Gavin Mortimer

France's centre-right newspaper, Le Figaro, is running a poll on its website asking readers if they're happy to see Donald Trump in the White House. At the last count 56 per cent of the 131,954 respondents said they were. One person who most definitely is delighted is Marine Le Pen, leader of France's National Front, who said the election result was 'good news for our country'. That's because, as she went on to explain, Trump would end 'wild globalisation', improve relations with Russia and, most importantly, rein in 'the warlike interventions that are the source of the huge migratory waves that we are suffering'. But what will it do to her own chances of winning next May's presidential election?

My daughter started secondary school on 1 September. She was very excited. I wish I could report that she skipped through the gates on her first day, but this is France, and no child skips through school gates in 2016. Instead she stood in a queue outside the entrance, as one by one she and her new classmates had their satchels searched by a pair of security guards. Not that I'm complaining. In fact if I did have a gripe it was that the security was too light. According to Bernard Cazeneuve, France's interior minister, 50m euros has been provided to tighten security at schools and colleges, and more than 3,000 police reservists were mobilised when French children returned en masse on the first day of September.

May I interrupt, for a moment, the howls of anguish from those liberals in uproar at the news that authorities in France are banning burkinis on their beaches? I'd like to relate an incident that occurred earlier this month in France. It involved my girlfriend, who was on her way from Paris to visit her grandmother in eastern France. An hour into her journey she pulled into a service station to fill up with petrol. On returning to her car she made a small sign of the cross as she slid into her seat. Navigating one's way on a French motorway during the height of summer can be a fraught experience, particularly for the nervous driver. Suddenly there was a violent thump on her window. She jumped with fright. A man stooped so his face was level with hers. 'Why do you make that sign?

In Saturday's Guardian, Natalie Nougayrède, the former managing editor of Le Monde, wrote that in the days following the slaughter of 84 people in Nice by an Islamic terrorist 'incidents of open, blatant, anti-Muslim hatred have sparked a new, worrying phase' in France. She didn't elaborate on what form this hatred took, nor come up with any examples, but Madame Nougayrède was adamant that intolerance among her compatriots was on the rise following four years of bloody religious mayhem that has left more than 200 dead in terrorist attacks on French soil. Then today comes a new attack, the brutal murder by two Islamic terrorists of an elderly priest as he conducted mass in his Normandy church.

Living in France is a lottery. The chances of getting a losing ticket are very slim, but a chance it is all the same. Twenty four hours before the slaughter in Nice, I took my daughter to the Bastille celebrations in the southern suburb of Paris in which we live. The centrepiece of the celebration was a parade through the town centre finishing in the town square. On arrival the kids in the parade leapt up on stage and sang La Marseillaise before trooping off into the embrace of their parents. Next up on stage was a pop band, and as they launched into their first number my 11-year-old daughter began dancing with her friends. I sat on the other side of the square, outwardly relaxed and at ease, but vigilant all the same.

The new year has not started well for France. On the last day of 2015 - the most traumatic year for the French in decades because of the twin attacks in Paris - president Francois Hollande warned the nation in his traditional New Year's Eve address: 'France is not done with terrorism... these tragic events will remain for ever etched in our memories, they shall never disappear. But despite the tragedy, France has not given in. Despite the tears, the country has remained upright.' Hollande's warning was borne out within 24 hours. On the first day of 2016 a lone motorist - inspired by Islamic State - drove at a group of soldiers guarding a Mosque in Valence.

Several years ago I visited the village of Couillery in Lower Normandy to interview Juliette Girard for a book I was writing about the wartime SAS. She was 80, small, grey and bird-like. She still lived on the farm on which she'd grown up, the same farm where in the summer of 1944 she hid three members of the SAS. The Germans knew the British had parachuted into the area and for nearly two weeks they scoured the countryside. They came to the farm where Juliette lived with her parents; they searched it inside out, but the soldiers had been smuggled out of the back, across a field and into a copse. I've been thinking a lot about Juliette recently.