The lesson that France is currently teaching is one that applies far beyond its borders, and spectacle readers in Britain, in Ireland, in the United States, in every country where the same austerity and the same contempt and the same degradation of public services is being imposed by governments with no mandate and no answers, should be paying close attention. The French are demonstrating something that is easy to forget when you are watching from inside a system that has been designed to make organised resistance feel futile: the state does not respond to reason alone. It does not move because of petitions or polite letters or even electoral pressure, because all of those things can be absorbed, delayed, managed, and eventually forgotten. It responds to disruption, to the credible assertion that the country cannot function normally while its people are being ignored, and the French people have been making that assertion, with remarkable consistency and remarkable discipline, for weeks.

They let the ambulances through. They block the roads and then they open them for the fire trucks and then they close them again, because they understand that their anger is not directed at the people the state is also failing to protect. They have chosen their targets carefully, and their message is clear. The system that is telling you there is no money for schools spent billions on war. The government that is cutting your pension sent its children to private school. The state that fires tear gas at 14-year-olds is the same state that has an answer for every question except the ones that matter.