France’s Broken Shopfronts and the Price of Disorder

A Sunday morning street of burnt-out cars, shattered windows, and a restaurant’s interior wrecked is a kind of ledger, though not one kept by any book-keeper. In France’s latest unrest, police arrested some 1,800 people; more than 500 police officers, gendarmes, and firefighters were injured; around 1,500 shops and retailers, we are told, were damaged. The nation’s interior ministry insists that demonstration is a fundamental right, yet speaks also of “outrages” by several thousand determined to attack public buildings and confront the police. The figures are striking, but the more important account is not numerical. It asks who ultimately pays for every broken pane and abandoned shift and fearful walk home.

When I wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments, I urged that we judge conduct by placing ourselves in the situation, not of the actor or the victim alone, but of an impartial spectator, well-informed and disinterested. That spectator may understand, and even sympathise with, the indignation of young people who believe their prospects are blocked, their efforts under-rewarded, their rulers inattentive. Yet fellow-feeling for their grievances cannot extend to applauding looting or the deliberate burning of a city’s tourist office, or the terror of residents watching “groups of young people smashing everything, with total impunity.” To seize another man’s property because one is angry at the world is not justice but its negation, and the spectator cannot but condemn it.

Such outbreaks are not only wrong in morals; they are costly in the very coin which the protesters often say the nation withholds from them. In the Wealth of Nations I described how the division of labour – from the humble pin factory to the grand commerce of a great city – is limited by the extent of the market. A bakery with its glass front shattered, a wine shop where every bottle lies broken, an office building set aflame: these are not symbols but interruptions to the daily cooperation of multitudes. Each day a shop is boarded up, each customer deterred, each insurance premium quietly raised, narrows the market in which the labouring poor sell their work and buy their bread.

We are told that hundreds of thousands marched nationwide. Most, it seems, did so peaceably. Yet a small number, by choosing violence, effectively imposed a tax upon all, collected not by law but by fear. The cost appears first as visible ruin, but it soon disperses into higher prices, shuttered premises, and hesitating investment in the very quartiers where work is scarcest. It is one of the cruellest ironies of disorder that it commonly diminishes, not the pomp of the great, but the annual produce of the land and labour as consumed by the poor. A smashed McDonald’s or looted electronics shop does not humble the masters of mankind; it nudges them elsewhere and leaves their former neighbours with fewer options and dearer goods.

The state here is not an intruder from some other planet. Defence against foreign aggression and the exact administration of justice at home are its first duties. To protect streets, persons, and property during large demonstrations is therefore not tyranny but office. Yet office must itself be exercised under law. It is significant that the French police inspectorate has opened several dozen investigations into alleged police violence since these high-school protests began. Force that exceeds necessity is not redeemed by the uniform that wields it, any more than anger is redeemed by the slogan that excuses it. The impartial spectator will insist on two things at once: firmness against rioters, and sincere inquiry into abuses by those who police them.

From what little is reported of the grievances, I suspect I recognise an old drama. In Moral Sentiments I traced the poor man’s son, bewitched by the splendour of the rich, who toils all his life to attain a station that brings far less contentment than he imagined. The same deception of ambition, multiplied across a generation taught to expect both material abundance and unceasing recognition, may ferment into rage when the promise appears to fail. Yet this disappointment, however real, confers no right to treat city streets as a theatre of moral exhibition, where the suffering of shopkeepers and drivers and cleaners is merely a stage prop.

If we ask what should be done, we must beware two species of folly. On one side stands the man of system, who, observing broken glass and angry youth, imagines that a comprehensive plan – a new code, a grand programme, an ingenious policing doctrine – might rearrange the great chess-board of human society to his taste. On the other stand merchants’ associations, such as those now counting 1,500 damaged retailers, who will be tempted to demand measures that secure their premises by narrowing competitors, restricting street use, or shifting costs onto the public purse. Both require the most suspicious attention. Repression can drive discontent underground without curing it; privilege can clothe self-interest in the language of security.

The sounder path is humbler and slower. Let the law, impartially applied, pursue looters and violent assailants; let misconduct by officers be investigated and punished where proved; let public works, education, and employment be ordered so as to widen, not fragment, the market in which these young protesters must in time sell their labour. But let no one pretend that justice for the disappointed requires indulgence for the destructive. To excuse cruelty to one’s neighbours as a form of protest is to proclaim that only power matters, and once that maxim is generally believed, no shopfront – and no constitution – is truly safe.