Meanwhile the prefects took the night from the citizens. In Paris, around the Place de la République and Châtelet, the streets were closed from eleven at night until six in the morning; at Grenoble, Tours, Bordeaux, Lille and the other towns of the north, the same; at Lyon, Marseille and Avignon, children without an escort were ordered to stay indoors. Cities that clamour by day in the name of liberty are shut by night like a besieged camp. The route from the Bastille to the Nation, as the Figaro's own pages record, had been forbidden by the Council of State.

Laurent Nuñez, to whom the interior is entrusted, praised his arrangements as, in his words, "robust and agile": through them the declared processions had gone ahead, freedom of speech had been preserved, and those who wished to turn the marches into riot had been thwarted; the wreckers and looters, some hundreds of them, had been stirred up by what he calls the faction of the ultra-left. He added that the Republic stands because the police are there. For the authors, however, Le Figaro offers nothing beyond the minister's words; what the three hundred and twenty thousand wanted, who called them out, how the policeman fares, whether the arsonist is among those taken, the reports do not say. That this same man, after the disturbances that broke out in October, wished to resign his office, and that Emmanuel Macron refused, Le JDD and Euronews reported at the time. So the chair is still held by one who has already once confessed himself unequal to the burden.

The name: the Republic stands. The thing: it stands among guards, as a defendant stands. An authority measured by the number of its chains has ceased to rule by auctoritas and is held by force alone. Our ancestors thought a city safe not because watchmen ran about it by night, but because its citizens were quiet unbidden. Domitian, having brought back nothing truly conquered from Germany, celebrated a triumph with captives bought in trade and dressed up as Germans; those who had seen it laughed. I do not say the minister bought his prisoners. I say it is the same kind of glory, which measures a war not won by the crowd of those led away.

Yet the mob is not to be excused. Whoever sets a policeman on fire seeks murder, not liberty; Bruno Retailleau called it attempted murder, Marine Le Pen demanded the utmost severity, and it is no secret that these voices will bear their fruit at the coming elections. Alexis Corbière took pity on the police, but set against them a joyful march and a deaf government. Both can be true at once: that the criminals are few, and that many have a grievance no one hears. This is exactly what the minister's proclamation covers up; it is easier, after all, to ask five thousand passers-by their names than to ask the cause of a single grievance.

The remedy, if there is one, is old: to seek out the one arsonist, find him, and condemn him under the law on violence; to hear the cause of the rising, on which the reports are silent, in the chamber, not to suppress it in the streets; and to compel the magistrate who put his own fortune before the public safety, not to be praised, but to render account. If that is not done, there remains the office of the annals, which I define thus: "I hold it the chief duty of annals that virtues should not go unrecorded, and that evil words and deeds should fear the infamy of posterity." Posterity will read that in this year Gaul shut its children indoors, ringed its prefectures with armoured cars, and counted prisoners in place of victory. They take the night from the citizens, and call it order.