This is incredibly good reporting, well done Ben. What you uncovered in your story is not so much shocking as much as it is sobering. It is easy to traverse the streets of Paris and get lost in superlatives, at no point mentioning Saint Denis, until you have to, because you will be in an uber and your driver is from Saint Denis.

Some can argue that the French laicite model is failing, but it isn’t like the Anglo-saxon take on libertarianism is holding up much better either. Brexit, Trump, UKIP et al, it is the same cacophony of depression for the enlightened and hope for the despaired.

The west is facing an ailment that I don’t think has any obvious cure. This position of limbo, of going to the end with the idea of oneness and humanity but realising that you were being used and abused all along. Then failing to realise that you were only getting a taste of your own medicine after enslaving and meddling in other countries affairs for centuries. It always strikes me how ambivalent Le Pen supporters are to the horrors inflicted by the French armies in Africa, in Algeria or even in the Middle East. That was history they tell me, we moved on. But really, have we?