There’s a surreal element to these balmy late fall days in Paris.

Paris has suddenly woken up, after a couple of years of shuttered R&R.

Under these imaginative circumstances I can move around Paris with impunity, unlike my friends and neighbors.

Was Progress, the ambition of a society to, well, improve itself, only a brief historical phenomenon that has faded like the Cheshire Cat, leaving us only a jaundiced grin (or a yellow vest)?…

And so the circle draws a notch tighter around the question of national identity.

Since when has blanket opposition become so much more attractive in democracies than, well, the work of thinking things through?