Paris

THE antics of a flash mob sparked panic on a Spanish beach earlier this week, revealing the hair-trigger anxiety that has gripped Europeans following a wave of terror attacks.

"We are made to suffer doubly: not only feeling this fear . . . but also a sense of disarray from being caught in an infernal cycle that can't be stopped," author Edouard Louis and philosopher Geoffroy de Lagasnerie wrote in the French daily Liberation.