Officials say fire severely damaged Limoges Town Hall during protests

A town hall is not a shop window. It is the building in which a city governs itself. On Saturday, fire severely damaged Limoges Town Hall, and France is being invited, once again, to file that under the cost of living.

The local prefect, Maurice Barate, refused the euphemism. He called the fire an intentional act by hooligans and a loss for the city’s heritage. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said violent radical-left groups were involved in the unrest around demonstrations over prices. Masked groups, he said, tried to force their way into the city halls of Lille and Calais and into a police station in Brest. About four hundred arrests. Clashes in Rennes, Toulouse, Montpellier and Grenoble. Tear gas and water cannons at Place de la République.

Read that list again and then try the sentence still favored on the French left: that the march “degenerated.” Marches do not degenerate, on the same afternoon, into attempted entries of several hôtels de ville and a police station. That is a method. It has a costume, a geography and a political alibi. The alibi is that households are squeezed, so the matches somehow belong to the people.

The squeeze is real. Anyone who does the shopping in France knows it. A government that has spent years announcing mastery of crises while wages lose the race with rent, energy and food has earned a reckoning. A citizen who marches against that is using a right the Republic exists to protect. The masked man who burns the mairie is not his comrade. The building does not belong to Emmanuel Macron. It belongs to the commune — its memory, its council, the ordinary machinery of local self-government. Burning it does not punish Paris. It punishes Limoges.

This is the permission structure the French left has never honestly closed. Since it turned 1968 into a civic religion, part of its political class has treated the street as a higher electorate and whatever spills from a cortege as still, somehow, popular will. It is not. The people of a city do not vote with a fire at the town hall. The ultragauche that treats a mairie as a legitimate target has already left the democratic argument. It is not radicalizing a social movement. It is consuming one, then daring the rest of the country to object without being called indifferent to poverty.

Nuñez’s plain words matter because they are so often avoided. For years the vocabulary has been a solvent: casseurs, débordements, violences urbaines — as if a fire started itself and a police station was stormed by the weather. Naming radical-left groups is not a smear. It is a description of a milieu that arrives masked, repeats the same tactics from city to city, and spends Monday wrapped in someone else’s legitimate anger. If the minister is wrong, he should be corrected with evidence. If he is right, the correction required is not of his tone.

Macron said the sentence France has memorized. Violence has no place in the Republic; those who attack public institutions and businesses will be prosecuted. The sentence is true and, by now, cheap. It is issued after the damage, and it is believed only if the prosecutions are swift, public and hard enough that the next Saturday looks different. Four hundred arrests are not a policy. They are a queue. What follows — charges that stick, a state that distinguishes a union march from an organized raid, police who are backed when they hold a line and answerable when they abuse one — is the test. A republic that can deploy water cannons but cannot finish the cases has chosen spectacle over authority.

The right should not enjoy this too easily. There is a standing temptation, in the anti-system part of our own camp, to treat every burning window as proof that disorder is a verdict on the elite and therefore halfway justified. It is not. Popular fury at prices and at a distant political class is legitimate precisely because it can be told apart from the men who attach themselves to it. Confuse the two, and you hand the institutions to the arsonists and the argument to Macron. Defend the grievance. Withdraw every ounce of romance from the violence. A politics that cannot do both is not order, and it is not opposition. It is an excuse.

No price index authorized a raid on a police station in Brest. No household budget required the attempted invasion of the mairies of Lille and Calais. Those were choices. A democracy that will discuss only the motives, and not the choices, has already agreed that its own buildings are optional. They are not. You may denounce the government with your whole voice. You may not burn the house in which your neighbors are governed.