PARIS — Day in and day out for the past 18 months, two or three French soldiers have been posted by the doors of a small synagogue on the Rue St.-Lazare in central Paris, where they have become as much of a fixture as the bar on the corner and the place selling rotisserie meats across the street.

If people hadn’t noticed the synagogue before, they certainly do now. Rabbi Salomon Malka tells the story of his grandson who was lost in the neighborhood until he spotted the soldiers. “Now I know where you are,” he told his grandfather.

Code named “Sentinelle,” the deployment of 10,000 French military personnel at potential targets around the country, which was ordered after terrorist attacks in and around Paris in January last year, was already under review when a 31-year-old Tunisian drove a 19-ton truck into crowds in Nice on Bastille Day, killing 84 people.

In the aftermath of the attack in Nice, a plan to reduce the number of soldiers assigned to Sentinelle to 7,000 was immediately shelved, and France’s state of emergency, scheduled to expire on July 26, was extended again for six months.