France: Anti-Missile Defense

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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 against the Gaullist regime.

But the government knows its history too, and has no intention of seeing it repeated. Last week a thick coating of asphalt settled over the elegantly patterned cobblestones of the Rue des Ecoles, the Rue Saint-Jacques and the Boulevard Saint-Michel, the main battlegrounds around the Sorbonne in France's recent upheavals. After all, the riots of 1830 and 1848 had sent two of Charles de Gaulle's predecessors, King Charles X and King Louis Philippe, into retirement and obscurity.