周日晚上8点，埃马纽埃尔·马克龙总统发表了全国性讲话，谴责了这周末席卷法国的骚乱和抢劫行为——这些事件从布列塔尼一直蔓延到佩皮尼昂。他穿的是黑色西装和领带（而非他惯常穿的深蓝色），并严厉谴责了“那些来自极左翼团体的煽动者”以及“许多参与其中犯罪的分子”，他们在我们城市的街道上实施了毫无节制的暴力行为。
At 8 p.m. on Sunday night, President Emmanuel Macron delivered a national address to condemn the rioting and looting that convulsed France this weekend, from Brittany to Perpignan. His suit and tie were black, instead of his customary navy blue, and he denounced the “seditionists from far-left fringe groups, joined by many criminals, engaged in unbridled violence in our cities.”
他痛斥了那些令人发指的破坏行为（其中最典型的例子就是利摩日市政厅那座19世纪建造的木结构屋顶被大火烧毁的景象），以及那些有组织地洗劫商店的恶行。他说：“没有任何理由可以为这些行为辩护，没有任何解释能够为它们开脱。”马克龙承认民众对教育问题和生活成本上升的合理担忧，区分了和平抗议者与暴力骚乱者，并呼吁对相关责任人进行法律追究；同时他还指示地方官员考虑禁止大规模集会。
He decried the grotesque destruction—crystallized in the viral image of a fire consuming the 19th-century wooden roof of the town hall in Limoges—and the methodical sacking of businesses. “Rien ne le justifie, rien ne l’explique, rien ne l’excuse,” he said: Nothing justifies it, nothing explains it, nothing excuses it. Macron acknowledged legitimate concerns about education and the cost of living, distinguished between peaceful protesters and rioters, and called for prosecutions while instructing prefects to consider banning mass gatherings.
他的讲话听起来很有力度。但当我从纽约通过电视直播观看马克龙的讲话时，我给在巴黎的孩子们打了电话，却听到了楼下街道上依然回荡着的喧嚣与欢呼声。他们告诉我，在总统讲话期间，他们公寓楼下的一些商店正在遭到洗劫。我不得不努力驱散一个可怕的念头：那些暴徒会不会趁机闯入公寓的住宅区？如今，仅靠言语已经远远不够了……法国当局终于开始意识到问题的严重性了。
It sounded good. But as I was watching Macron live from New York, I called my children in Paris and heard the giddy chaos—the shouts and cheering—still vibrating through the streets below their open window. They told me that some of the stores beneath their apartment were being ransacked as the president was speaking. I had to push from my mind the appalling thought that these rioters might climb into the building’s residential upper levels. Words aren’t enough anymore. Slowly, the French authorities are starting to grasp that.
“我们在法国刚刚经历的这场混乱与暴力事件实在太多了，”马克龙政府的前部长布鲁诺·勒梅尔在周六的社交媒体上写道。当时，大约有2400人被逮捕，1000名警察和宪兵受伤，其中7人伤势严重。整个周末期间，至少有3000家商铺遭到破坏或抢劫。昨天，塞巴斯蒂安·莱科努总理宣布在巴黎及全国其他城市实施“局部性”的宵禁措施，这无疑是一个积极的开始。
“The day of disorder and violence that we have just experienced in France is one day too many,” Bruno Le Maire, a former government minister under Macron, wrote on X on Saturday, when there were roughly 2,400 arrests and 1,000 police officers and gendarmes injured, seven of them grievously. At least 3,000 businesses were damaged or looted over the weekend. Yesterday, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu announced “localized” curfews in Paris and other cities across the country, which is a start.
今天，莱科努还表示将在本周末部署军队，因为预计还会有更多的抗议活动发生。这些干预措施是必要的。但如果政府无法迅速恢复社会秩序，那么宣布进入紧急状态或许将是唯一可行的选择。
Today, Lecornu added that the military would be deployed this weekend, when further protests are planned. These interventions are welcome. But if the government cannot restore peace quickly, then a state of emergency is the only sane option.
正如我的朋友、作家帕斯卡尔·布鲁克纳所说，困扰法国的“内部腐朽”与其他更易理解的原因相伴而生。一些抗议活动最初是为了表达对法国学校资金不足和生活成本过高的真实不满。但此后，这些抗议已变成对健康公民生活的极度蔑视——无关理智，也无关政策。布鲁克纳在《费加罗报》上写道：“高中生的诉求已于10月17日星期六消亡。无论其最初的要求多么合理，它都不会恢复。”
The “internal decay” besetting France, as my friend the writer Pascal Bruckner phrased it, piggybacks on other, more intelligible causes. Some of the protests began in response to genuine grievances about France’s underfunded schools and exorbitant cost of living. But they have since turned into paroxysms of disdain for healthy civic life—nothing more cerebral, nothing to do with policy. “The high-school students’ cause died on Saturday, October 17,” Bruckner wrote in Le Figaro. “It will not recover, however legitimate its original demands may have been.”
