Sparks: Le Pen sees polls boost amid mass protests, riots

The barricade in the street and the ballot in the box are both architecture for transferring power, and the crowd that builds one while casting the other has merely changed which wall bears the load.

The poll is not in your power, the riot is not in your power, and your alarm at both is a judgment you have added to facts that were already sufficient without it.

A republic calibrated for the pace of the printing press now operates at the velocity of the feed, and the dynamo that delivers the tally overnight has no Virgin to soften what it carries.

They tell me the Republic is in danger, and I ask whose Republic, because the one I was born into did not consider me a citizen and now counts my neighbours' fear as a mandate.

That a people, having found its institutions unresponsive, should turn to the one candidate who promises to break them, is not a symptom of the disease but the disease's own remedy being mistaken for it.

A poll is a map of where people say they will go; I never ran my train on a map, I ran it on the ground, and the ground in the banlieue is telling a different story than the telephone is.

Do not ask what the poll portends. Ask what you will do the morning after, for the crowd that raises a candidate today will raise another tomorrow, and the man on horseback is always the same man.

Count the burned cars, the injured officers, the dates, the districts, and the pretexts, and you will find the poll does not rise from the riot but from the same ledger the riot was written in.