In 2027, France’s Memorial Museum of Terrorism (MMT) is scheduled to open its doors in Suresnes, a suburb west of Paris. The project will be “unique,” according to the mission statement on the memorial’s pilot website, covering “the history and memory of terrorism over more than fifty years. Moreover, unlike other similar institutions, it does not limit itself to a single attack or single type of terrorism.” Visitors can expect a broad overview of the history of political violence by non-state actors, from Italy’s Red Brigades to a diverse array of nationalist movements and the current jihadist wave.

But the commemoration project dances around one taboo: France’s homegrown tradition of far-right violence. The last of the eight historical sequences laid out in the museum’s scientific prospectus is indeed devoted to “far-right terrorism since the 1990s,” from the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing to Anders Breivik’s attack in Norway in 2011 or the 2019 mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Judging by the museum’s mission statement, the French experience of far-right terror — violence “motivated by xenophobia, racism, antisemitism or the hatred of Muslims” — is notably lacking. What’s mentioned in passing are artifacts from a comfortably distant past: clandestine 1930s organizations like La Cagoule or 1960s fanatics of an abandoned French Algeria.