Violent attacks in Paris, targeting the “Charlie Hebdo” newspaper in January 2015 and across multiple sites in November 2015, were sobering illustrations both of a new form of Islamist terror as perpetrated by the Islamic State, and of France’s permeability to social and political processes centered outside her borders. The renewed urgency around discussions and dialogues regarding the place of Muslim, North African, and Middle Eastern ‘others’ in French society. These were not the first attacks, however, that used French soil as a venue to further political and ideological conflict based elsewhere, nor were they unusual in that they roused fears of Muslim and Middle Eastern minorities in France, leading to discussions often couched in terms of immigration. Two decades earlier, in 1995, the Armed Islamic Group (Groupe Islamique Armée) brought the Algerian Civil War to French soil with metro and railroad bombings intended to further destabilize their opponents in Algeria. This paper places reactions to these two sets of attacks in dialogue through a comparative analysis of media coverage of the 1995 and 2015 attacks. This qualitative analysis focuses on perceptions of Islam; Muslim, Middle Eastern, or North African minorities in France; immigration; and national identity, pointing to continuities and discontinuities in the ways that French unity has been constructed against, or including, these others. Much has changed in the last twenty years: global flows of people are more highly regulated, in part due to fears of terrorism; information and ideas enjoy increased rates of dispersion thanks to the spread of digital technologies. Within France, government and civil society initiatives have focused on promoting increased intercultural integration and developing a new, inclusive, national identity, while at the same time government policies and social practices continue to engender the opposite effect when it comes to some of the Muslim, Middle Eastern, or North African populations. All of these processes and more have altered the stage on which these acts of terror take place, and the terms by which they are understood. Yet, twenty years later, Paris again stands as a symbol to be attacked and defended: one element in overarching conflicts over religious ideology, political control, identity, and national membership.