Not even a month after 800,000 people showed up for an open-air Mass with Pope Leo, France has had a completely different kind of mass movement, with 550,000 people engaging in protests over inflation and education.
■ Some protesters were peaceful, but 2,400 were arrested. Riots and looting broke out in a disturbing number of locations. France seems to have a chronic problem with youth-oriented violent protest outbreaks, and it’s certainly a case of confusing messaging, at least from the outside.
■ It’s easy to imagine American students protesting. It’s much harder to imagine them protesting in large numbers over demands for better educational opportunities, as at least some of the French have been doing. Educational quality is the kind of thing addressed more often in the breach than in any other circumstance.
■ People who feel like they’re being deprived of high-quality education often understand intuitively that the deprivation could be used as a tool of control, as has so often been the case in history. The problem is how much it muddies the waters to go from authentic pleas for better schools to destructive rioting. Education is supposed to be a civilizing process, not a barbaric one.