Paris: Professor Jean-Pierre Filiu is looking at flowers, and feeling fiercely proud of his country, two weeks after the "European 9/11" he has long been warning about.
He stands in the picturesque main square in Nancy, in France's north-east. In the middle is a big statue of Stanislaw I, the Polish king who was deposed, resettled in France and devoted himself to promoting science and good deeds.
Now the statue is surrounded with candles, flowers and handwritten tributes. It has become a makeshift monument to the victims of the November 13 attacks for a town that lost a beautiful, popular daughter – 24 year-old Mary Mosser – in the slaughter at the Bataclan concert hall.
"It is very moving," Filiu says. "The people have been very moved. It is not only Paris, it is the whole country, it is very deep."
But he doesn't see a deep wound, he sees a deep emotion, a determination, that France will not be changed by the November atrocity.
"I see it, I feel it in the street, I know my country, the students, the people, I see it in my own town. Everybody is very aware that something is happening. It's a new world and we were plunged into it and they declared war on us.
"And so people are still living their lives as a way of resisting. They can really feel it, that living a normal life is also an act of resistance and they don't want to stop, we will not bend over because of these murderers."
Filiu teaches and lectures at universities and schools, and he says the French youth recognise they were the targets of the attacks.
"They took it very deeply, as a generational blow," he says. "The whole generation has been hit badly in what is dearest to them."
Says Filiu: "French people are pretty cool. The US students [at his university] they wanted guns everywhere. We told them 'no, no'. That's not the way we handle it in this country, it's not the way we handle this kind of threat. People are aware but they are cool."
But there is another France, and it is not cool.
"Choisissez votre banlieue", say the posters, which popped up just before the Paris attacks and have multiplied since.
Choose your suburb.
The choice is presented as two versions of the same, attractive young woman. One has the French flag painted on her cheeks and wears a red beanie, signifying Marianne, the personification of the Republic, goddess of liberty.
The other wears a niqab.
It's a poster for the National Front, the right-wing nationalists who are sailing into December's regional elections on track for historic wins.
The National Front is leading polls in two regions. Party leader Marine Le Pen is tipped to win in Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie, a region of high unemployment and the notorious Jungle refugee camp. And her 25-year-old niece, Marion Marechal-Le Pen, has a big lead in Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur, where refugees have been trickling across the border from Italy all year.
The FN has never won two regions. Now it even has eyes on a third – deputy leader Florian Philippot is neck and neck with the Republicans in Alsace-Champagne-Ardenne-Lorraine in the north-east.
If they win only one region, let alone three, it will be a "terrible political shock", says Pascale Joannin, director of the Robert Schuman Foundation, a policy and political think tank based in Paris.
Before the Paris attacks, the FN's strength came from two sources of dissatisfaction, she says. Firstly, the country's stagnant economy and high unemployment – "some people say 'OK I voted for the right, I voted for the left, nothing changed for me ... The situation is not recovering'."
And the second, like all of Europe's far-right populist movements, was migration. Though this summer's extraordinary migration of asylum seekers through Europe did not touch France, it was still enough to trigger a groundswell of discontent that the FN could exploit, especially in the towns of regional France.
President Francois Hollande announced in September that France would resettle 24,000 Syrian refugees over two years but he immediately met resistance from local mayors, including two who insisted they wanted only Christians.
Yves Nicolin, mayor of Roanne in the country's east, worried that non-Christians might be "terrorists in disguise".
Towns across the country are "bubbling with anger" and frightened of foreigners, one official says. They fear the "sanitary impact" of refugees on their town, either genuinely ignorant or using disease as a victim-blaming disguise for xenophobia.
"I was horrified," the official says. "There is a level of racism in these towns, there is no other word."
But the mayors have something to point at in response to accusations of narrow-mindedness: Jungle, the shameful shanty town of transitory asylum seekers in Calais.
"We cannot have Calais everywhere in France," Francois Baroin, president of the French mayors' association, told the EU Observer. "The situation of France is not good. It is not good economically, it is not good socially. Are we able to welcome these people in the long term?"
And then there were the terror attacks. Marine Le Pen immediately pinned them on Hollande, accusing him of failing to secure the country after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January, and linking terrorism to migration.
Without tighter border controls terrorists could slip into France among the refugees, she said: "France and the French are no longer safe." And her niece echoed the line, saying "immigration has become favourable terrain for the development of Islamism".
France has been wrestling with its attitude to Islam for years, trying to reconcile it with the secularist heart of the republic. There have been sometimes-angry debates over the wearing of veils, the provision of halal meals at state schools.
France has about 4.7 million Muslims, the second-biggest Muslim population in Europe in size (behind Germany) and per capita (behind Bulgaria).
