The French Riviera is the one spot in Europe that comes closest to the image of an earthly paradise. At its heart is the Franco-Italian city of Nice, now France’s No. 2 tourist attraction after Paris.

On Wednesday night, as the French celebrated the anniversary of their Great Revolution, Nice was jam-packed with tens of thousands of tourists from all over the world, many of them on the golden mile between the iconic Negresco hotel and the Palais de Mediterranee to watch the annual fireworks.

To a committed Islamist, Nice was the very symbol of a sinful “deviation from the Right Path.”

It was then that Mohamed Lahoueiej Bouhelel drove his giant white truck on the Promenade des Anglais in a bid to kill as many as he could.

Just over a mile and long minutes of zigzagging later, Bouhelel had managed to kill at least 84 people and injure dozens more before being shot by a policeman.

First reports say victims were of 20 different nationalities, including American and Russian. Police say many victims were French Muslim citizens of North African origin.

It was the fourth time in just over two years that France was being attacked by what President François Hollande was quick to label “Islamic terrorism.”

In January 2015, three days of attacks by gunmen in Paris left 17 dead, starting with the raid on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo to execute its editorial staff.

In November 2015, parallel attacks by seven gunmen in Paris killed 132 and injured 350 more in the deadliest terrorist “incident” in French history.

This June, a man claiming to operate on behalf of ISIS killed two police officials in Magnaville, a suburb of Paris.

For the past 18 months, France has lived under a state of emergency, the longest in its history. On Tuesday, President Hollande, in his annual National Day address, said he planned to lift the emergency — a pledge he quickly withdrew after the carnage in Nice. In the same period, police units have been working overtime, some say to exhaustion, while army units have been deployed in Paris and at least five other major cities.

Yet, as the Nice attack showed, France is no safer than before.

Nathalie Goulet, who heads the French Senate’s foreign affairs committee, describes the situation as “a nightmare.” “The question is: Are we able to prevent [such attacks]? And my answer is: Unfortunately no.”

Should France prepare itself to regard terrorism as the “new normal”? This is what Prime Minister Manuel Valls suggests.

“France has to learn to live with terrorism,” he said Thursday, repeating what he had said in the security conference in Munich last February.

The chief weakness in France’s anti-terrorism strategy is the inability of its leadership elite to agree on a workable definition of the threat the nation faces.

Many still cling to the notion that Bouhelel and other terrorists are trying to take revenge against France for its colonial past. Yet Tunisia, where Bouhelel’s family came from in the 1960s, has been independent for more than 60 years, double the life of the terrorist — who had not been there, even as a tourist.

Some, like the Islamologist Gilles Kepel, blame French society for “the sense of exclusion” inflicted on immigrants of Muslim origin. However, leaving aside self-exclusion, there are few barriers that French citizens of Muslim faith can’t cross. Today, Valls’ Cabinet includes at least two Muslim ministers.

Still others claim that France is being hit because of Muslim grievances over Palestine, although successive French governments have gone out of their way to sympathize with the “Arab cause.” France was the first nation to impose an arms embargo on Israel in 1967 and the first in the West to recognize the PLO.

Meanwhile, there is growing anger in Paris with Iran, which has launched a propaganda campaign to blame France’s policies for the attack in Nice. Claude Bartolone, speaker of the French National Assembly, has canceled his long-planned official visit to Tehran.

The blame-the-victim school also claims that France is attacked because of the “mess in the Middle East,” although the French took no part in toppling Saddam Hussein and have stayed largely on the sidelines in the conflict in Syria.

Isn’t it possible that this new kind of terrorism, practiced by neo-Islam, is not related to any particular issue?

Isn’t it possible that Bouhelel didn’t want anything specific because he wanted everything, starting with the right to kill people not because of what they did but because of who they were?

“The Muslim warrior (ghazi) should make sure that no one is safe anywhere unless he submits to an Islamic authority,” wrote Sheik Yussef al-Ayyeri, the late theoretician of al Qaeda and ISIS.

In all its various versions, whether ISIS, the Taliban in Afghanistan or the Khomeinist cabal in Tehran, this neo-Islam demands to impose its will on the whole of mankind, by terror if necessary.

And there is nothing more futile than the debate over whether this is “true Islam.” The Grand Mosque in Paris condemns the Nice attacks, but in its normal “sermons,” it also condemns everything that Nice represented.

Ten months ago, in an “Open letter to the Western Youth,” Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, invited the Western democracies to abandon their current national and international policies and devise new strategies in close consultation with “the world of Islam.” In other words, submit or die.

President Hollande must admit that his nation, perhaps the whole democratic portion of the globe, is at war, a war over two mutually exclusive visions of the future.