A recent incident at a council meeting in Ivry-sur-Seine, on the outskirts of Paris, provided a striking snapshot of the tensions surrounding secularism and the place of Islam in French society. In protest against the ubiquity of the Islamic veil, a Rassemblement National (RN) councillor brandished a cross and recited a Hail Mary—provoking a hysterical reaction from a Communist mayor who has made Islamist communitarianism his electoral stock-in-…