On Saturday, the seventeenth of October, people took to the streets across Gaul against the high cost of living: a hundred and ten marches, Le Figaro reports, with five hundred and fifty thousand marchers by the Interior Ministry's estimate, eight hundred thousand by the CGT's claim. On the margins of the marches, as both Le Figaro and Le JDD relate, shops were looted in several cities, bins set on fire, streets wrecked. In Paris, Le JDD writes, the police company called CRS 8, two hundred strong, fought the looters for two whole days in the districts of Les Halles and the Madeleine. Laurent Nuñez, Minister of the Interior, wished to resign; President Emmanuel Macron refused, pleading continuity in the command of the police, and ordered him, as Le Figaro reports, to lay open the failures of foresight and intelligence that bred the violence.

Today, at half past four in the afternoon, the same Le Figaro relates, an immense uproar filled the chamber. Mathilde Panot rises; and since others accused her movement of authoring the riots, she throws the charge back: the ministers' incompetence made the disaster, they failed to protect the right to assemble; she condemns violence; by accusing her faction the ministers spare themselves from drawing the political consequences. Her own side applauds. Who accused her first, what the ministers answered, the report does not disclose, since the greater part of it is cut off. A Roman magistrate would have asked that first.

See, then, what has been done. Two parties, one holding power, the other the platform, agree on a single thing: the fire is useful. It profits the ministers to lay the riots at the faction's door, so that they need not account for neglected watch; it profits the faction to accuse the ministers, so that no one asks what its own words added to the blaze. Meanwhile the shopkeeper whose goods were plundered concerns neither; and the citizen whose prices climb hears no remedy at all. Cato put it rightly among us: "we have long since lost the true names of things." Now a minister who fails is kept on, and this is called continuity; a faction that shouts, the defence of liberty.

Our ancestors, when Catiline's conspiracy was uncovered, did indeed disagree in the senate, Caesar urging clemency, Cato severity; but they contended over the penalty, not the blame, and after the debate the thing was done. Here, by contrast: on blame, a suit without end; on penalty, silence. Add to this that, as Le Figaro observes, the budget for next year is at this very moment before a chamber that has had no majority since 2024. So there comes to pass what always comes to pass where factions rule: "by concord small states grow great; by discord the greatest fall apart."

The remedy is old and not obscure. Let looters be restrained by law and the courts, not by speeches. Let the ministers render account of the neglected intelligence not behind closed doors but before the chamber; and if fault is found, let the guilty man go, however unwilling his chief. Let the factions, if they love the commonwealth, argue about the price of bread before they argue about spite. But I fear the lust for glory is greater than the care for preservation. For when all accuse, no one judges; and when no one judges, the fire itself pronounces sentence.