Macron Versus the Yellow Vests

Patrick Chamorel

Journal of Democracy, Volume 30, Number 4, October 2019, pp. 48-62 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2019.0068

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/735458

[ Access provided at 13 Feb 2021 22:46 GMT from CEU Library ]

 Macron versus
the Yellow Vests
Patrick Chamorel

Patrick Chamorel is a research scholar at the Center on Democracy,

Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University’s Freeman
Spogli Institute for International Studies.

In May 2017, Emmanuel Macron’s victory over far-right leader Marine

Le Pen in the runoff for the French presidency became a global symbol
of democratic resilience in the face of populism, as well as a promise of
political renewal for France and Europe. Yet a mere eighteen months later,
France was shaken by another momentous and unexpected event: Between
November 2018 and May 2019, the country faced its most serious social
uprising and political crisis since the student revolt of May 1968 rocked
the Fifth Republic and threatened to unseat President Charles de Gaulle.
Triggered by a seemingly benign ecological tax on diesel fuel, a pow-
erful grassroots insurrection saw tens of thousands of ordinary workers
and retirees occupy ronds-points (traffic circles) around the clock on the
edge of small and midsized towns. The protesters’ badge was the high-
visibility yellow emergency vest (gilet jaune) that French law requires
all motor vehicles to carry. Each Saturday for seven months, demon-
strations that often degenerated into violence took place in the wealthy
sections of large cities, including Paris.1 The Yellow Vests denounced
Macron’s socially unjust tax policies, the privileges of the elites, and the
lack of direct democracy, putting his presidency at risk.
Now that the crisis has abated, we can reflect on the movement’s ori-
gins, characteristics, and significance. What makes it seemingly unique in
France’s long tradition of social uprisings and political crises? How does it
compare with other contemporary populist movements in Europe and the
United States? What have the Yellow Vests revealed about the growing
fractures in French society and politics, and what impact have they had on
these fractures? Why did the crisis erupt not long after a historic presiden-
tial election that had brought about unprecedented political change while
massively rejecting the populist option offered by Marine Le Pen?

Journal of Democracy Volume 30, Number 4 October 2019

© 2019 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press
Patrick Chamorel 49

The Yellow Vests’ uprising took place amid a social and political
crisis that has been deepening over the last two decades. The 2017 presi-
dential election was considered the last chance for France to reform. For
two decades, France’s leaders and the two parties (center-left Socialists
and center-right Gaullists) that had alternated in power had failed to
resolve the country’s mounting problems with slow growth, stubborn
unemployment, a bloated public sector, rising crime, massive immigra-
tion, the growing challenges associated with the integration of Muslims,
and radical Islamist terrorism.
In France, an existentially political country, a growing distrust of
political leaders and institutions permeated all of society.2 This distrust
fueled the rise of populist parties and drove voter abstention to unprec-
edented levels, especially among those most challenged by the new glo-
balized economy. These trends have been reflected in every election
since 2002, the year Marine Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen of the
National Front (FN), confounded all expectations by qualifying for the
presidential runoff against incumbent Jacques Chirac. In 2005, the tra-
ditionally pro-European French voted non to the ratification of the Eu-
ropean constitution drafted by former French president Valéry Giscard
d’Estaing. That October and November, large-scale violence by groups
of immigrant youth around large cities erupted for the first time. Each of
Macron’s immediate predecessors—Gaullist Nicolas Sarkozy and So-
cialist François Hollande—saw his approval rating nosedive and failed
to achieve reelection.
The 2017 contest was arguably the most dramatic, unpredictable, and
consequential since de Gaulle founded the Fifth Republic in 1958.3 For
the first time, neither the Gaullist nor the Socialist candidate qualified
for the runoff. Together, they won only a quarter of the first-round vote,
while candidates from the far right and far left drew an unprecedented
total of 44 percent. Having ridden the antiestablishment wave despite
his own privileged background and membership in the technocratic
elite, the 39-year-old political novice and centrist Emmanuel Macron
became the only alternative to Marine Le Pen in the runoff. He won
decisively with 66 percent of the vote.
The displacement of the traditional right-versus-left cleavage by a
divide separating Macron’s merged center-right and center-left from the
populist far right had major sociological implications. Macron’s elector-
al base was disproportionately urban, well off, and well educated, while
Marine Le Pen’s was younger, more rural, and overwhelmingly lower
middle class. In the National Assembly elections held five weeks later,
Macron’s new party, known as La République En Marche (LREM),
gained an unexpected two-thirds of the seats at the expense of the old
mainstream parties. A weak parliamentary opposition was split among
the extremist parties.
Once elected, Macron sought to restore the “regal” presidency `a la
50 Journal of Democracy

de Gaulle. The government was to be run vertically, with all author-

ity coming from the top, at the expense of intermediary bodies such
as the legislature, local officials, the media, labor unions, and interest
groups—none of which Macron trusted. He was eager to engage on his
promise of tax and economic reforms. One of Macron’s first and most
symbolic decisions was to revise the controversial wealth tax by apply-
ing it only to real-estate assets. To further encourage productive invest-
ment, he instituted a flat tax of 30 percent on capital gains. Macron
delivered on his promise to make labor markets more flexible, and he
streamlined the national railway, holding firm against powerful unions.
Weakening the unions and their far-left allies, the traditional sources of
protest in French politics, was as important an accomplishment for him
as passing the reforms.

