If the government does nothing to stop “the disintegration” provoked by “Islamism and the hordes in the banlieue” then “tomorrow civil war will end the growing chaos, and the dead, for whom you carry the responsibility, will be counted in the thousands.”

That is the dire warning issued on April 13 and signed by some 1,300 retired Officers, including 23 generals, NCOs and other veterans of the French military. But it wasn’t until April 21 that the letter was made public by the conservative weekly Valeurs Actuelles. Since then, it has been a civil war of words between the left, the government and those on the right.