By Theresa Rézeau 

A group of young men breaks into a shop. Windows are shattered, merchandise is taken, and within moments, a place of ordinary commerce becomes a scene of destruction.

The footage appeared amid the unrest that has swept through France since September 2026. What began with student protests over underfunded schools and inadequate teaching conditions developed into a broader national movement concerned with rising living costs and public services. On 17 October, hundreds of thousands demonstrated across France. Most marched peacefully, but incidents of violence and looting occurred, including attacks on shops in Paris and public buildings elsewhere. In Limoges, the town hall was set ablaze.

Beneath one video, someone wrote:

He who sows hardship reaps chaos.

The words stayed with me.

They appeared to offer an explanation for the destruction, directing responsibility towards those whose policies, indifference or failures had allowed hardship to accumulate. There is force in that argument. Governments cannot remain indifferent to the conditions in which their citizens live and then express astonishment when public confidence begins to collapse.

But the sentence leaves something unresolved.

If those in power sow hardship, what responsibility belongs to those who respond to it? And when the harvest becomes destruction, why does it so often fall upon people who had no part in creating the original suffering?

The video cannot tell us what motivated each young man or whether any had participated in the demonstrations. It reveals an act, not the entire history behind it. Yet it raises a question that reaches far beyond one damaged shop.

Nearly two centuries earlier, Honoré Daumier examined the possibilities of collective anger in The Uprising (L’Émeute).

At the centre of the painting stands a man in a white shirt, his mouth open, his right arm raised above the crowd pressing behind him. His face catches the light. Around him, other faces emerge from the darkness, some animated, others almost swallowed by the bodies surrounding them.

There is no broken shop window here. No merchandise being carried away. Daumier gives us no basis for determining whether those before us have committed a crime.

Instead, he captures something that precedes such judgements: the moment when indignation finds a collective voice.

The man in white appears to be shouting, but we cannot hear him. We do not know whether he demands bread, employment, political representation or an end to injustice. His expression communicates urgency without revealing its object.

The white shirt separates him visually from the darker crowd, yet he remains inseparable from it. His raised arm gives direction to the surrounding bodies, drawing our eyes upwards while the weight of the figures seems to push forwards.

On the right, a vertical wall restricts the composition. On the left, darkness presses against the crowd. The people are compressed between these boundaries, leaving little visible space through which their collective energy might disperse.

Daumier makes confinement almost physical.

There is no obvious exit from the emotional pressure of the scene. The figures appear to be moving towards something we cannot see, propelled by a force that has already gathered momentum.

That compositional tension carries a political question. What happens when people believe that the ordinary avenues through which they might improve their circumstances have narrowed or closed?

The painting confronts us with the human intensity of an uprising before its outcome can determine how history will remember its participants.

Born in Marseille in 1808, Daumier lived through a France repeatedly transformed by revolution, political confrontation and social division. A painter, lithographer and political caricaturist, he was imprisoned in 1832 for satirising King Louis-Philippe.

His criticism of authority was therefore more than an artistic posture. He knew that political power could punish those who challenged it.

The Uprising, dated 1848 or later by the Phillips Collection, was probably inspired by the revolution that overthrew Louis-Philippe’s monarchy and established the Second Republic.

The upheaval emerged against a background of economic distress, unemployment and demands for greater political participation. But the republic did not resolve the differences between those who had helped bring it into existence.

When the government closed the National Workshops, established to provide employment, workers rose in June 1848. Barricades appeared in Paris, and the uprising was violently suppressed.

Political liberty without economic security remained an incomplete victory.

The France of 1848 and the France of 2026 cannot be treated as identical. Their institutions, economic circumstances and political conflicts differ profoundly. Yet the relationship between hardship, political authority and collective action remains a question for any society.

Daumier’s central figure may represent a demand for justice, but the painting does not tell us whether the crowd’s members agree with one another or what they intend to do next.