A Weakened President
Three other developments, however, overshadowed these achieve-
ments and harmed Macron’s popularity in the months preceding the Yel-
low Vest protests. The first of these was a set of scandals involving Al-
exandre Benalla. As an aide to Macron’s personal secretary, Benalla was
in charge of the president’s security. The scandals broke in July 2018,
when the left-leaning but Macron-supportive newspaper Le Monde re-
leased a video showing the 26-year-old Benalla, wearing a police riot
helmet though he held no police rank, wrestling with demonstrators in
the streets of Paris on May Day. Macron was forced to suspend and then
dismiss Benalla, who had guarded him during the campaign and whom
Macron had then given a senior post at the Élysée Palace despite the
security man’s youth and the existence of a regular National Police pro-
tection detail that obviates any need for a private bodyguard. There was
a criminal investigation into how Benalla had received police security-
camera footage of the incidents, complete with a raid on his office at
the Élysée. Parliamentary inquiries and a Senate hearing ensued as well.
The Benalla affair shattered the president’s public image. Macron
had spread the myth that his victory inaugurated a more ethical and
transparent era in French politics; it was the necessary complement to
the authority that he claimed for himself and his narrow circle of advi-
sors. The affair revealed an opaque and corrupt presidency, practicing
favoritism on behalf of close aides and covering up their misdeeds. The
media turned against Macron, and his approval rating dropped fifteen
percentage points.
The second source of Macron’s deteriorating image lay in his pen-
chant for blunt and provocative public statements. Meant to encourage
hard work and individual accomplishment, these utterances had the
counterproductive effect of stigmatizing those left behind by the global-
ized economy. In June 2018, a staffer tweeted out a video clip of Macron
Patrick Chamorel 51

telling a group of his advisors that France spends “crazy money” (un
pognon de dingue) on social-welfare programs that only keep people
poor. Then in September, also on camera, he told a young man trained
in horticulture but unemployed, “Je traverse la rue, je vous en trouve”
(“I can cross the street and find you a job”—meaning in the staff-starved
restaurant business).4 The vast majority of people were shocked by the
president’s arrogance and insensitivity.
In addition to Macron’s maladroit rhetoric, his policies also became
targets of criticism. In particular, small pensioners were angry at tax
hikes as well as the end of cost-of-living increases in the sums they
received. When Premier Édouard Philippe proposed dropping the speed
limit on secondary roads (from 90 to 80 kilometers an hour), many mo-
torists became enraged and charged that revenue and not public safety
was the real goal. More than 1,500 fixed traffic-speed radars—60 per-
cent of the total—were vandalized as a result. Macron was perceived as
unfairly targeting the most economically fragile individuals. The com-
mon assumption was that he was cut off from the daily economic hard-
ship of ordinary citizens in “la France profonde.”
It was in this context that, in October 2018, two women circulated
separate Facebook videos, each viewed more than a million times, ex-
pressing their anger at rising taxes and Macron’s lavish spending on his
public residences. Highlighted was the imminent implementation of a
carbon tax on diesel fuel at a time of rising global gas prices. Used by
60 percent of the cars in France, diesel is alleged to release less carbon
dioxide but more fine particles into the atmosphere than other types of
fuel. Those who live in rural areas or on the outskirts of big cities and
who must drive a long way for work are predominantly from the lower
middle class. They tend to drive diesel cars because these go farther on
cheaper fuel, and have more durable engines.
Macron was undoubtedly aware of the precedent of the bonnets roug-
es (Red Caps) uprising against a similar carbon tax in 2013, which had
forced President Hollande to backtrack. Yet Macron offered nothing to
compensate the hardest-hit citizens, and he sought no comparable sac-
rifice from better-off city-dwellers with their short commutes, access to
public transit, and penchant for jet travel. Paradoxically, cities are where
most environmentalists live. The Yellow Vest movement objected not to
environmental-protection policies as such, but rather to the imposing of
their costs on those less able to bear them.

