A young man sits on a balustrade beside Montpellier’s tramway tracks. The trams are not running. Police officers are deployed across the city centre, and the afternoon’s demonstration has been banned. Still, he has come to protest. He invokes Article 35 of France’s 1793 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which described insurrection against a government violating the people’s rights as both a right and a duty. The Declaration has no constitutional force today. But he is drawing on France’s revolutionary tradition to question the relationship between citizens and political authority.

The protests began in September with secondary-school students demanding more teachers, better facilities and greater educational resources. Their grievances concerned classroom conditions but........

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