Free Republic

Nationwide, about 89,000 police will fan out in the streets, an increase from 65,000 last weekend, when more than 130 people were injured and over 400 arrested as the protests degenerated into the worst street violence to hit the French capital in decades. In addition to the closure of the Eiffel Tower, many shops and museums across Paris, including the Louvre, the Orsay Museum and the Grand Palais, will be shut on Saturday for safety reasons. Music festivals, operas and other cultural events in the capital were canceled.

PARIS - Do artists have to be miserable to produce great art? A new exhibition in France suggests that a little inner darkness helps. "Melancholy — Genius and Insanity in the Western World," which has visitors lining up around the block at Paris' Grand Palais, is anything but depressing. "Long Live Melancholy!" one highbrow French magazine raved in its review. The dazzlingly extensive look at art from antiquity to the 21st century shows how troubled thoughts have inspired great painters, sculptors, philosophers and writers. "Melancholy is not only negative," curator Gerard Regnier said in an interview. "On the contrary, it...