Taking the Traffic Circles

The Yellow Vests called for the occupation of 1,500 strategically
located traffic circles around small and midsized towns on Saturday, 17
November 2018. As these occupations became permanent, they came to
symbolize the determination and resilience of the protesters, as well as
52 Journal of Democracy

the sense of “fraternité” that had developed among them. The Yellow
Vests also visited downtowns every Saturday to protest. Unlike trade
unionists, who traditionally demonstrate in working-class areas, the gi-
lets jaunes chose wealthy commercial districts to underscore their mes-
sage about inequalities. The vast majority of the tens of thousands who
gathered in the largest cities (as opposed to the hundreds of thousands
who attend major union demonstrations) came from faraway exurbs and
rural areas. Weekends were chosen because most protesters had jobs.
As each Saturday neared, the public, the government, and the po-
lice would wait anxiously to see where the Yellow Vests would gather,
what tactics they would employ, and what levels of strife might ensue.
Nonetheless, in surveys taken by the French Institute of Public Opinion
(IFOP) the protesters were scoring 70 percent approval, backed by the
legions of French people who drive and pay taxes and have an ear for the
cri du coeur of honest and hard-working fellow citizens. Only a quarter
of those polled told IFOP that they saw the Yellow Vests as idiosyn-
cratic, while 72 percent believed that the protesters were highlighting
problems facing all of France.
The Yellow Vests were truckers, healthcare employees, factory
workers, independent businesspeople, and retirees. A high percentage
were women. Most worked in the private sector, where incomes are less
secure and levels of schooling, unionization, and benefits are lower than
in the public sector.
The Yellow Vests shared positions toward the lower end of the in-
come and educational scale, residence in distant outlying areas, and a
sense of patriotism: At traffic circles, they flew the Tricolore. Among
the populace at large, 16 percent told IFOP that they “totally identified”
with the movement, but among those with two or more years of higher
education, that figure was only 9 percent. By contrast, more than a quar-
ter (28 percent) of those with no high-school diploma fully identified
with the Yellow Vests. Of those who had finished high school but not
gone to college, almost a fifth (19 percent) professed themselves fully
in sympathy.
Most protesters had never been political activists, but they had dis-
proportionately voted for the extremes or abstained in 2017. Eighty-four
percent of Marine Le Pen’s first-round voters supported the movement,
as did 75 percent of far-left politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s voters. But
only 15 percent of Macron’s first-round voters supported the Yellow
Vests, because they made him the target of their revolt. Among the sup-
porters and foes of the Yellow Vests, class and culture tended to prevail
over the traditional dichotomy of left versus right. For example, work-
ers and farmers were political allies in opposition to college professors
and business executives. By contrast, despite their joint opposition to
Macron’s promarket policies, teachers and workers were not allied, in
part as a result of their increasingly divergent views on immigration and
Patrick Chamorel 53

cultural liberalism. Teachers fully identified with the Yellow Vests at a

quarter of the rate that blue-collar workers did (8 percent as compared to
32 percent). In fact, this was the first mass protest movement of recent
times not led or supported by intellectuals.

“Peripheral France” Comes Downtown

The Yellow Vest crisis also revealed growing contrasts in social and
political geography, especially between small towns and big cities. For
decades now, central-city real-estate values have been rising, and the
priced-out lower middle class has been moving away. In the closer-in
suburbs, known as les banlieues, the large, subsidized rental-apartment
blocks built during the three decades of rapid economic expansion that
followed World War II have become increasingly populated by immi-
grants (often from former French colonies in North and West Africa)
and their French descendants.5 The lower middle class settled beyond
these districts, on the outermost urban fringes or in the countryside.
France is now a collection of concentric rings, with metropolitan elites
downtown, the post-1960s immigrants and their descendants in the ban-
lieues, and the lower middle class farther out—a pattern that reflects
the growing fragmentation of French society. According to geographer
Christophe Guilluy, the Yellow Vest uprising has signaled the social
and political awakening of those in the outer circles, the invisible and
abandoned areas that he calls “la France périphérique.”6
The cultural and geographical separation between the outer-ring low-
er middle class and the residents of the banlieues helps to explain why
the latter did not join the Yellow Vest movement, despite facing many
of the same economic challenges. These communities mistrust each
other, with immigrants and immigrant descendants suspecting the white
lower middle class of racism. In fact, the Yellow Vests’ focus on their
economic and democratic grievances restrained them from addressing
the much more divisive issues related to immigration. Rather, aware that
the progressive elites were eager to dismiss them as racist, the Yellow
Vests sought to dispel any such impression of their movement.
The Yellow Vests’ agenda featured three items: taxes, social inequal-
ities, and direct democracy. Under Hollande, taxes had risen significant-
ly, although mostly on the upper middle class. Macron’s priority was to
reduce deficits as the European Commission required, but he viewed
spending cuts as too politically risky, so he settled on targeted tax hikes.
The Yellow Vests’ revolt against taxes was less about ideology than
what they felt was their falling standard of living. At the same time,
there were conflicting priorities within the movement: Some Yellow
Vests, especially in remote and neglected rural areas, were demanding
more spending on public services.
Underlying the tax revolt was a strongly held egalitarianism that
54 Journal of Democracy

