The scenes from Paris this weekend were not merely the consequence of a football match gone awry. They were the spasms of a civilisation in decay, a tableau of the very decadence that Edward Gibbon might have recognised as the prelude to a fall. Hundreds arrested, dozens of police injured: these are the statistics of a society unravelling, where the veneer of civil order is shattered by the primal scream of the mob.
Consider the parallels. The late Roman Republic saw its own bread and circuses turn sour, with gladiatorial games sparking riots that shook the foundations of the state. Victorian England, for all its outward propriety, was riven by class conflicts that erupted in Hyde Park and in the streets of Manchester. We now have our own version: a football match, that modern-day coliseum spectacle, which has left the streets of Paris awash in tear gas and fury.
At the heart of this chaos lies a cultural sickness. The French Champions League, an event meant to showcase national pride and sporting excellence, instead became a stage for a nihilistic theatre. The mob does not riot out of hunger or political grievance; it riots because it can. It riotes because the thin threads of respect for authority, for the common good, have been snapped by decades of intellectual rot. The police, those symbols of the state's monopoly on violence, are now the targets of a populace that has lost all sense of the sacred.
And where are the intellectuals? Where are the moralists who should be decrying this descent into barbarism? They are silent, or worse, they are offering excuses. They speak of 'frustration' and 'social deprivation'. But this is nonsense. The young men who hurled bottles and chanted hate do not lack for opportunity; they lack for discipline. They lack for a sense of belonging to a nation that demands something of them. They are the products of a progressive education that has taught them only their rights, never their responsibilities.
Perhaps it is time to admit that the liberal democratic experiment on the European continent has failed. The French Republic, with its grand slogans of liberty, equality, and fraternity, has become a hollow shell. The reality is a society where the state is held in contempt, where the police are seen as an occupying force, and where the only language the masses understand is that of violence. We are watching the slow death of the West, and the Champions League riots are but one more symptom of the terminal condition.
Yet there is a perverse hope in this despair. History teaches that such convulsions can be purgative. The fall of Rome led to the Dark Ages, but also to the Renaissance. The Victorian crises of faith gave way to the Edwardian summer. Perhaps from the ashes of this self-immolating age, a new order may arise, one that recognises the need for authority, tradition, and a shared moral language. But that will require a rejection of the very ideologies that have brought us here.
For now, we watch the streets of Paris burn, and we wonder: how many more such nights must pass before we admit that the empire has no clothes? The answer, as always, lies in the courage to speak the truth, no matter how unpleasant. And the truth is this: we are reaping what we have sown. The riots are not a glitch in the system; they are the system, revealed in all its ugliness.
