09/12/2018 The Gilets Jaunes and a Surprise Crisis in France | The New Yorker

N s Desk

The Gilets Jaunes and a Surprise Crisis

in France
By Lauren Collins December 4, 2018

The gilets-jaunes movement, which takes its name from the yellow safety vests that French drivers are
required to keep in their cars, has led to protests in Paris and throughout France.
Photograph by Bruno Arbesu / REA / Redux

his weekend, the third consecutive Saturday of increasingly violent protest by

T the gilets jaunes—an amorphous mass of activists that emerged in response to
an increase in fuel taxes—left France charred, smashed, defaced, and generally
stunned. In Marseille, an eighty-year-old woman died after being hit by a tear-gas
cannister while trying to close the shutters to her apartment. In Le Puy-en-Velay, in
Auvergne, protesters set the prefecture on re. In Paris, mingling with professional
vandals, they trashed some of the city’s most famous, heavily touristed areas—the
Tuileries, Opera, the Champs-Élysées. As they torched cars and broke windows,
Parisians holed up in their apartments, unsure whether their neighborhoods would
be the next to burn. Most unthinkably, the marchers breached the Arc de Triomphe,
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spray-painting the monument with slogans such as “Macron Démission” (“Macron

Resignation”), referring to the French President, Emmanuel Macron. The images
were immediately iconic: Napoleon’s marble head lying in a stairwell, a statue of a
Marianne-like warrior with a crater in her skull. The symbolic effect was akin to
someone punching the Statue of Liberty in the face.

Macron had vowed to “stay the course without ceding to demagogy.” But the gilets
jaunes have provoked a surprise crisis that will likely de ne his Presidency. As they
persist, he is increasingly desperate to appease them, even at a loss of revenues and
face. On Tuesday, Édouard Philippe, the Prime Minister, announced a raft of
conciliatory measures, including a six-month suspension of gas taxes, a promise to
make sure that electricity prices don’t go up over the winter, and a “national debate”
on issues of taxation and expenditure. “No tax is worth endangering the unity of the
nation,” he said. It is not clear that a tax freeze can restore it.

The gilets jaunes take their name from the yellow safety vests that French drivers are
required to keep in their cars. The group is a complicated phenomenon, rst of all
because it has no de ned leader. The movement began in protest of Macron’s
economic policies, particularly the increase in fuel taxes (four euro cents on the litre
for unleaded gas, seven euro cents for diesel) that was introduced, in January, to help
curb carbon emissions. Along with the hike in taxes, the price of gas has risen
dramatically, meaning that French drivers, this fall, found themselves paying as much
as 1.59 euros per litre (six dollars per gallon), an increase of seventeen per cent since
this time last year for users of unleaded gas, and twenty-three per cent for diesel. For
many households, particularly in rural and suburban areas that are ill-served by
public transportation, the added expense has been brutal. It has also in amed social
resentment, the sense that the ruling classes and their wealthy urban supporters take
the rest of the country for fools, “milking cows” for the rich to grow ever fatter off of.
In a homemade Facebook video that has been viewed more than six million times,
Jacline Mouraud, an accordionist from Brittany who has become a de facto
spokesperson for the movement, vented her frustration with an exasperated, folksy
refrain: “Mais qu’est-ce que vous faites avec le pognon des français?” (“But what are you
doing with French people’s money”). In addition to the gas tax, she objected to new
rules for car inspections and the transformation of the countryside into a “forest of
radars.” Many of the group’s early actions consisted simply of blocking traffic on
roads and at roundabouts.

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If the gilets jaunes started as a drivers’ movement, it has mutated quickly into
something more diffuse and more volatile. In La Réunion, the French island near
Madagascar, protests have been sufficiently intense that Macron was forced to
activate troops. Like Macron’s own party, which he founded only months before
running for President, the gilets jaunes confound traditional political divisions and
have appeared seemingly out of nowhere. Its adherents are old and young, male and
female (even if women were conspicuously underrepresented among the rampaging
crowds in Paris), apolitical and activist, nonviolent and nihilistic. Facebook is its
incubator. Supporters congregate on pages organized by region, whose tone and
content vary according to their administrator. “Good evening everyone,” wrote one
member of the group for the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region. “I have an idea to make
some little videos. I’ll explain the principle: in front of the camera, we respond to the
phrase, ‘I’m a gilet jaune for . . . ’ and each person is free to say his reasons, his
demands. The idea is to give you back the oor, which has been con scated by
officeholders, by the media.” Disinformation abounds: the professional vandals were
sent by Macron, the French constitution was invalidated in 2017.

