When the Bastille fell, it was a massacre of symbols. Today, France erupts not over bread, but over paper: the criminal record of a child murder suspect. The suspect, a recidivist predator, was released from custody due to a bureaucratic oversight.
The public, naturally, is incandescent. The hashtag #OnVeutDesNoms trends. Politicians scramble.
The government, a delicate balance of socialist piety and neoliberal efficiency, offers the usual pablum: ‘We will reform the system.’ But let us be clear. This is not a glitch in the database.
This is a civilisational rot. We are witnessing the slow collapse of the Enlightenment’s contract between citizen and state. A contract that once held: the state protects, the citizen obeys.
But what happens when the state becomes a sieve, leaking dangerous men back onto the streets? The answer is a return to primal justice. The mob.
The vigilante. The ‘citizen’s arrest’ that is anything but lawful. I am reminded of the fall of Rome, where the Praetorian Guard, an institution meant to preserve order, became the instrument of chaos.
They sold the throne, and with it, the safety of the people. Now, France’s justice system has sold a child’s life. The reaction is not overblown; it is understated.
We are polite in our fury, for now. But listen to the mutterings in the café and the chatter on the boulevard. ‘They are not protecting us.
’ This is the death knell of the liberal state. When the people no longer believe the state can guard their children, they will guard them themselves. And history tells us that this path leads not to justice, but to the guillotine.
The French Revolution did not begin with a king’s head. It began with a mother’s scream.
