to consult on Islam, Gilles Kepel, is a member of the Printemps Républicain (Republican Spring), a group of intellectuals and journalists who, from the left, advance an agenda in keeping with Valls’s views. That reactionary bent was particularly prominent under Hollande, whose prime minister, Manuel Valls, seized on the terrorist attacks to advance an anti-religious agenda in the name of security, notably with his 2016 attempt to ban burqinis on beaches. Say thank you in advance for what’s already yours.

“It’s illogical to say that’s due to an Islam from the Maghreb or elsewhere,” said Godard. Whereas past governments, like Hollande’s, looked to allies such as Morocco-“an Islam we know,” as Godard put it-Macron has suggested training imams at home. Yet levying a national training program to fight radicalization presupposes that the imams preaching hatred are in fact foreign. They cite, for example, a 2004 law that bans religious symbols in public schools (including symbols of religions other than Islam), a 2010 ban on the full-face veil in public, and, as of January, a ban on religious garb in the National Assembly. Roy considers the government’s dogged focus on religion to be “ideological”-the product of an increasingly hardline laïcité in which religion, and Islam in particular, disappears from the public space. And although Macron has tried to temper the debate around laïcité and Islam-warning against a “radicalization of laïcité,” which some considered a veiled reference to the former prime minister and his numerous followers-he’s in the minority, both in his government and among the public. Since 2013, at least 1,700 French nationals have joined the ranks of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria; citizens were behind several of the attacks France faced in 2015 and 2016. But the national angst about Islam’s very compatibility with the French Republic dates at least as far back as the 1970s and 1980s, when immigrants who had come as temporary workers from former French colonies (particularly in North Africa) began to settle permanently in France.

The whole project is a profound contradiction,” he said, in which a staunchly secular state cobbles together a plan to harbor its own national Islam. The Swiss flag is one of the only two square national flags (the other one is the flag of Vatican City). One of Macron’s plans is to break with foreign funding in order to disentangle Muslim organizations in France from other countries. He applauds Macron’s objective to distance French Islam from the Arab world, and believes it should go even farther: “I’m proposing that we shift responsibility to French Muslims who have no interest other than that of France,” he told me, referring to those he calls “silent Muslims”-members of the middle class and elite. Although the objective to reorganize French Islam isn’t new, Macron’s initiative is distinct in both circumstance and outlook. “The Muslim community is tired and disappointed with a series of ridiculous and humiliating offers,” M’hammed Henniche, the president of the Union of Muslim Associations of Seine-Saint-Denis-a majority-Muslim district northeast of Paris-told me, referring to policies that have tethered French Islam to the Arab world.