There are certain seasonal rhythms one learns to accept with weary resignation, like the migration of swallows, the annual flu vaccine rollout, and the French citizenry enthusiastically setting fire to their own boulevards. For the third weekend in a row, the streets of major French cities resembled a medieval siege with modern chemical accelerants, culminating in hundreds of arrests and a newly minted attempted murder investigation after someone lobbed a petrol bomb directly at a phalanx of riot police. Naturally, the authorities in Paris are clutching their collective pearls, expressing profound shock that the populace is once again failing to behave like well-mannered cogs in the great machine of the Republic.
Now, as a matter of basic property rights and civilized neighborliness, hurling improvised incendiary devices at fellow human beings is entirely indefensible. You cannot build a free society on broken cobblestones and third-degree burns, and private individuals ought to be secure in their persons and property without fear of roving mobs reenacting Les Miserables on a whim. But to watch the French state react to this violence with bewildered indignation is like watching a man poke a hornets nest with a truncheon and then file a formal complaint with the Department of Agriculture about the stings.
The French state is, after all, the world’s most suffocatingly attentive relative. It is the eccentric, overbearing uncle who insists on managing your diet, negotiating your bedtime, regulating the precise composition of your baguette, and guaranteeing your retirement at forty-five, only to demand half your paycheck and throw an apocalyptic tantrum when you ask to be left alone. France spends more than half its gross domestic product through the state apparatus, maintaining a civil service so vast and labyrinthine that it likely has a dedicated sub-directorate for the calibration of office rubber bands. It has promised its citizens that central planning can abolish the harsh realities of scarcity, math, and aging.
When you make that promise and inevitably fail to deliver, this is what happens. As F.A. Hayek warned in The Road to Serfdom, the fatal conceit of the central planner always ends in coercion. Hayek noted that the more the state plans, the more difficult planning becomes for the individual, and crucially, the more all economic disagreements are transformed into political conflicts. In a market economy, if you dislike your contract, your pension fund, or your employer, you renegotiate, move, or seek an alternative. In a dirigiste playground like France, where the state sits atop every transaction like a gargantuan paperweight, every private disappointment is a political grievance, and every political grievance is an existential battle against the sovereign.
Because the French state has nationalized virtually every sphere of public and economic life, it has also nationalized all frustration. If the government determines the cost of your fuel, the age you can stop working, the healthcare you receive, and the hours your neighborhood grocer may legally unlock his doors, then who else is there to blame when life goes sideways? The state has positioned itself as the sole author of society, so when the plot falls apart, the audience naturally storms the author’s stage with a jerrycan of gasoline.
The state’s response to this inevitable feedback loop is as predictable as it is depressing. It will not, of course, conclude that perhaps it has overextended its mandate or that society might function better with a little more spontaneous order and a great deal less administrative dictate. Instead, it will summon hundreds more gendarmes, deploy fresh clouds of tear gas, announce high-level ministerial inquiries, and treat the whole mess as a technical policing problem rather than a systemic crisis of state overreach. The interior ministry will vow merciless justice, the opposition will vow unyielding resistance, and the bureaucratic engine will keep humming, churning out thousands of new pages of regulations designed to pacify the very people currently setting dumpsters ablaze.
It is a tragedy of modern statism that Paris cannot see the fire for the smoke. When you replace voluntary human cooperation with top-down coercion, you strip society of its natural shock absorbers. You create a fragile, brittle system where any adjustment to the economic thermostat produces a riot, because peaceful, decentralized compromise was outlawed three administrative decrees ago. Until the French government learns to let go of the reins and treat its citizens as autonomous adults rather than wards of the court, the weekend forecast in the City of Light will remain partly cloudy with a heavy chance of Molotovs.