Baston à la Bastoche

Streetfighting continued around the Bastille late last night.

The confrontations with riot police are being instigated by supporters of the Trotsyist Party LCR (Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire) and their leader Olivier Besancenot (his motto: defeat the Right at the ballot box, or failing that, in the street). Besancenot, a postal worker in the upper crust neighborhood of Neuilly sur Seine (where Sarkozy was Mayor), is a typical phoney blowhard French pseudo-revolutionary. He blathers on about le grand soir but enjoys his cushy lifestyle working as a lifetime-employed-job-secured French functionary before going home to bang his upper-middle-class éditrice girlfriend who works in a very Kapitalist Saint-Germain neighborhood publishing house.

The LCR has distinguished itself by becoming the hotbed of homegrown French anti-Semitism. It's rallies and marches are often punctuated by cries of "Death to Jews" and other such tripe offered up by its street soldier French youth militants.