A crowd can be united by dissatisfaction without being united by purpose. One individual may seek political reform, another may demand more radical change, while a third may be drawn towards the excitement and opportunity created by disorder.

Their proximity does not make their intentions identical.

In France today, that distinction is essential. The grievances expressed by peaceful demonstrators must be considered on their merits, independently of the destruction committed by others. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez has attributed some of the violence to far-left groups and opportunistic looters. That is the government’s assessment; it does not establish the motives of everyone present.

To treat everyone in the streets as a criminal would be unjust. To treat every criminal act as an expression of legitimate protest would be equally mistaken.

Daumier’s painting resists both simplifications.

Look closely at the figures behind the central man. Their faces are not equally distinct. Some appear animated by his cry; others remain difficult to read. As they recede into the darkness, their individuality becomes less visible.

The crowd acquires a collective identity, but each person within it retains an individual conscience.

Collective action can achieve what isolated voices cannot. It can confront injustice, expose institutional failures and oblige governments to recognise grievances they would prefer to overlook.

But collective momentum can also provide cover for actions that individuals would hesitate to undertake alone.

A person breaks a window. Another enters the shop. Others follow, and an act of theft begins to resemble an event for which the crowd itself is responsible.

Yet the crowd has no single conscience upon which every participant can deposit the burden of a personal decision.

Understanding the origins of anger and judging what is done in anger are separate responsibilities.

The words beneath the video suggest that hardship eventually returns to those responsible for creating it. But the most troubling feature of social disorder is that its consequences do not necessarily return to their source.

The caption accuses those in power of sowing hardship. Yet when businesses are looted, it is not necessarily those in power who pay the price. The losses may fall upon shopkeepers, employees and families who had no influence over the decisions that provoked the anger.

The harvest misses the sower and lands upon someone else’s doorstep.

Consider the shop being looted.

We do not know its owner’s circumstances, and there is no reason to invent them. It may belong to a large company or an independent trader. Its employees may be financially secure or struggling to make ends meet.

But a shop is never merely an assortment of goods behind glass.

It represents work, wages, contractual obligations and people whose livelihoods depend upon its continued operation.

The person opening its doors each morning may have spent years building a business. The employee arranging its shelves may be supporting a family. The cleaner arriving after closing may depend upon those hours of work to pay the rent.

When the windows are broken, the losses do not end with the price of replacement glass. There may be interrupted trading, damaged stock, insurance difficulties and uncertainty over whether employees can continue working.

The immediate target of anger may be an economic system or a political establishment. The person left to confront the damage may have had no influence over either.

The attack on Limoges town hall raises another dimension of the same problem. Public buildings are not merely symbols of political authority. They are places where citizens obtain services and where public employees perform work on which communities depend. Their destruction can impose new costs upon the very public whose grievances have brought people into the streets.

This does not mean that property should be valued above human suffering. It means that the consequences of destroying property must be understood through the human lives attached to it.

The livelihood of an ordinary worker is not an abstract defence of capitalism. It is a means of survival.

Return to the light falling upon Daumier’s central figure.

His white shirt commands our attention so completely that the people behind him risk becoming a backdrop to his indignation. Yet the painting would lose its force without them. Their presence gives his gesture its public significance.

This visual relationship exposes a danger in the way we interpret unrest.

We are drawn towards its most dramatic figures and actions. A shattered storefront attracts cameras. A confrontation with police becomes a headline. A burning public building may come to define an entire day of protest.

Meanwhile, the quieter experiences that brought people into the streets can disappear from view.

So, too, can the individual lives affected by the disorder.

The spectacle overwhelms the people.

But in France, the conduct of the state has itself become part of the grievance.

On 5 October 2026, a 15-year-old boy in Lens lost his hand when a police grenade exploded during unrest outside his school. The circumstances remain disputed. Police sources said he had picked up the grenade, while student witnesses described the device being fired towards him. Authorities also reported that groups of students had thrown projectiles at officers. An investigation was opened to establish precisely how the injury occurred.

