I am the préfet of the Haute-Vienne, in Limoges la Rouge, the red city built on porcelain, in the part of France that Paris remembers only when it is on fire. It is on fire now. Or it was, Saturday evening; by the time you read this the glass will be swept from the place and the cafés will have reopened and someone will be eating a tartine six metres from where the hôtel de ville lost its roof, debating with great seriousness whether the police were too hard or not hard enough. Both opinions will be held by people who were safely at home. Both will be forgotten by Wednesday. That is not a flaw in my country. That is the finest machine my country has ever built, and I will come to it, because it is the only thing here I am truly proud of. They burned the mairie. I condemn this without reservation. The parquet has ruled the fire was lit sciemment, knowingly, deliberately, by hand, and I agree, and we are actively pursuing those responsible, of whom nineteen are already in garde à vue as I write. The Justice Minister has called it violence of an unheard-of gravity. The President has promised that those who pillaged our mairies will be punished, that we will all stand as one against the semeurs de chaos, the sowers of chaos. When Beauvau, the Interior Ministry, called at 18h40 to ask why the roof was alight, I gave the correct figures. I am, in this matter, entirely cooperative. I did not put myself on the list of suspects. It did not occur to me. One does not arrest the author of the report. And yet I have sat here since the roof came down with a small administrative discomfort I cannot file anywhere, and I would like to describe it, because I believe it is the most honest thing a man in my position has committed to paper in some years. The boys with the lighters burned one building, in one evening. I have burned a great deal more than that, over four budgets, from this desk, with a stamp. Let me explain the stamp, because the stamp is the whole of me. I did not decide the austerity. I did not stand in the Assembly. I did not personally cut the fifty-two teaching posts from this académie, a figure our teachers described, in January, in a sentence I have not been able to put down, as though the lycée had been wiped off the map. I decided none of it. I received it, as a circulaire, twelve pages, and I applied it, and I signed it, and my signature is the thing that turns a decision taken by a man who will never visit this city into a fact that happens to its children. Without it, the circulaire is a suggestion. With it, it is an arrêté préfectoral, and an arrêté is the Republic made flesh. Louis XIV said l'État, c'est moi, I am the State. For a man of my rank it is smaller and truer. L'État, c'est mon tampon. The State is my rubber stamp. That is my entire function, and I have performed it, I will say this for myself, without once being late. So I have been thinking about the word sciemment. Knowingly. The parquet used it for the casseurs, and they are right; the boy with the mortar knew what he was doing. But I will gently observe that every fire in this story was lit knowingly. No one cut the teaching posts in his sleep. No one froze the wages by accident. No one lifted the farmer's diesel to one euro seventy by mistake, and he drove his tractor to my gates with an empty tank to prove it, and I received him, and I sent it upward, and it came back as a measure worth perhaps fifteen centimes, announced with great precision. Every arson in this department was committed sciemment. The difference between myself and the boys in the hoods is not intent. We both did it knowingly. The difference is that mine went through on headed paper, pushed past the Assembly with le 49.3, the article that lets you govern a country that did not ask to be governed by you, so it is called a budget; and theirs went through with a lighter, so it is called a crime. One of us will face a judge by Monday. The other will be at his desk, having lunch, for which there is always time, because there is always cheese. Do not imagine we are a state that cannot count. We count magnificently, and this is the part I find genuinely beautiful. On Saturday they burned the building, and by Sunday morning the façade had been assessed as very nearly one hundred percent destroyed, surveyed, classified, mourned on the national news as a heritage catastrophe. By Sunday morning. And when the schools opened last month without their teachers, the ministry announced the replacements it had scraped together, and gave the number not as "around three thousand," which would have been honest, but as very precisely three thousand and twenty-four. To the single teacher. I have never been so moved by an integer. Because it tells you, exactly, what this state intends to give back. We count to the last unit what we have decided to return, and leave uncounted, forever, uncountably, what we have decided to take. There is no figure anywhere, in any circulaire that has crossed this desk, for the hours of mathematics a child here has gone without since September. I have looked. I am thorough. There is a box on the form