France’s Riots Show What Happens When Tumult Loses Its Institutions

Burnt-out cars, shattered shopfronts, a restaurant gutted, a tourist office in flames, at least 1,800 arrests and more than 500 injured among police, gendarmes and firefighters: this is not politics, it is a breakdown. I begin always from the effectual truth. When residents say it is “terrifying” to see groups of young people “smashing everything, with total impunity,” the key words for a statesman are not “terrifying” or “young,” but “everything” and “impunity.” Where many feel that no one restrains violence, power is already in question, no matter how many ministers repeat that demonstrating is a fundamental right.

The Interior Minister names “several thousand far-left individuals” determined to attack public buildings and confront police. That language is less interesting to me as ideology than as diagnosis. He is saying: there exists a core of actors whose purpose is not to petition but to clash. At that moment, the question for government changes. The prince, or the magistrates of a republic, must first maintain the state. They cannot allow armed minorities in the streets to decide which buildings burn. As I wrote in The Prince, in W. K. Marriott’s translation, fortune overwhelms those who build no dykes in fair weather; you do not start worrying about the river once it is already in your house.

Look at the numbers again. Hundreds of thousands demonstrate; “several thousand” pursue confrontation; 1,800 are arrested; 1,500 shops are reported damaged. In this city, as in ancient Rome, the many come into the streets with mixed motives: some to complain of real grievances, some to fight, some to steal. A wise order distinguishes among them in its laws and in its blows. When I wrote in the Discourses on Livy, in Ninian Hill Thomson’s rendering, that founders must assume all men are bad and will show it whenever they have free field, I did not mean that all must be beaten; I meant that the field must never be free. You build barriers that channel anger into institutional outlets before it reaches the shop window.

The French say demonstrating is a fundamental right; their streets now show what happens when that right is not matched by strong and trusted channels capable of absorbing the energy it releases. Tumults in Rome, managed with tribunes and clear procedures, produced liberty and new laws; tumults that lacked such forms produced Sulla and rivers of blood. Here I see a similar fork. On one side lies the path where student protests, however noisy, are heard by legitimate organs that can concede something, deny something, and give reasons. On the other side lies the theatre of smashed glass, where those who loot an Apple store speak not for any cause but for opportunity.

The government has opened 36 investigations into alleged police violence. This is prudent, but also dangerous. It is prudent because a republic must show that its arms are not exempt from law; soldiers and police who feel answerable to nothing become another faction, not guardians. It is dangerous because, if handled as spectacle or sacrifice, it teaches the forces that they will be abandoned when things go badly. Then you have the worst mixture: citizens who fear the police, and police who hesitate in fear of their own judges. Severity badly used multiplies enemies; mercy badly used multiplies crimes; there is no worse policy than the middle course that earns you both.

Notice that the state here does at least rely on its own arms. The injured are its police, gendarmes, firefighters; the arrested are seized by its officers; the investigations are conducted by its inspectorate. For this alone it is better situated than many princes I have known, who borrowed soldiers from their neighbors and discovered too late that auxiliaries obey their original masters. As I argued in The Prince, power that is not your own will ruin you at the first shock. Yet to possess arms is not the same as to employ them well. The test is whether force is used swiftly enough, and discriminately enough, that ordinary people see an end to impunity without seeing the birth of tyranny.

I do not know here what preparations were made in calmer days: what training police received, what doctrines governed crowd control, what outlets were available to students before they filled the streets. But I know the law of rivers. If you find 1,500 shops damaged and residents crying out about impunity, your dykes were too low. Now the rulers face the second test: not whether there will be repression — there must be, for no city can allow the burning of its own offices — but whether, once order is restored, they will take the tumult as occasione to repair the channels of conflict. A state that only beats back the flood and never raises the banks invites the next storm to finish the job.

A free people is turbulent; a cowed people is easy to rule and not worth ruling. The art is to turn fury into petitions, strikes, elections, not into looting and arson. France today is learning, again, that when this art is neglected the streets will improvise their own institutions with fire and stones. If those who govern wish to prove their virtù against this fortune, they must act with a severity that ends disorder, coupled with reforms that restore faith in lawful outlets — for without both together, they will have chosen the middle course, and the middle course is where republics go to die in pieces rather than in a single blow.