I largely agree about the danger, but as I was reading this, I couldn't help thinking about the staggering contradiction. At the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics on July 26, 2024, a beheaded Marie-Antoinette appeared to the music of Gojira (a band I actually really like), accompanied by the revolutionary refrain “Ah! Ça ira, ça ira, ça ira, les aristocrates on les pendra” (“The aristocrats, we will hang them”). People all over the world watched the performance. The French Republic has a bloody history, and whatever the more radical ambitions of some May ’68 thinkers, violence has an undeniable place in its political tradition. It just does. Which is why far-left groups that glorify “revolutionary violence” consider themselves heirs to that very heritage, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon is pretty open about his attachment to it as well. So simply insisting that violence has no place in French political battles, in my opinion, misses a much deeper political problem. The question is what that violence seeks to accomplish and against whom. Condemning it is certainly necessary to preserve the state's monopoly on legitimate force and maintain some degree of social cohesion. But without understanding the resentment directed at the Republic itself, such condemnations tell us very little about the political forces driving it. thefp.com/p/bernard-henri-le…