for the destroyed façade. There is no box for the boy. To be counted by this Republic, it seems, you must first be made of stone. We have a name for our own government. We named it after a pastry. Le mille-feuille, the thousand-leaf, a tower of fine, delicate, overlapping layers, and at the very bottom, pressed flat beneath all of them, always, a child waiting for a teacher. Three weeks ago his mother came to the permanence, the hours when the state consents to be spoken to. She said her son had had no mathematics teacher since the start of term. I wrote it down. I have the note. I sent it upward, correctly, through the channel, and the answer came back, in time, as a circulaire on les priorités de la rentrée, the priorities for the new school year. Twelve pages. The mother is still waiting. The façade will be rebuilt before her son has a teacher, and rebuilt in finer stone, because the façade is insured, and listed, and photographed, and the boy is none of these things. A president promised to heal la fracture sociale, the social fracture, when I was a student at the school that trains men like me. The fracture has since been promoted. It is now the foundation. The mayor said something Saturday night, meant kindly, that I cannot stop turning over. He stood before his gutted building and said, it is a monument that burns, but not the Republic. I understood what he meant. I think he has it exactly backwards, and I think some part of him knows it. The monument is the one thing in this square that will survive. It burns loudly; it announces itself; it collapses on camera; it has its heritage assessment by Sunday. The Republic, the real thing, the compact by which this state once fed the poor and taught the child and could be held to it by a woman at a permanence, that left years ago, on tiptoe, uninsured, with no roof to fall and no bell-tower to come down, and no one filmed it, and no one assessed the loss, because a republic, unlike a monument, does not announce when it burns. That is the only true difference between them. It is also the entire reason we will save the monument and let the other thing go. We save what makes a sound. If we are honest about craft, and craft is all that is left to a man in my office, I am the superior arsonist. The boys burned a building in an evening and it is already out. Mine took four budgets, and mine is still alight, and mine will still be burning at the next rentrée, in every starved lycée in this académie, quietly, legally, on headed paper, and no elite unit will be scrambled to put it out, and no one taken into custody for it, and the markets, I am assured, are pleased. They sent a column of CRS to defend a building from fire. They have never once sent anyone to defend a child from the budget. My function has a name: le maintien de l'ordre, the maintenance of order. No one has ever given me a department for le maintien du reste, the maintenance of everything else. The water cannon does not protect the Republic from arson. It protects the state's monopoly on it. Now. The machine I promised you. The thing I am proud of. By morning the place is clean. I give the order; it is done. The crews are already staged, they are always staged, we are a people who have rehearsed the morning after for two centuries. The glass vanishes. The burned cars are towed to a yard beyond the ring road where no one of importance has to see them. The cafés open. The same tartine is ordered. And by Wednesday the whole city will have agreed, with that small haussement d'épaules, that shrug that is the one authentic monument we have left, that ça aurait pu être pire. It could have been worse. Here is the confession beneath the confession, the one there is no form for. We are not bad at reckoning. That is the flattering lie the foreigners tell about us. We are the most advanced reckoning-avoidance engine ever assembled by a free people. The shrug is not weakness; the shrug is the load-bearing wall. It is what lets the state set a slow fire in a classroom in full confidence that by the time the smoke reaches the street it will read as weather. Ça aurait pu être pire is not resignation. It is the stamp an entire nation presses onto its own losses, so they become true enough for the dossier, small enough to carry, and forgotten by Wednesday. They will clean my city by morning. The casseurs' fire will be out by Wednesday. Mine will not. I will sign the report that says order has been restored, and the report will not be untrue, and it will not be the whole of it, and the distance between those two things is the entire history of this Republic, the whole of my career, and the one document I have never been issued the stamp to file. My wife texts to ask if I have eaten. Tu as mangé? Then: Il reste du fromage. There is still cheese. There is always cheese. That was never the problem. What there is never, in this country, for the ones at the bottom of the mille-feuille, is a teacher, a reckoning, or a word of help, only, when the smoke clears, a stranger's hand on the shoulder and the thing we say in France instead of doing anything: bon courage.