From France to Albania, from Belgium to Turin, the protests of these days stage a clash between metaphors. Young people (the people) and police officers (the State), equally precarious, face each other as if the other were the enemy. But the enemy stopped living where we look for it long ago. And that is precisely where it organizes the anger, makes it visible and summons it into the street.

Let me say this right away, to leave no room for misunderstanding: the young people who have been filling the streets of Europe in recent weeks have every right to do so. This is not a rhetorical concession, one of those premises you write only to take back three lines later. They have reasons to spare: schools falling apart, overcrowded classrooms, a future shrinking like a room whose walls someone moves at night while we sleep. Anyone who dismisses them as vandals, as spoiled children of a prosperity they no longer know, or as puppets of some hidden director, has understood nothing. Or pretends not to understand, which is worse. But precisely because they are right, and precisely because their distress is real, it is worth asking the question nobody seems willing to ask these weeks. Not because it is difficult, but because it is uncomfortable for everyone: for governments, for movements, for newspapers, for commentators. The question is simple. Against whom are they protesting? In favor of what?