Sparks: Major protests in France: French shop owners brace for more unrest

Liberty is proclaimed in the square, and the shopkeeper boards his windows because the republic that was promised and the republic that arrived are two different governments wearing the same tricolor.

A government that bans the illegitimate protest confirms that the protest was legitimate, and the shopkeeper's shutters will fall as surely as water finds the crack in the wall.

The president calls the protest illegitimate and the vandal seditious, and in the space between those two words the accountability of the state quietly disappears, as it always does when power names its critics.

To the shopkeeper who boards his windows and the president who calls the protest illegitimate, I put the question the republic has always answered badly: who decides which grievance is lawful, and by what right is the answer given?

Forget the speeches; the president has the police and the shops have the shutters, and whoever controls the street between them will decide by Monday which of the two coalitions still has leverage.

They call it an illegitimate protest, yet the protest is a relationship between ruler and ruled that has been permitted to break, and no name imposed on the break will repair what the name conceals.

'Illegitimate protests will be banned,' the president said, and in that sentence the protest was convicted before it was named, and the ban was issued before the legitimacy was examined, and the grammar did all the work.

The president calls the protest illegitimate, and I ask him: when the shopkeeper cannot sell his bread and the worker cannot buy it, whose legitimacy is being protected, and by whose body is the bill paid?