Twelve days later, on 17 October, a 17-year-old demonstrator in Saint-Étienne lost his right hand following the explosion of a grenade launched by security forces. The precise circumstances remain under investigation. Both the national police inspectorate (IGPN) and the national gendarmerie inspectorate (IGGN) were assigned to establish what happened.

These were two young people, in different cities, whose lives were permanently altered during a movement that began with demands for better educational conditions.

Their injuries cannot be measured solely in the language of public order. They will live with the consequences long after the demonstrations end, after damaged shop windows have been replaced and after political attention has turned elsewhere.

The wider human cost has affected both demonstrators and members of the security forces. On the evening of 17 October, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu announced provisional figures of 1,200 arrests and 150 injured police officers and gendarmes. The figures illustrated the scale of the confrontation, but they could not settle the separate question of whether force had been lawfully and proportionately used in every instance.

On 13 October, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez had already acknowledged 36 investigations by the national police inspectorate, including four involving mutilating injuries, into allegations of misconduct during the student protests.

These investigations do not establish guilt. But their existence, alongside the severity of reported injuries, raises questions that cannot be dismissed as secondary to the restoration of order.

For some demonstrators, the state’s use of force is no longer merely a response to their protest. It has become another reason to protest.

Here, Daumier’s painting assumes a darker significance.

The man in white appears trapped between the weight of those behind him and the boundaries that restrict his movement. His raised arm might express indignation at political authority, but the painting offers no guarantee that authority will hear him without resorting to force.

Daumier knew the dangers of political repression. His own imprisonment demonstrated that governments could punish dissent while claiming to defend the established order.

Yet the legitimacy of a grievance cannot be judged solely by the violence of the state’s response, just as the conduct of an individual protester cannot be excused solely by the grievance that brought him into the street.

Both demand independent scrutiny.

The French government has a duty to protect shopkeepers from looting and citizens from attacks. It also has a duty to ensure that police officers exercise lawful, necessary and proportionate force.

These are not competing obligations.

A shopkeeper should not lose a livelihood because the authorities fail to prevent destruction. A teenager should not suffer a permanent injury through unjustified police force because the authorities seek to restore order.

Where the use of force is disputed, the facts must be independently established and those responsible held accountable.

Otherwise, the institutions charged with protecting citizens risk deepening the very mistrust they are supposed to address.

This is the difficulty of governing during social unrest. A state must act against violence without treating dissent itself as an enemy. It must protect property without losing sight of human dignity. And it must recognise that restoring quiet to the streets is not the same as resolving the conditions that brought people there.

The absence of disorder is not necessarily the presence of justice.

Daumier’s painting offers no comforting resolution. The raised arm remains suspended, the mouth open, the crowd pressed between stone and shadow.

We cannot know whether the people will secure reform, encounter repression or become divided by the consequences of their own actions.

The absence of an outcome forces us to consider responsibility before history supplies a verdict.

That is what makes the painting more valuable than a straightforward image of either heroic revolution or criminal disorder.

It refuses to tell us that anger is inherently noble or inherently dangerous.

Anger is a human response. What gives it political and moral significance is the grievance behind it, the action it inspires and the consequences it imposes upon others.

Nearly two centuries after the upheavals associated with Daumier’s painting, the question remains.

What does a society owe people who believe they have been denied a meaningful voice, and what do those people owe others when they choose to make themselves heard?

Look once more at the man in white. He stands with his arm raised, his mouth open, surrounded by people whose expressions we cannot fully read.

We see the moment of collective indignation, but not the choices that follow.

Perhaps that is where our responsibility as viewers begins: not with the assumption that everyone in the crowd is righteous or dangerous, but with the recognition that every movement is made up of individuals whose actions have consequences.

Those who govern must answer for the hardship they allow to endure. Those who destroy must answer for the hardship they create.

For when chaos becomes the harvest, it is too often the innocent who are left to gather what remains.