ABSTRACT

Painting a picture of Islam in France at the start of the 21st Century by looking at the last decade involves highlighting perceptions and stereotypes that increasingly determine community-based attitudes. First, though, we have to explain how this religion, seen as foreign and aggressive (to go by the symbols of the Battle of Poitiers, the Crusades and other events), became in the 1980s the second biggest religion in France, and of the French.