On Saturday, as France's descent into disorder reached its violent crescendo, with street battles, organised looting and buildings in flames, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) offered a remarkably sanitised account of the mayhem. Its report began thus: "Violence broke out across France… against hardship in schools and the cost of living".

The unsuspecting reader could be forgiven for imagining a desperate populace, deprived of basic schools and economic dignity, rising against an indifferent, predatory state. But when protest degenerates into arson, pillage, and attacks upon the institutions of civilised life, the vocabulary of socio-economic grievance begins to sound suspiciously like an alibi.

When schools themselves become targets of a movement ostensibly demanding educational reform, an inconvenient question arises: was education ever the real grievance, or merely the pretext for something altogether more sinister?