"... legitimacy lies with the people and the street."

I was there with them, in the streets of Paris. There couldn't be a starker contrast between how events have been reported in France and in Britain and the United States. On the covers of Britain's broadsheets and tabloids like the Independent and the Daily Mail there were pictures of burning cars, fully geared riot police in action, hooded rioters; on the cover of the International Herald Tribune, it was stranded air passengers having to walk the roads. The tone was always somber. The Daily Mail even talked of insurrection on the level of the 1793–94 Reign of Terror.

... On the BBC's flagship morning news program Today, Carolyn Quinn asked, "The Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz thinks that we should take a leaf out of the French book. Should we? Could we? Or is it simply not in our DNA?" The answer—so far at least—is a little brutal: no, it is not in the British DNA to demonstrate. The British simply don't believe in it. In Britain, all political legitimacy lies with Parliament. If Parliament agrees on the government's spending cuts, the British will simply endure hardship valiantly, even if those cuts are unfair. In France, a country that in the past 200 years has known eleven different regimes while Britain's royal family peacefully perfected the art of croquet, legitimacy lies with the people and the street. Institutions and elected representatives are only an expression of the people's sovereignty and can be overruled by the street if the street decides to do so—courtesy of the French Revolution and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.