《巴黎人报》昨天发表的一项调查与布鲁克纳的看法一致，认为近期的暴力事件与最初引发学生抗议的教育诉求无关。该报报道称，据法国情报部门消息，有组织的极左翼激进分子与来自主要城市周边郊区的更大规模年轻人群体之间结成了临时联盟，其中许多人并未参与政治，很可能从未对该运动最初的要求表示过兴趣。
An investigation published in Le Parisien yesterday concurs with Bruckner, suggesting that the recent violence is detached from the educational grievances that originally sparked the student protests. The paper reports that according to French intelligence sources, there is an alliance de circonstance between organized ultra-left militants and a larger group of young people from the banlieues encircling major urban areas, many of whom were not politically engaged and likely never expressed an interest in the movement’s original demands.
一些叛乱分子甚至在预定示威开始之前就寻求与国家对抗。另一些人则只是趁机中饱私囊，眼看着自己的国家陷入火海。
Some of these insurgents sought confrontation with the state before the scheduled demonstrations even began. Others merely took the opportunity to stuff their pockets and watch their country burn.
过去几周的混乱让我深刻认识到，没有任何社会——即便是像法国这样慷慨且在诸多方面开明的社会——能够为愤怒的年轻人创造足够美好的生活。我们所看到的那些从法国东海岸到西海岸涌上街头的虚无主义者，无论社会契约起草得多么完美，都永远不会履行他们那一方的义务。这正是托克维尔著名悖论的精髓：随着社会变得更加平等——由于对富人的重税和慷慨的社会保障网，很少有社会比法国更努力追求平等——任何被感知到的或残余的不平等都变得不可容忍。
These past weeks of pandemonium have driven home for me that no society, not even a society as generous and in many ways enlightened as France’s, can make life sweet enough for angry young men. Nihilists of the kind we’ve seen flood the streets of France from coast to coast will never uphold their end of the social contract, no matter how beautifully it is drafted. This is the essence of Tocqueville’s famous paradox: As societies become more equal—and few societies strive to be more egalitarian than France, thanks to heavy taxation of the rich and a generous social safety net—any perceived or remaining inequalities become intolerable.
法国的暴徒并非在表达“未被倾听者的语言”的政治行动者，而是反抗集体民族生活这一观念本身的虚无主义者。无论他们声称的理由是种族主义、伊斯兰恐惧症、新自由主义，还是其他什么，他们都是混乱与恶意的代理人，向他们那些富有成效、品行端正的邻居发泄，或许正是因为那些邻居富有成效且品行端正。于是他们焚烧、砸毁、羞辱既定秩序的象征。
The rioters in France are not political actors expressing the “language of the unheard,” but nihilists rebelling against the very idea of a collective national life. Whether their stated justification is racism, Islamophobia, neoliberalism, or something else, they are agents of chaos and spite, lashing out against their productive, decent neighbors, perhaps precisely because those neighbors are productive and decent. And so they burn, shatter, and humiliate the symbols of the established order.
官方政府估计将抗议者人数定在50万以上。上周末的画面显示，警力巡逻队因掠夺规模之大而不堪重负。马克龙政府对叛乱规模准备严重不足，如今陷入进退维谷的困境。任何对抗或升级都可能为抗议者制造烈士；如果受害者来自边缘化群体，火势可能引发全面骚乱。
Official government estimates place the number of protesters at more than 500,000. Images from last weekend showed patrols of police forces overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the pillaging. The Macron administration was drastically underprepared for the size of the rebellion and now faces an impossible situation. Any confrontation or escalation risks providing the protesters with a martyr; if that victim comes from a marginalized demographic, the conflagration could spark a full-fledged riot.
但另一种选择——绥靖——同样不可接受。国家不能指望其守法公民——占人口大多数，其中包括和平抗议者——接受国家反复未能保护他们及其生计。人民能够自由移动、经营生计、在既不危险也不被亵渎的街道上进出家门，是一项基本权利。纵容渗透进大规模运动的无政府主义者、掠夺者和暴徒的代价，落在了从未同意承担这笔费用的其他法国人头上。
But the alternative—appeasement—is equally unacceptable. The state cannot expect its law-abiding citizens—the majority of the population, which includes the peaceful protesters—to accept its repeated failures to safeguard them and their livelihoods. A people’s ability to move freely, conduct business, and come and go from their homes through streets that are neither dangerous nor desecrated is a fundamental right. The cost of indulging the anarchists, looters, and rioters who infiltrate mass movements has fallen on the rest of France, who never consented to cover it.
“距离我们的总统大选还有六个月，”马克龙在演讲接近尾声时提醒全国，“因此，所有今天告诉你们当务之急是走上街头——示威、制造混乱——的人只有一个目的：破坏共和国并劫持辩论。”他说得没错。但如果马克龙无法遏制这些力量，它们试图将政治辩论推向被大火烧焦的街道、学校和商业场所，那么他将把选票拱手送给那些承诺要这样做的极右翼领导人。
“We are six months away from our presidential election,” Macron reminded the country toward the end of his speech. “And so all those who are telling you today that the urgent thing is to take to the streets—to demonstrate, to create disorder—have only one goal: to damage the republic and hijack the debate.”He’s correct. But if Macron is unable to contain these forces, which seek to push the political debate into flame-scorched streets and schools and places of business, then he will be handing votes to the far-right leaders who have promised to do so.