France: Anti-Missile Defense

As every Sorbonne student knows, the road to raising hell in Paris is paved with good ammunition. The cobblestones of Paris, first laid in 1185, cracked against police helmets in the antiroyalist riots of 1830. They helped arm the socialist revolutionaries of 1848. They provided the enduring arsenal of the Paris Commune in the great battles across the barricades in 1871. With such textbook examples of tactics, it was hardly surprising that the student rioters of 1968 found the paving stones of the Left Bank a prime weapon in their nightly insurrections...