loathed the privileges of the elites. A major demand was to bring back
the old wealth tax. Macron, like Sarkozy, was scorned as “le président
des riches.” A graduate of the rarified École Nationale d’Administration
and a former investment banker, Macron embodied the entrenched and
all-powerful French technocratic elite. Only 11 percent of those whom
IFOP surveyed believed that he understood ordinary citizens and their
worries.
It might seem paradoxical that economic inequalities would be at the
heart of the Yellow Vest movement. France is one of the most egalitarian
advanced economies, with the average income of the richest 10 percent
being only 3.5 times higher than that of the bottom 10 percent. This is
mostly because the government redistributes a staggering 56 percent of
the national GDP through taxes and public programs, the very policies
that protesters deemed unjust. France is distinct among Western democ-
racies in that it has not seen inequality intensify since the 2008 financial
crisis—and Macron’s presidency has been no exception. Yet most people
at the bottom feel worse off and abandoned by the governing elites, il-
lustrating Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation that the more egalitarian a
society becomes, the less tolerable the remaining inequalities seem.
The Yellow Vest movement signaled a deepening crisis of represen-
tative democracy that can also be read in falling voter turnout. The pro-
testers gave voice to widespread distrust of the media and the political
system. Of those who identified with the Yellow Vests, 81 percent dis-
trusted politicians, and 71 percent considered them corrupt.7 Views such
as these are in fact common in France, where 70 percent of respondents
tell IFOP pollsters that democracy is failing to work properly, and 69
percent trust neither the right nor the left to govern. Yet 62 percent see
the Yellow Vests as a hopeful sign for French democracy, versus 34
percent who perceive them as a threat.
Among the Yellow Vests’ key demands was the institution of na-
tional citizen-initiated referendums and recalls of local elected officials.
The protesters believed that direct democracy could express majority
will better than elections involving political parties and a complex elec-
toral system. Calls for direct democracy—Macron and his team, like
most elites, had no use for it—allowed the Yellow Vests to portray
themselves as a prodemocracy movement. Foreign leaders not known
for their liberal-democratic credentials, including Russia’s Vladimir Pu-
tin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdo¢gan, Italy’s Matteo Salvini, and even
Donald Trump evoked the Yellow Vest crisis to criticize Macron’s al-
leged authoritarian style and unpopular environmental policies.
The media was another Yellow Vest target. The protesters accused
the press of misrepresenting them by focusing excessively on street
violence and playing up the far right’s role in the disturbances while
ignoring the far left’s. The Yellow Vest uprising was an opportunity to
express “wounded pride” and to dispel the negative view of the lower
Patrick Chamorel 55

middle class propagated by the intellectual and cultural elites.8 Although

the media had in the past shown more sympathy for the protests of stu-
dents, artists, immigrants, and unionists, the extensive coverage of the
Yellow Vests did recast the national image of the lower middle class:
Along with the traditionally militant working class and the immigrants
and immigrant descendants of the banlieues, the French lower middle
class now stands as one of the once-unheard communities of citizens
who have spoken up to voice their discontent.

A Rudderless Movement
In the end, the Yellow Vests failed to capitalize on their huge num-
bers and high popularity. They lacked shared purpose and direction. The
movement’s very spontaneity and grassroots character steered it away
from speaking with one voice or building a permanent leadership. The
gilets jaunes resisted becoming vehicles for political parties and labor
unions, but also resisted turning themselves into a political alternative.
Their fleeting efforts to compile candidate lists for the upcoming Euro-
pean and local elections fizzled. Their rudderless movement increasing-
ly fell prey to its own extremists, not to mention the violent outside or-
ganizations that used it as cover to sow disorder. Shocking anti-Semitic
graffiti and insults were propagated by the far right and left.
Far-left groups with more effective organizations and more expe-
rience pushed aside the far-right elements and hijacked much of the
movement. Most of the violence against the police, banks, government
buildings, and upscale stores was the work of uncompromising “ultra-
yellows” and the radically anticapitalist “black blocks,” whose notoriety
stemmed from their violent behavior at world financial meetings in Se-
attle in 1999 and Hamburg in 2017.
Images of violence and anti-Semitism, along with an air of drift, ate
away at the Yellow Vests’ credibility, but so did Macron’s response. Even
as many observers were pronouncing his presidency dead, Macron took
three steps that proved effective. First, he adjusted his policies, withdraw-
ing some of his most contentious proposals and announcing significant
tax cuts for low-income families. Macron’s concessions surpassed any
previous ones made to the unions, save possibly those of May 1968. Yet
he left the new wealth tax in place and endorsed no direct-democracy ini-
tiative; instead, he confirmed that the general orientation of his economic
policy would remain unchanged. Second, he spared no effort to discredit
the Yellow Vests by condemning the violent, extremist, and anti-Semitic
aspects of the demonstrations. The police used more powerful weapons
against the gilets jaunes than are used when dealing with the violent ele-
ments of labor-union demonstrations or banlieue uprisings. Third, Ma-
cron declared a nationwide “Grand Débat,” personally holding town halls
across the country and urging citizens to air their grievances.
56 Journal of Democracy

