The town hall in Limoges, France, was built to persuade the French that their Republic was permanent. It opened on Bastille Day 1883, crowned with a 43-meter bell tower and decorated with coats of arms in the city’s own Haviland porcelain.
On Saturday evening, after a march that the mainstream media reported was a protest against the cost of living and educational standards, masked men broke in and set it alight. As a metaphor, it was so on the nose that, if it had appeared in a novel, an editor would have blocked its publication as too obvious a symbol of tragic civilizational decay.
