Is France particularly vulnerable to terror attacks and is there a reason for this?

Sadly France has been the victim of a series of lone wolf attacks in recent years.

At first, i want to talk about how France has seen a surge of attacks on Jews and Jewish sites, including the January 9, 2015 hostage attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris that killed four Jews. Several victims of Islamist-inspired lone wolf operations were Jewish, including four of the seven victims from the March 2012 shooting spree in southern France. Increasingly, Jewish businesses and sites have become targets of extremist attacks.

Second we wont forget how French nationals have been victims of Islamic-extremist attacks abroad. In 1983, Hezbollah targeted the American and French Marine Barracks, killing 58 French service members and 241 Americans. In 2002, French expatriates were the victims of the bombing of a French naval defense contractor’s bus in Karachi and an attack on a Limburg supertanker off Aden. In recent years, French civilians and service members have been kidnapped and murdered in Afghanistan, Algeria, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, and Yemen.(according to New York Times).

And what is intresting is that when responding to the question of policies they considered to be most effective in dealing with countries that permit extremism, most of the French respondents favor imposing tough economic sanctions against a country that allows extremism. Finally, compared to other European countries, most French respondents (52 percent) believe that fighting Islamist extremism should be a top priority.