These approaches worked. In effect, Macron told the left that he was
flexible and the right that he would defend public order. Like Napoleon
Bonaparte after the 1789 revolution, his nephew Louis-Napoleon after
the 1848 revolution, Adolphe Thiers after the Paris Commune of 1870,
and de Gaulle both in 1958 (when the Fourth Republic came undone) and
after May 1968 (when the Gaullists won a sweeping electoral victory),
Macron capitalized on the popular desire to see public order restored.
But most importantly, by discrediting the Yellow Vest movement, Ma-
cron further discredited opposition to economic liberalization, cultural
liberalism, and immigration in an attempt to reframe the entire crisis as
another illustration of the divide between democrats and populists.
The May 2019 European Parliament elections might have presented
an opportunity for the Yellow Vests to exert some influence, but they
lacked a political organization and were not a factor. After Macron’s
first policy concessions on 10 December 2018, and in reaction to height-
ened violence, support for the Yellow Vests began to fall, with a major-
ity of those polled after February 2019 saying that they opposed fur-
ther protests. Turnout at traffic circles and in central cities waned after
the late May European Parliament elections. What is left of the Yellow
Vests at the time of this writing in early September are a few thousand
violent protesters mobilizing on most Saturdays. But what Macron and
his government fear most is that the movement could broaden and catch
fire again if triggered by some new turn of events.
In contrast to the Yellow Vests’ inability to strengthen their move-
ment via the 2019 European elections, Macron and Marine Le Pen suc-
cessfully exploited the crisis to reinforce their polarized duopoly over
French politics. The FN, rebranded as the National Rally (RN), finished
first with 23 percent of the vote. Macron’s party finished just behind
with 22 percent. The Greens came in a surprising third with 13 percent,
far ahead of the faltering center-right (8.5 percent) and far left (Mélen-
chon’s party won just 6.3 percent).
Macron’s ambition to reshape European politics as he had French
politics has never been realistic. But domestically, he appeared as the
true winner, having lured well-off center-right voters through his de-
fense of public order, representative democracy, and the wealth-tax re-
form. His party’s center of gravity is now more to the right of center.
The Greens’ success, the result of young voters abandoning the parties
of the left, will likely enable Macron in the future to mobilize cultural
progressives against the far right.
Marine Le Pen’s score in the European Parliament elections was un-
derwhelming in light of the Yellow Vest mobilization of her troops and
issues, Macron’s unpopularity, and the traditional protest dimension of
European elections. Yet she outpaced the far left, which suffered from
its lack of ideological and sociological cohesion and from its inability
to match the RN’s flair for acting as a foil to Macron.9 The Yellow Vest
Patrick Chamorel 57

crisis accelerated the bipolarization of French politics around Macron’s

elitist center and Le Pen’s populist far right, as the underlying sociologi-
cal divide grew deeper. Macron and Le Pen’s agreed-upon dichotomy
between progressives and national populists is one reflection of the soci-
ological and ideological realignment that is underway in French politics.

Macron and �Elite Populism�

Why did a populist protest movement emerge so suddenly and spec-
tacularly just eighteen months after Macron’s decisive electoral victory?
Had not the long-simmering frustrations of large segments of the popu-
lace been expressed during the campaign? Had they not fueled the tri-
umph of the “outsider” Macron over the widely unpopular radical option
offered by Marine Le Pen?
Macron’s surprise 2017 presidential victory partly hid the circumstanc-
es, as well as the fragile sociological and political basis, of his election.
He owed much of his success to the traditional parties’ collapse, the fi-
nancial scandal that sank the center-right favorite François Fillon, and the
widespread “anyone but Le Pen” sentiment that emerged in the runoff.
According to pollsters, Macron was only one of three candidates who
would have been capable of defeating Marine Le Pen in the runoff. Ma-
cron’s surprisingly large margin of victory was due to Le Pen’s disastrous
performance in the televised debate on the eve of the runoff, as well as her
ambiguous pledge to hold a referendum on exiting the euro, which made
the middle class fear for its savings.
Marine Le Pen’s severe defeat was interpreted as the defeat of popu-
lism. In fact, with the public mood so hostile to the political establish-
ment, all candidates resorted to populist rhetoric and demagogic prom-
ises. A novice in politics who founded a political “movement” to carry out
a “revolution,” Macron positioned himself as an antiestablishment candi-
date, one of the instigators as well as the main beneficiary of the popu-
list wave that was rolling across France. As a consequence, some voters
reasonably expected him to govern in a more economically inclusive way.
Rather than being the antidote to populism, Macron embodied a
“populism of the elites,” a concept that has become popular among
pollsters.10 A right-left cleavage is giving way to one pitting the center
against the far right—a shift caused by splits within both the right and
the left, as well as cultural issues that draw the elites toward the center-
left and the working-class toward the far right. A growing class and
educational divide is replacing the socially mixed constituencies of the
traditional right and left.
The era of all-encompassing movements and ideologies that brought
together constituencies across social classes is over. Gaullism once en-
joyed the support of workers, farmers, and members of the elites; com-
munism had intellectuals and workers; and socialism had intellectuals
58 Journal of Democracy

