There is an enduring, dark comedy to the modern managerial state. Whenever its grand schemes collapse into smoke and street violence, its caretakers never pause to wonder if their blueprint was hopelessly flawed. Instead, they look around the smoldering room, spot a few opportunistic onlookers peering through the window, and angrily demand to know why the neighbors are being so terribly unhelpful. Such was the spectacle this week as French President Emmanuel Macron scolded foreign political figures for daring to exploit the fiery unrest tearing through French streets to score points in their own upcoming elections.
The primary targets of the Élysée Palace’s indignation appear to be Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, both of whom have treated France’s perennial urban turbulence as handy campaign trail cautionary tales. One can hardly blame Macron for being annoyed by the spectacle; politics is, after all, a parasitic trade where one man’s burning boulevard is another man’s thirty-second campaign ad. Yet there is something profoundly rich about the French state—an institution that spends well over half the nation’s gross domestic product and regulates everything from the length of a baguette to the precise hours an adult may sell dry goods—pretending that its latest round of civil chaos is merely an issue of foreign narrative management.
The French Republic behaves like an eccentric, spendthrift uncle who has hoarded old newspapers to the ceiling, set the kitchen curtains on fire while attempting to boil water, and then storms onto the porch to yell at the neighborhood watch for whispering about the smoke. The issue is not that foreign leaders are rude, though they certainly are. The issue is that the French administrative model has once again produced the exact social conflagration it was ostensibly designed to prevent. Decades of crushing labor regulations have made youth unemployment an entrenched way of life. Immense, suffocating welfare programs have trapped generations in concrete suburban ghettos, substituting genuine economic mobility with bureaucratic stipends.
This is the inevitable wreckage of what Friedrich Hayek famously termed the fatal conceit: the delusion that any central authority, no matter how cultivated its technocrats or how polished its prose, can successfully direct the complex, organic machinery of human society from an office in the capital. When the planners attempt to orchestrate every social outcome, civil society atrophies. When economic freedom is strangled in the crib by thousands of pages of statutory labor codes, peaceful cooperation through voluntary exchange is replaced by resentment, tribal friction, and state dependence. The French state built a massive pressure cooker, sealed the valve with red tape, and now expresses moral outrage that the steam is making a racket.
Naturally, the response from the political class is never to dismantle the apparatus of control. It is to manage the public relations. Macron’s complaint treats the destruction of French property and the collapse of local order as if it were a proprietary brand problem, a domestic tragedy sullied only by bad manners abroad. He appears genuinely offended that overseas populists are pointing at Paris and telling their voters, "Look at what happens over there." Well, look at what does happen over there. When Leviathan assumes total responsibility for the welfare, education, integration, and employment of its populace, it must also own the ashes when the system inevitably fractures under the weight of its own incompetence.
The Fifth Republic was engineered to be a sort of elected monarchy, an architecture tailored to the fantasy that a brilliant administrator at the helm could steer millions of disparate souls toward harmonious equilibrium. But men are not chess pieces on a board, and the French street has a historic habit of reminding its rulers that top-down engineering breeds volatile discontent. To suggest that foreign commentary is somehow the urgent scandal of the week is pure administrative deflection, a classic dodge used by bureaucrats everywhere who would rather debate diplomatic etiquette than explain why the fire engines are running low on water.
If the French government wishes to deprive foreign opportunists of their favorite campaign props, the solution is remarkably straightforward, albeit horrifying to the Parisian political imagination: stop providing the footage. Step out of the way. Dismantle the rigid economic protections that keep millions from earning an honest living, loosen the suffocating regulatory grasp on local enterprise, and permit a free society to heal its own fractures without the clumsy, patronizing intervention of a bloated state. Until then, Leviathan will continue to lecture the rest of the world from behind a riot shield, wondering why nobody is buying the excuse that the smoke was blown in from abroad.