France is ablaze (again). Limoges’s nineteenth-century town hall was set on fire and declared largely lost. The prefect’s residence in Bordeaux was ransacked. The Galeries Lafayette were looted and, in the words of the mayor of Paris, entire streets “methodically wrecked.”
This is what happens when a society treats the lycéen – a creature of dubious pilosity who cannot legally buy a beer – as an oracle
We could expend many words analyzing why: a failing justice system, a lack of political courage, the left’s insurrectionist tendencies. But one underestimated reason is the rise of the Child King. This, in essence, is what happens when a society treats the lycéen (the student) – a creature of dubious pilosity who cannot legally buy a beer – as an oracle.
None of this came from nowhere. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile, or On Education first cast the child as another version of his noble savage: a creature still free of corruption, imbued with natural wisdom, a symbol to be cherished, listened to, and imitated. Children, therefore, must not be told what to do, but given free rein. A. S. Neill, in Summerhill, gave that disastrous and profoundly uncivilized idea an English twist, running a school where pupils voted on whether to attend class. Across the Atlantic, Nixon’s vice-president, Spiro Agnew, accused Dr Spock’s Baby and Child Care of spawning the permissive generation that gave us 1968. The apotheosis came in 2018, when Greta Thunberg, a professional activist at the ripe old age of 15, lectured world leaders at the UN climate conference in the condescending and brash tone that parents of pre-pubescent brats know all too well. We have lost so much confidence in ourselves and in our leaders that the supposed innocence of youth now passes for wisdom.
France, however, has its own pathology. Not only does the left hold up social unrest as the “engine of progress;” the state itself has been petrified of student protest since 1986, when Malik Oussekine died under police batons during the demonstrations against the Devaquet university reforms. Why does France combust so regularly? Simply because protesting pays. Devaquet was withdrawn within days. Similarly, the government withdrew Balladur’s youth contract in 1994 after the lycées marched. So was Chirac’s First Employment Contract in 2006. In 2018 the government held onto the Parcoursup university admissions platform, but only just. This month, after two audiences with a union of minors, the education minister announced that the platform would not be abolished but that “everything is on the table.” Forty years of retreat before children have taught each new generation of French teenagers the same lesson: these tactics work. The lycéen is the Republic’s sacred cow, and sacred cows, as every farmer knows, eventually trample the fields.
What, then, have these oracles demanded? New buildings and modern equipment. They made this case by burning down the main hall of the Lycée Nelson-Mandela in Nantes, a school inaugurated in 2014. They also want an end to Parcoursup, which supposedly breeds inequality – a platform that made at least one offer to 92 percent of applicants last year. Every baccalauréat holder has a legal right to a place at a public university. France has nearly ten times as many students as in 1960. None of this, nor the fact that scores of these young protesters are in the pocket of Mélenchon’s far left, seems to faze anyone.
Paradoxically, our era both overestimates teenagers’ intelligence and underestimates their destructive potential. By 1 October, 83 police officers and 34 school staff had already been injured. Ah, but it is not the students who are burning and rioting, we are told; it is “black bloc” infiltrators, corrupting the pure and innocent student movement. Why, then, were 86 percent of the more than 6,800 people taken into custody since 28 September minors? Scores of perfectly decent people, upon learning that a 15-year-old in Lens had his hand ripped off by a crowd-control grenade, were aghast and immediately blamed the police for their brutal tactics. They seem perfectly unaware that today’s minors, who account for a third of those arrested for violent robbery in France, are perfectly capable of being dangerous, even lethal, including to trained police officers.
And yet the Child King is not really the culprit, because a child cannot seize power on his own. He must be crowned by adults. In saner times, people listened to him, indulged him, and then gently put him back in his place
the moment he presumed to explain to adults how a society should be run. Thomas Sowell wrote that each new generation is “an invasion of civilization by little barbarians”, who must be civilized before it is too late. The barbarians must be taught the ways of the world, not the other way around. This is what sane nations do. But as France shows, who is sane anymore?
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