Yves here. As a student of the French Revolution in college, I am leery of comparing the current protests to that transformative process. It took nearly 100 years before France had a durable republic, with the Third Republic in 1871. The Revolution ushered in ten years of escalating violence, and ended not in democracy but the Empire under Napoleon. But that bloody first phase did shift how the French men saw themselves, as citizens rather than subjects.

If you take a broader view of what revolutions do, as in shatter political structures to allow new ones to rise, again the current protests do not yet seem sufficient to achieve that. Meaningful and durable change would require not just fundamental change in France but at the European Union level as well.

Nevertheless, this post gives a good feel for the state of play on the ground in France.

Dimitry Lascaris also has a lot of coverage on his Twitter account and on Reason2Resist.…