The world is watching alarming scenes in the burnished boulevards of Paris where riot police are using batons and tear gas on protesting students. Here in France, the spectacle of students clashing with police is familiar street theatre.

The mother of all Fifth Republic student revolts was the uprising in May 1968, when riots and strikes paralysed the entire country. The insurrectional violence forced Charles de Gaulle to flee the French capital and even to contemplate abdication. A symbolic reference to those turbulent events was visible this week in slogans inscribed on banners. One was ‘sous les cahiers, la rage’ (‘under our textbooks, rage’ — an allusion to the May ’68 slogan, ‘sous les pavés, la plage’ (‘under the pavement, the beach’). In the past, rebellious French students were dreamily idealistic; today, they are angrily disillusioned.

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In truth, mass rituals of student unrest in France, past and present, follow the same script in a recurring dramaturgy of upheaval. Student revolts are dramas in five acts whose plot elements can easily be anticipated.

Act 1. A revolt breaks out at one school, often in a disadvantaged area, where students have grievances about overcrowded classes, understaffing and poor physical infrastructure. Sometimes there is wider opposition to a proposed........

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