Fist punching the air, born aloft on the shoulders of a fellow student, there she is, Marianne, the French revolutionary woman, the symbol of the Republic urging the crowd onwards. Press photographers, always on the lookout for an iconic image, are reaping a rich harvest in Paris during the anti-austerity riots of the past week, with several agencies publishing images of young female protesters that recall Delacroix's famous painting of Marianne as Liberty, leading the People.
Le Monde, a newspaper that never fails to take up the challenge of cultural critic, has a portfolio of the pictures and offers a deconstruction of the revolutionary symbolism. Meanwhile, the British press scoff at the French protests and ask why students barely out of their teens are in such a flap about plans to raise the age of retirement to 62 from 60. In Britain, so far, not a whimper of popular protest has been heard about plans to sack a half-million civil servants and slash welfare payments to the long-term unemployed.
These events lend themselves to easy caricatures - stoic or browbeaten Britons versus principled or hysterical French. But these events are not just flag-waving, because everywhere you look the state is on trial. In richer Western nations, government is weakened, often heavily indebted, if not virtually bankrupt. The crippling cost of looking after the elderly, the sick, the unfortunate and the incapable is forcing government to choose between victims. People want to know if the state can still do the job of caring and what it will cost. Some are asking whether the job is still worth doing.
That is why the French girl with the clenched fist is more than a good photo. In one sense she is defending a privilege (early retirement) but she also represents an intellectual legacy, the idea that the state - in France, the Republic - is the best guarantor of civilization. Marianne is not Britannia, a symbol of the nation. She is the Republic, an embodiment of ideas such as liberty, reason and equality. In Britain, the notion that the state incarnates reason and civilized values never caught on.
There have been no significant uprisings in recent British history that have captured the popular imagination, except for the poll-tax riots of 1990, provoked by an unfair levy on ordinary people. It had historical parallels - the peasants' revolt of the 14th century - but what was important about the struggle against Margaret Thatcher's tax was that it was an uprising against a state exerting "unjust" power over individuals. Instinctively, the English only tolerate the state.
On the other side of the Atlantic, different women are trying to dismantle the state. The Tea Party movement has given voice to a band of charismatic female politicians who may be about to cause a huge political upset in Washington. Mocked from the left and the right for incoherence and lack of sophistication, their common strand is a rejection of state power and the role of the state in the lives of U.S. citizens.
The American republic was cooked in the same intellectual soup as the French Republic but Americans have a more fluid idea about the proper role of the state than do the French. So fluid that ideas about the proper breadth and reach of government can change fundamentally in the space of a year. President Obama was elected with a strong mandate for state intervention in areas such as health care and financial regulation. He is now stymied as politics goes topsy-turvy. The financial crash, far from being supportive to those who would bring capitalism to heel, is giving succour to an inchoate backwoods conservatism. The Tea Party women are frightening everyone, even right-wing Republicans in the business lobbies who fear that the small-town conservatives will dismantle a state machine that underpins big multinational enterprise.
What would Marianne think? A revolutionary symbol, an image of popular protest, she has become an emblem of static conservatism. She now stands for zero change and the preservation of the protective power of government. Meanwhile, who are these weird American women who would wreck it all and bring down government?
For the Tea Party women, the state is bankrupt and unsustainable. The 19th century Franco-American idea of a great republic that sustains us is kept alive only by the sale of trillions of dollars in IOUs to corrupt and authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and the Far East. Marianne might not be so shocked by these wreckers, after all.
Carl Mortished is a Canadian financial journalist based in London.