France arrests the watchlisted militant it blamed for the fire, curfewing the country into Le Pen's win.

…(cont) Let me walk it in order, because the order matters. On October 8th, Common Dreams reported students marching in France over what it costs to go to school there, with Jean-Luc Mélenchon telling the crowd the Bastille had been retaken — his line, not the government's. By October 17th it had spread: 550,000 people in the streets nationwide, the New York Post's count, enough that President Macron told reporters, word for word, "let them come and get me." Buildings burned that day, including the town hall in Limoges, a hundred and forty years old — Fox News reported the roof came down and most of the building was lost. The same day, Paris police booked 855 people, NPR had that number, and a McDonald's got cleaned out too, the kind of detail that sticks.

Here's where I wish Anthony would call back. So you had a government naming a movement its own people missed. Does that sound like a government that already knew who it was dealing with, or one still catching up?

Ultra-left, the Post said — the government's own label, landing on a real person this time, for a building that stood since before anybody's great-grandmother was born.

I walk my dog past a corner store most mornings, and Hassan, who runs it, keeps a short list behind the register of people told not to come back, mostly over one incident each. Four names. If one of those four walked in and did something, Hassan would be right to point at his list. But four names isn't every customer who's come through his door, and it isn't a reason to lock the door on the other four hundred who had nothing to do with it. So which is France's curfew closer to — the four names, or the other four hundred?

Because there are curfews now, overnight, in Paris and other cities — ABC News has Prime Minister Sebastian Lecornu crediting them, this week, for a measure of calm. Calm's a fine thing. My family isn't against it.

Actually — hold on, one more thing, now that I think of it. The same reporting that has France's spies missing this movement also has Marine Le Pen, this same week, calling for an end to what she terms anarchic immigration, positioned — the Washington Examiner's word, not mine — to benefit from exactly this stretch of curfews. The watchlisted man is real. The fire is real. The curfew is real. So once the lockdown lifts, whose name is left standing in the street it cleared?