In France, protest is theatre. And as the half-centenary of May 1968 approaches, it looks like the props are out, the stage-set is getting the final touches, and the actors are once again learning their lines, reports the BBC.
The few last weeks have permitted certain souls to imagine that President Emmanuel Macron's France is entering a zone of high dramatic turbulence, comparable even with the events of 50 years ago, when student and worker protests changed the country for good.
In the universities of Nanterre and Paris - starting-point for the ructions of '68 - once again there are sit-ins, slogans and fights with police.
Railway workers provide the industrial muscle that Renault car-workers gave 50 years ago, with three months of strikes against Macron's liberalisation of the state railway.
And in a corner of the rural west, eco-warriors act out their battles with forces of the state, who want to evict them from the site of a now-abandoned airport.
No doubt all these movements, and others by hospital workers, Air France pilots, justice officials, etc would have gone ahead anyway.
But the '68 anniversary has given them a historical oomph, rekindling the ideal of the great coming-together, the convergence des luttes (coalescence of struggles), that motivated protests back in the day.
As one of the myriad banners put it in a Paris campus this week: "The train due for May 1968 has arrived… with a delay of 50 years."