France has obviously been racked by deep crises historically, but at least in the latter-half-20th century, the question of the attitude towards the state was ultimately one of seeing the state as being able to offer a potential response to various social and economic problems.

And what I think the new stage, if you like, in the crisis of legitimacy

is, is that the state institutions themselves and other statal and parastatal institutions are

incredibly delegitimized. It doesn't go all the way down. Still, people have a lot of faith in

their local mayors and so on and so forth, particularly in rural France.

But once you go above that level, all forms of public institution are considered more and more with deep, deep suspicion, distrust, and in some cases anger.

So that is possibly a new or deeper form of this crisis and that can then also

metabolize horizontally. So institutions like, you know, I suppose let's take the case of the Louvre,

if you're like, I don't think the Louvre is such a big thing in French politics, but all right,

let's imagine that people are very angry and outraged by the heist at the Louvre.

Then, yeah, the idea that the Louvre's security policies were incompetent or not up to snuff would feed into this idea that basically we're ruled by a bunch of incompetent people who are only in it for their own interests.

And that is to to the extent that

that's true, that is quite a big shift, as I say, in terms of French political subjectivity,

because it means that if you can't look to the state as a potential way of resolving, at least

partially social and economic conflicts, then where do you look? You can look to yourself,

you know, the kind of individualist

kind of politics that is pushed by the far right. In another age, you could look to some other

type of state, a revolutionary state, as a potential horizon of solution. But that was obviously

not a horizon that exists in France to the same extent. It did

20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago anymore. So it leaves you with a deep sentiment of anger and

distrust that doesn't really have a focus, or at least has a focus for particular outbreaks of it,

but doesn't have a focus in terms of a solution. And that can underlie potentially a very long period of instability politically in the near future.

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