According to some polls, around eighty per cent of French people are sympathetic to
the gilets jaunes. When the questions are worded more precisely, the number drops to
around forty- ve per cent, roughly the same proportion of the electorate that
supported the extreme-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon (19.5%) and the extreme-
right leader Marine Le Pen (21.3%) in the rst round of the 2017 Presidential race.
Interestingly, the gilets jaunes have been able to amass support without putting
particularly impressive numbers of people on the streets. Even as physical
participation in the movement has declined—from almost three hundred thousand
people to a hundred a sixty-six thousand in the course of three weekends—its power
has increased. (Can there ever be fewer of a thing online?) A fourth Saturday of
disruption is planned for this weekend.

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The gas tax has in amed social resentment, a sense that the ruling classes and their wealthy urban
supporters take the rest of the country for fools.
Photograph by Sebastien Ortola / REA / Redux

The gilets jaunes have attracted hangers-on from across the ideological spectrum.
The beauty of the movement, for Macron’s political opponents, is that it can be
whatever they want to say it is. Mélenchon tweeted, “France isn’t a startup. You can’t
boss around 65 million French people. Public order isn’t possible without social
justice.” He called for the dissolution of the Parliament, as did Le Pen, who
compared Macron to “a stubborn boy, who refuses to listen to what the people tell
him.” Both Mélenchon and Le Pen are trying to glom a long-term objective—the
establishment of a voting system that would make it easier for extremist parties like
theirs to gain seats in Parliament—onto the gilets-jaunes agenda. After Saturday’s
disorder, Benoît Hamon, of the decimated Socialist Party, tweeted, “By his unjust
politics and his deafness to the anger of the French people, Emmanuel Macron has
sown chaos. He must without delay open a national dialogue with the gilets jaunes,
the unions, the NGOs about purchasing power, the redistribution of wealth, and the
ecological transition.” So far, the gilets jaunes have greeted these overtures with, at
best, indifference. “To all of you, you are no longer needed,” one of them told a
reporter, of the entire political establishment. Last week, Philippe, the Prime
Minister, invited eight representatives of the gilets jaunes to meet with him at
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Matignon, his official residence. Amid internal schisms and death threats, only two
of them showed up. One left immediately, because Philippe refused to broadcast the
meeting on live television. The one who stayed demanded anonymity.

The railroad-workers’ strike, which attempted to bring France to a standstill in the

course of thirty-six days this spring, was supposed to make or break Macron. It was
railroad employees, after all, who helped to humiliate the center-right government of
Jacques Chirac, in 1995, forcing it to drop a plan to reduce their considerable
bene ts. No one had really been tempted to try again since. But Macron took up the
challenge with determination, if not relish, his technocratic and “jupiterian”
tendencies converging upon a clear message: I know what to do and I’m not afraid to
tell you to do it. “The world isn’t like it used to be,” he told one protester. In the end,
his steely management of the situation forestalled real crisis. The strike petered out
and the reforms passed relatively easily, with members of the Assemblée Nationale
approving them by a margin of four hundred and fty-four to eighty. For Macron,
Le Figaro declared, “this political victory against a fortress long deemed unassailable
changes everything.” He had beat “the street,” that formidable but ckle French
institution.

The European Parliamentary elections are coming up in May. Macron knows that
they are referendum not only on him but also on the values of globalism, centrism,
and environmentalism, of which he has positioned himself as an international
defender. One of the garbled but loud messages of the gilets-jaunes movement may
be that it isn’t the street that Macron has to master, it’s the information highway.
Macron successfully fended off hackers’ attempts to discredit his campaign on the
eve of the Presidential election, but it’s hard not to wonder whether Facebook
populism is nally coming for France.

Lauren Collins began working at The New Yorker in 2003 and became a staff writer in
When in
2008. She is the author of “When in French:
French: Love in
French: Love in aa Second
Second Language
Language.” Read more »

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