Watching businesses burn in France, I think about the person who built them. As a restaurant owner, I know what it means to pour blood, sweat, and tears into a business. I think about employees who need their next paycheck and owners whose bills will arrive even when customers cannot.
The demonstrations in France have involved grievances about living costs and public services, alongside violence and destruction. Those events do not establish a single explanation as the source of the unrest. We should resist forcing the evidence into our preferred narrative. But they should raise a question Americans ought to consider: What holds a country together when its people become this angry?
