France has stepped up security at its borders and is calling for a rethink on free movement in the EU after a spate of suspected Islamist terror attacks.
President Emmanuel Macron said the EU’s Schengen area, which allows people to cross borders freely, may need reform.
A knife attack in Nice last week, which killed three people, was blamed on a Tunisian migrant who crossed into France from Italy in October.
It was the second alleged jihadist attack in France in just over a month.
France’s security alert is at its highest level, with thousands of soldiers deployed to protect places of worship and schools, since teacher Samuel Paty was beheaded for showing cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad to his students.
President Macron has since sparked anger and protests in some Muslim-majority countries with his robust defence of France’s values and freedoms that permitted the publication of cartoons.
But he has rejected right-wing calls for greater safeguards to protect the country’s principle of secularism, saying: “The situation does not warrant changing the constitution.”
And, in a letter to the Financial Times, he made clear France was fighting “Islamist separatism, never Islam”. He accused the British newspaper of misquoting him in an article – which has since been removed from its website – suggesting he was “stigmatising French Muslims for electoral purposes”.
“I will not allow anybody to claim that France, or its government, is fostering racism against Muslims,” he said in the letter to the editor.