and minorities. But these cross-class coalitions are no more. Macron’s

election saw a wide “elite bloc” defeat a “popular bloc.”11 Macron’s base
was confined to the political, sociological, and geographical constituen-
cies that gave him his 24 percent showing in the first round (equaling 17
percent of all those eligible to vote). It centered on the wealthy central
cities, the moderate regions of rural western France, and retirees.12
The Macron “revolution,” which saw 72 percent of the 577 seats in the
National Assembly receive newly elected occupants, created a centrist
governing majority that spans right and left. The current deputies—es-
pecially the ones from LREM—are younger, more female, more diverse,
and more educated than before. Yet this “revolution” stopped short of
affecting either the dominance of the traditional technocratic elite or the
liberal orientation of economic policy, both of which dated from long
before Macron’s presidency.
Macron’s victory was overinterpreted as ratifying his electoral pro-
gram, even though the latter remained deliberately ambiguous and had
not been meant to play a central role in the campaign. Macron was eager
to launch his main reforms before opposition could coalesce, expect-
ing that voters would realize the benefits by the time he was up for
reelection. Only a minority of voters, however, backed his main policy
approaches: liberalizing the economy, deepening European integration,
maintaining high levels of immigration, and favoring the advent of a
multicultural society. It was left to many Macron voters to become grad-
ually aware that the president whom they had elected to keep Marine Le
Pen out of the Élysée Palace (the motivation of 43 percent of Macron
voters) was pursuing economic policies that conflicted with their own
interests. Macron himself was convinced that, with time, his policies
would benefit everyone, not just the well off.
Even though liberal economic reforms meant to make the French
economy more competitive are necessary and overdue, they might no
longer be politically viable. Since the 2008 financial crisis, most people
are less inclined to sacrifice what they have in order to, as they be-
lieve, benefit elites. Moreover, the political agenda has shifted toward
more protection from globalization, European integration, immigration,
multiculturalism, and terrorism. Macron was keenly aware of citizens’
demands for protection. Yet he sought to aid the most economically
challenged on a European rather than a national level. His plans for a
more protectionist and “sovereign” Europe ran into fierce opposition
from most of the other EU member states.
With liberal economic policies seeming to have run their course, and
with cultural progressivism and immigration having provoked a back-
lash, Macron’s version of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair’s “third way”
may have arrived too late. The Yellow Vests appeared to be the populist
response to Macron’s perceived elitism, much as Brexit had been to
David Cameron’s and Trump had been to Barack Obama’s and Hillary
Patrick Chamorel 59

Clinton’s. Macron, having risen as the putative antidote to populism,

had instead become its enabler. Once the promising outsider, he has
morphed into the discredited establishment. In fact, Macron’s perceived
assets—a split political opposition, weakened labor unions, and neu-
tralized intermediary bodies—helped to divert discontent into the only
available outlets: social media and the street.
Whatever their differences, Macron’s presidential movement En
Marche and the Yellow Vest movement are similar in some ways. Both
are fueled by social media, antiestablishment rhetoric, and distrust of
political parties, labor unions, and the traditional media: They are the
twin products of the crisis of political representation. More pragmatic
than ideological, each shuns any long-term vision and offers a vague
and self-contradictory agenda. They do differ in their attitudes toward
leaders and institutions: The Yellow Vests refused to have anything to
do with either, while En Marche was founded by and for Macron with
the express purpose of running candidates in elections. Moreover, the
Yellow Vests did not emulate Macron’s rhetoric about building a better
world, preferring instead to focus on surviving in a hostile one.13 But
then there is this commonality: Both Macron and the Yellow Vests ad-
opted revolutionary optics while in reality pursuing conservative goals.