Thanks to its long history of Muslim immigration from former colonies in north Africa, France was also Europe's most welcoming of Muslims. A Pew Research Centre poll in 2014 found 72 per cent of the French said they had "favourable" views of Muslims – compared with 58 per cent in Germany, 49 per cent in Spain or just 28 per cent in Italy.
But this favourable attitude has been shaken this year, Joannin says.
"The main problem the people have in mind is there are some people inside the country – or not so far away, in Belgium – who are here, who have French passports, who were working here for years and were radicalised by Islamist religion and who made these terrorist attacks," she says.
"French or Belgium citizens, they were here and making these terrible attacks in the name of radical Islamic figures. That is the main shocking problem for the citizen."
The original immigrant population made an effort to integrate, to find jobs and educate their children, Joannin says.
"But now the grandchildren, the third generation, the fourth maybe, some of them are thinking they are not accepted or they have difficulty integrating in France, and they look for a new ideal of living – on the internet mainly – because they are unemployed or because they think their life has no sense or they have difficulties integrating here.
"A large part of the Muslim community live in this country very happily. But a part of this third or fourth generation are completely disoriented, because of unemployment, the economic situation, the difficulty today to have a job.
"Day by day, step by step they go to this radical Islam and they find a lot of information on the internet and this movement is growing. That is the fear of the population, how to stop this growing of radical Islam inside France."
Filiu, however, fiercely resists this kind of analysis. He thinks it is not only wrong, but dangerous.
Filiu is a professor of Middle East studies at the Paris School of International Affairs at Sciences Po, the Paris Institute of Political Sciences. The former senior diplomat is one of France's leading thinkers on jihadism, contemporary Islam and the modern Arabic world.
"It is of course a terrible fact that among the 12 [November 13] terrorists, at least five are French nationals," he says. " But they didn't become jihadis in France, they became jihadis because you have something called Syria and ISIS [Islamic State], and they are connected with networks.
"A lot of things are going wrong in France but it's not because things are going wrong in France that we have [the jihadist attacks] – it's because things are going terribly wrong in the Middle East.
"In France we have problems with unemployment in the banlieues [suburbs], but those problems have to be addressed because they are problems. We don't have to address them because of Daesh [another name for IS]. If we address them because of that, we will address them wrongly."
It is playing into the terrorists' hands to link jihadism to the social problems of the banlieues, Filiu says. The terrorists laid a deliberate "trap" with their attacks, he says.
"What ISIS want is to create the feeling that there is a fifth column, an inner enemy.
"They wanted to trigger retaliation against Muslims from France. To trigger a cycle of sectarian strife. They failed. They failed miserably. The national unity after the attacks was far more solid and stronger than what happened after Charlie."
After the Charlie Hebdo and kosher supermarket attacks in January, there was a wave of violence against Muslims and mosques in France.
The French Council of the Muslim Faith recorded 147 incidents in the following month. Grenades were lobbed at a mosque in Le Mans, Muslim-owned restaurants were hit with firebombs, and there were reports of racist graffiti and threats.
A new spike in hate crimes has followed the November 13 attacks, despite loud condemnation of the terrorists' actions by Muslim organisations including the Grand Mosque in Paris.
However, Filiu doesn't see a rise in Islamophobia, he sees a remarkable absence of it.
"What I was fearing was a bloodbath, and this hasn't happened, period," he says. "And this is big news. People shouting 'Allahu Akbar' killed nearly 200 people in the streets of Paris and no Muslim has paid for that."
Part of the difference between now and January, he says, is the extent to which the Muslim community condemned the attacks.
This week Anouar Kbibech, president of France's leading Muslim body, the French Council for the Muslim Religion, even suggested a system of permits "like a driving licence" for imams.
He proposed that the council hand out such permits by testing theological knowledge and adherence to French principles. The imams would then sign a charter agreeing to "respect the laws of the republic", ensuring they would promote a "tolerant and open Islam".
For now there is, broadly, a solidarity and unity in France – as Filiu puts it, "France stood fast in a way that even for me, and I'm pretty patriotic, surprised me."
But there is a time limit on the country's faith in its leaders.
"This time the government has to deliver," Joannin says – deliver security at home, and victory abroad.
Hollande has been at his most statesmanlike. Days after the attacks he strode through Versailles, past gleaming ceremonial swords, to assure a historic joint sitting of parliament that he had a plan to wage war on IS in Syria and Iraq and on the home front.
"He said the right words, immediately he did the right thing," Joannin says. "His popularity is increasing. But it will not go forever. Now we want to have some action. In January they promised to do things and they didn't. This time, we want the government to do the job."
