BREAKING: As the world’s great and good gather for the G7 in Biarritz, France finds itself once again in the grip of protest fever. The usual blend of anarchists, socialists, and professional malcontents has taken to the streets, smashing windows and burning effigies of global capitalism. It is a familiar spectacle: a carnival of rage that has become as much a part of these summits as the platitudes about climate change and trade.
Yet, as the smoke clears, we are treated to a curious contrast. While French authorities struggle to contain the chaos, UK security services are quietly praised for their pre-emptive tactics. It is a tale of two approaches to public order: one continental, sentimental, and reactive; the other British, pragmatic, and effective.
For the contrarian intellectual, it is a moment to savour. The French, with their revolutionary heritage, seem almost to enjoy the theatre of disruption. Their police, though brave, operate under constraints that would make a Victorian constable weep.
They wait for the storm to break and then react with batons and water cannon. The British, by contrast, have learned from the riots of 2011 and the eternal vigilance required in a post-9/11 world. A combination of MI5 tip-offs, proactive community policing, and a legal framework that allows for pre-emptive detention has kept the peace on our shores.
The praise is deserved, but it also reveals a deeper truth: that liberty without order is mere license. The protesters in Biarritz see themselves as heirs to 1789, but they are more akin to the sans-culottes of the Terror: blind to the irony that their rage empowers the very authoritarians they claim to oppose. France may well descend into a new form of intellectual decadence, where the state’s reluctance to enforce order breeds a cycle of lawlessness and repression.
Britain, for all its current travails, retains a sense of historical balance. We understand that security is not the enemy of freedom but its precondition. The G7 protests are a microcosm of a larger struggle: between the romanticism of disruption and the sober duty of governance.
I know which side I am on. And as the tear gas clears, I hope the French take note. For the fall of Rome began not with barbarians at the gate, but with a failure to maintain order within.
