France’s modern political history has famously been defined by a cycle of sharp socio-economic decline, acute civic upheaval, state reconstitution, and national regeneration. Charles de Gaulle, the General who spearheaded French liberation from Nazi occupation, defined his nation’s temperament as ‘endlessly vacillating from greatness to decline, but revived, century after century, by the genius of renewal.’ The protests that have rapidly spread across the Fifth Republic–de Ga