Comparing Protest Movements

The Yellow Vest crisis illustrated many historically entrenched charac-
teristics of French political culture: weak political parties and intermediary
bodies, a remote technocratic elite, resistance to liberal economic reforms,
the mythology of revolutionary violence, an obsession with equality, and
resentment of the rich. The Yellow Vests combined aspects of different
historic revolts and political crises. Tax revolts were common before
1789, as peasants objected to paying taxes from which clerics and nobles
were exempted. In 1956, Pierre Poujade’s antitax party won 52 seats in
the National Assembly, giving the young Jean-Marie Le Pen his start in
electoral politics. The Yellow Vests’ populism evoked the “Boulangisme”
of the 1880s with its mixture of socialist and nationalist themes, though
the Yellow Vests’ mild expressions of patriotism bore little resemblance
to the Boulangists’ aggressive nationalism, to say nothing of the extrem-
ism espoused by the various far-right “leagues” of the 1930s.
Were the Yellow Vests the “May ’68 of the people,” as some have called
them? May 1968 was a utopian revolt by privileged urban students against
what they viewed as an authoritarian culture. By contrast, the Yellow Vests
came from the exurban lower middle class and focused on trying to pre-
serve what they feared to lose. Culturally, the Yellow Vests seemed to bring
to a close an era of optimism that had begun more than fifty years before.
Like earlier tumults in French political history, the Yellow Vests illus-
trate Tocqueville’s famous observation—he was writing about the Bour-
60 Journal of Democracy

bon monarchy on the eve of 1789—that “the most dangerous time for a
bad government is usually when it begins to reform.”14 Like past revolu-
tionaries, the Yellow Vests combined economic and democratic griev-
ances with a patriotic message. But the Yellow Vests lacked the strong
leadership and sense of direction found in revolutionary movements and
were not driven by ideology and an intellectual class.15 The Yellow Vests
were perhaps more “counterrevolutionary” than revolutionary because
they wanted to tame the winds of the globalized economy, mass immigra-
tion, and cultural progressivism—to preserve more than to change.
The Yellow Vests displayed similarities to other populist movements
that have recently sprung up across Europe and in the United States, but
with singularities as well. Like Italy’s Five Star Movement, the Yellow
Vests relied heavily on social media and adopted an antiestablishment
message that mixed leftist and rightist themes. Yet the fight against po-
litical corruption was not their main focus. Like Spain’s Podemos and
Greece’s Syriza, the Yellow Vests targeted economic inequalities, but
Podemos and Syriza are election-focused political parties led by leftist
intellectuals, and the Yellow Vests were neither of those things. They
also did not share the anti-Islam focus of Germany’s Pegida.
The Yellow Vest movement was spontaneous and ephemeral. It built
no institutional infrastructure. Other populist uprisings have led to more
permanent political organizations and political parties. In a stark con-
trast with the Yellow Vests, the Tea Party in the United States has seen
its members and ideas become an intrinsic part of the long-established
Republican Party. Also a fleeting grassroots movement, Occupy Wall
Street recruited essentially among the educated youth and never threat-
ened to destabilize the presidency of Barack Obama.
The Yellow Vests inspired protest movements against inequality,
elitism, and fiscal austerity in countries as near as Belgium and as far
away as Iraq, but none of these movements has achieved anything like
the éclat of the French original.
The Yellow Vest crisis has revealed and deepened France’s social
and political fractures. While running for president in 1995, Jacques
Chirac warned against what Marcel Gauchet and Emmanuel Todd called
the “social fracture.”16 Their fear was that a widening material, cultur-
al, and geographic gap between the elite class and the most challenged
socioeconomic groups would pull France apart, dismantling the politi-
cal system and threatening national cohesion. This concern intensified
when the voters put Jean-Marie Le Pen into the presidential runoff in
2002, when they rejected the European constitution via referendum in
May 2005, and when riots broke out in the banlieues in October and
November of that same year.
Since then, as pollster and political scientist Jérôme Fourquet has docu-
mented, French society has become not less but more fragmented along
economic, cultural, ethnic, and geographic lines.17 When asked what they
Patrick Chamorel 61

have in common with their fellow citizens, 35 percent of respondents say

“nothing,” the highest percentage in the EU. The 2017 presidential elec-
tion, the Yellow Vest uprising, and the 2019 European Parliament elec-
tions have only reinforced these trends. The role of class as well as atti-
tudes toward immigration and cultural progressivism have become central.
Macron’s travails and the Yellow Vest crisis have further polarized so-
ciety, with affluent, progressive, and urban elites opposing the economi-
cally and culturally anxious lower middle class. Each group resents the
other: The lower middle class is angry that the elites have so much wealth
and power, while the elites despise the lower middle class for its perceived
retrograde values. Both Macron and Marine Le Pen have an interest in this
polarization, with the former counting on a sustained rejection of the far
right by the majority, while the latter hopes that polarization will increase
the appeal of the political alternative that she represents.
The ongoing realignment of French politics is far from over, however.
The current bipolar split between a broad center and the far right might not
survive Macron’s one- or two-term presidency. The party system could re-
turn to featuring three or even four main parties organized around a revived
right-left cleavage. The Greens might grow popular enough for the left to
coalesce around them as its new main party. The far right’s most promis-
ing option is to seek allies among traditional center-right constituencies,
possibly under the new leadership of Marion Maréchal, Marine Le Pen’s
29-year-old niece. Then too, other uprisings might emerge: Something like
the Yellow Vest movement could reappear, while the banlieues continue
to simmer with discontents of their own.18
The future of French politics will depend on the capacity of French
people and their leaders to hold an increasingly diverse and divided na-
tion together. Since 1789, France has been divided by a deep right-left
cleavage that is now withering away. But France has also been cemented
by a strong state, republican ideals, and a vibrant culture. For better or
worse, France has always relied on politics to make sense of its collec-
tive existence. Faced with a weakening state, a more fragmented society,
and increased questioning of the core republican values of universalism,
equality, and secularism, France must meet unprecedented challenges.
Whether it will find the resources to overcome them is a question for
which there is as yet no answer.

