Taking responsibility should eventually involve something the public can distinguish from keeping your job with a more serious expression.

France’s interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, offered to resign after a weekend of rioting and looting. Emmanuel Macron declined. According to AP, the president cited the need for continuity in law-enforcement command and ordered transparency about failures in planning and intelligence.

Continuity is a fascinating selling point immediately after acknowledging that the current arrangement went badly. The government has decided the situation requires the experienced leadership of the people who have just gained some very unfortunate experience.

That is not necessarily the wrong operational decision. Removing a minister during an emergency does not magically improve policing. But if the resignation stays in the drawer, the explanation needs to come out. The public should get more than a moving ceremony in which responsibility is accepted and then carefully returned to its original packaging.

Nuñez acknowledged that authorities had lost control in some major cities. Businesses were looted. The historic city hall in Limoges was almost destroyed by fire. Those are real harms, not scenery for a politician’s opportunity to look resolute.

I want officials to protect people and businesses while protecting peaceful protest. A liberal government ought to be capable of holding both thoughts without requiring a second cabinet.

The unrest followed nationwide demonstrations over living costs and poor school conditions. Violent participants do not acquire immunity because a protest began with legitimate grievances. Equally, those grievances do not become illegitimate because somebody else broke a window. A smashed window is evidence of a smashed window, not a peer-reviewed rebuttal to the condition of a classroom.

In Marseille, the prefect banned protests and other gatherings for eight hours on Monday. It is a temporary measure, not a permanent national ban. Still, restrictions that sweep up peaceful people deserve close scrutiny. “Everybody stop” is an understandable emergency impulse. It is not a particularly sophisticated theory of civil liberties.

Public order should protect the public’s rights, not merely the government’s peace and quiet.

Macron has asked for new policing tactics and full transparency. Fine. Then publish a useful account of what went wrong, who made the decisions and what changes. An investigation that produces only the observation that events were challenging will have discovered the one fact everyone already knew for free.

And answer the underlying complaints about schools and living costs. Those problems cannot be dispersed. Send them home and they are still there the next morning, charging rent.

I am not asking Macron to sack somebody purely so the news cycle can enjoy a head on a plate. I am asking him to make retaining the minister a decision with public obligations attached, rather than an expression of personal confidence everyone else is expected to share on credit.

If continuity is essential, continuity of scrutiny is essential too.

The minister has taken responsibility. Now let’s see whether he can do anything with it besides remain the minister.