At Limoges the town hall, dedicated in 1883 and built on the model of the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, lost most of its roof to fire after a band of men attacked the building as the march was ending; the prefect of the region said it was in great part lost. Hundreds of citizens, the same paper reports, watched the flames, helpless, and a woman who works at the town hall wept, according to AFP, in the arms of a councillor. Many shops across the country were stripped; in Paris young men tried to break into the Galeries Lafayette; Alexandre Bompard, head of the retailers' federation, condemned the looting in the strongest terms.

Valeurs actuelles adds that at about seven in the morning some hundred hooded men attacked the Lagardère building, where CNews, Europe 1 and the JDD are written, and that twenty-one were arrested; the day before, the site Contre Attaque had urged readers to "unplug" those newsrooms, and printed their addresses. Barricades went up at Rennes, at Marseille, near Tours on the A10, at Lyon by a bridge over the Rhône and near the Feyzin refinery. More than ten thousand police and gendarmes were under arms; sixty were wounded, two carried unconscious to hospital, one struck by a paving stone; some four hundred were arrested. Laurent Nuñez, the Interior Minister, lays the blame on factions of the far left and denies that the policing doctrine was the cause; Sébastien Lecornu, the prime minister, convened a crisis council in the evening; the President of the Republic threatened on X that the looters would be punished.

I drew walls across Britain and forts across Germany: I know that a line is held not by the number of soldiers but by position and discipline. Ten thousand were under arms, and still the council-house of Limoges burned. How that could happen the reports do not say; a Roman magistrate would ask it first, not how many were arrested, but who was meant to guard the council-house door and where he was at the time. For a city's public buildings are not shops: a merchant can buy back a shop; only the whole city can buy back its council-house.

Let the Gauls remember Clodius' funeral. When the mob carried his body into the Curia and built his pyre from the benches, the Curia Hostilia went up in flames; yet no liberty rose from those ashes, only Pompey, made consul without a colleague. Those who burn the house of public counsel think they are seeking liberty; they are sending for a master. That is not liberty but licence, and licence always summons the very man it pretends to fear most.

Still, this business is not to be left to the police alone. A woman once hailed me on the road; when I answered that I had no time, she told me then to stop being emperor; I stopped and heard her. The complaints about the annona, about fuel prices, about public services are not inventions: the annona today is oil and the fire that drives vehicles, and a prince who lets it grow too dear is buying himself a riot. Which law, which decree most stirred these citizens, the reports do not say; the magistrates sitting in Paris perhaps do not know themselves. The prefecture, as Nuñez says, tried to separate the hooded men from the unions' march: rightly, for to lump the peaceful citizen with the arsonist wrongs them both.

The remedy, then, is ready to hand, and it is not new. Let them try the arsonists and looters by law, not in anger, each as he was caught. Let them keep a steady doctrine on weapons: a commander who changes his arms twice in nine days, first suspending them after a boy was maimed at Lens, then restoring them the day before the riot, shows levitas, and soldier and enemy alike feel it at once. Let the ministers leave Paris and go out into the provinces, to hear complaints with their own ears before they see the smoke. And let them rebuild the town hall of Limoges in stone within the year, and keep the old inscription, as I kept on the Pantheon M·AGRIPPA·L·F·COS·TERTIVM·FECIT: Marcus Agrippa, son of Lucius, consul for the third time, made this. A city that restores its buildings and does not erase the names of its ancestors shows the arsonists that it will outlast the fire.