NOTES

1. The strife grew intense and thousands were injured, but deaths were mercifully
few, with most caused by vehicular accidents associated with roadblocks and traffic-
circle occupations. Vincent Coquaz, “Qui sont les 11 morts du mouvement des gilets
jaunes mentionnés par Emmanuel Macron?” Libération, 29 January 2019, www.libera-
tion.fr/checknews/2019/01/30/qui-sont-les-11-morts-du-mouvement-des-gilets-jaunes-
mentionnes-par-emmanuel-macron_1706158.
62 Journal of Democracy

2. Brice Teinturier, “Plus rien `a faire, plus rien `a foutre”: La vraie crise de la démocra-
tie (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2017).

3. On the stakes and circumstances of the 2017 presidential election, see Patrick Cham-
orel, “Now It’s France’s Turn,” American Interest, 20 April 2017.

4. Zachary Young, “Emmanuel Macron’s 9 Greatest Gaffes,” Politico, 19 April 2019,

www.politico.eu/article/emmanuel-macron-9-greatest-gaffes-blunders-french-president.

5. RTÉ, Laura Costelloe, “The French Banlieues: plus ça change, plus c’est la m^eme
chose,” Brainstorm, 11 January 2018, www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2018/0110/932342-the-
french-banlieues-plus-ca-change-plus-cest-la-meme-chose.

6. Christophe Guilluy, �France Is Deeply Fractured. Gilets Jaunes Are Just a Symptom,�
Guardian, 2 December 2018, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/02/france-is-
deeply-fractured-gilets-jeunes-just-a-symptom; Guilluy, La France périphérique: Comment
on a sacrifié les classes populaires (Paris: Flammarion, 2014).

7. These data on Yellow Vest supporters’ views of politicians and on perceptions of

the Yellow Vests come from CEVIPOF, the research center of Sciences Po in Paris. The
center regularly publishes a “Barometer of Political Trust,” www.sciencespo.fr/cevipof/fr/
content/le-barometre-de-la-confiance-politique.

8. Laurent Bouvet, L’insécurité culturelle: Sortir du malaise identitaire français (Par-

is: Fayard, 2015).

9. Étienne Campion and Jérôme Sainte-Marie, “Pourquoi les Gilets jaunes profi-
tent plus `a Le Pen qu’`a Mélenchon,” Figaro Vox, 15 January 2019, www.lefigaro.fr/vox/
politique/2019/01/10/31001-20190110ARTFIG00081-jerome-sainte-marie-pourquoi-les-gi-
lets-jaunes-profitent-plus-a-le-pen-qu-a-melenchon.php.

10. The expression appears in the title of a book review by Alfio Mastropaolo, “Popu-
lisme du peuple ou populisme des élites?” Critique Internationale, no. 4 (2001): 61–67,
www.cairn.info/revue-critique-internationale-2001-4-page-61.htm#.

11. Jérôme Sainte-Marie, Le nouvel ordre démocratique (Paris: Les Éditions du Mo-
ment, 2015) describes the split between a “bloc élitaire” and a “bloc populaire.”

12. Jérôme Fourquet, Le nouveau clivage: Mondialisation (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf,
2018).

13. Denis Maillard, Une col`ere française: Métamorphose des relations sociales (Paris:
Éditions de l’Observatoire, 2019).

14. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution, trans. Ar-
thur Goldhammer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 157.

15. Pierre Vermeren, La France qui déclasse: Les Gilets jaunes, une jacquerie au XXIe
si`ecle (Paris: Tallandier, 2019).

16. Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Reli-
gion, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Emmanuel Todd,
Aux origines du malaise politique français (Paris: Fondation Saint-Simon, 1994). See also
Christophe Guilluy, Fractures françaises (Paris: Bourin Éditeur, 2010).

17. Jérôme Fourquet, L’archipel français: Naissance d’une nation multiple et divisée
(Paris: Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 2019).

18. Gilles Kepel, La fracture (Paris: Gallimard, 2016).