One morning in May, residents of the small French city of Orléans woke up to stickers slapped onto light poles, park benches, and other street furniture. “Muslim-restricted area,” the stickers read — accompanied with crossed-out photos of headscarf-wearing women, bearded men, and figures praying. Below another text read, “A better world without Muslim [sic].”

The stickers, left-wing daily L’Humanité reports, included the URL of a recently jailed Normandy-based neo-Nazi. He was infamous for his T-shirts proclaiming, among other crass and racist things, “Refugees welcome” in the form of the entry gate to Auschwitz.

The stickering action was no isolated incident. Nor was it the most extreme. In the first three months of this year, seventy-nine Islamophobic hate crimes took place across France — an increase of more than 70 percent relative to the same period in 2024, according to the interior minister.