[updates below]
Today is Act XIII—designated in Roman numerals—of the Gilets Jaunes, a,k.a. Yellow Jackets (or Vests), which is to say, this is the 13th Saturday in a row that the movement has held demos in Paris and around France. It’s become routine (with the weekly numbers albeit steadily dropping). The GJ movement is fairly well understood outside France by now, in terms of who they are—lower middle class small town/non-farming rural folk—and what issues initially drove the protests (gasoline taxes, a new speed limit law, cost of living; which have since been superseded by others). The English-language reporting has been quite good on the whole, not to mention analyses from France specialists, a few of which I linked to in December. One of the best Anglophone journalists on the GJ beat, whose reports have been first-rate, is John Lichfield, formerly Paris correspondent of The Independent, now of The Local. Lichfield knows France comme sa poche and his analyses are invariably spot-on. One of his latest on the GJs is a talk he gave in Brussels on January 31st, sponsored by a group called BEERG and which published a transcript on its BEERG Brexit Blog dated February 2nd, which I have copied-and-pasted below (and taken the liberty of correcting a few spelling errors). As I almost entirely subscribe to Lichfield’s analysis, this has spared me from having to elaborate my own. The transcript is lengthy (some 4,400 words) but well worth the read.
I’m sort of glad I didn’t offer my views on AWAV last month, as I posted more than one comment on Facebook expressing my exasperation, indeed fed-upness, with the GJs (here, here, and here), which I pronounced to be—or to have objectively become—a movement of the extreme right, on account of the violence of a significant number of GJs—the Saturday casseurs were not only neofascists, black blocs, and loubards from the banlieues—the proliferation of conspiracy theories among the GJs and which have been rife on their Facebook pages—N.B. without Facebook, the GJ movement would not exist—overt expressions of antisemitism at GJ-occupied ronds-points and gatherings (e.g. here, here, and here), and their hatred of the media, and particularly the all-news TV stations, with only the Russian RT France meeting with approval (this has been widely reported)—though without the saturation coverage of BFM, CNews, and LCI, the GJ movement would have never attained the proportions it has. And to this GJ hatred may be added that of politicians, indeed of the institutions of representative democracy, a.k.a. the Republic. A case in point: the incessant, insistant demand that Emmanuel Macron resign. However one feels about Macron—I am personally not a fan—he was legitimately elected president of the republic for a five-year term. Who do these people think they are to imperiously demand that he pack his bags and quit the Elysée, tail between his legs? To throw the institutions of French democracy into grave crisis and with no clue as to what would come out of it? The verbal violence against Macron was indeed attaining a virulence never witnessed against a major political figure, let alone a president of the republic, since the Second World War. Macron has a number of issues, as it were, and bears some responsibility for the emergence of the GJs—more on this another time—but a lynch mob atmosphere around his person by GJs quickly developed. If Macron had tried to dialogue with a critical mass of GJs on a Saturday in December—of working men and women in their 30s and 40s, indeed older—he would have likely not made it out alive. His physical integrity was indeed in danger.
But it hasn’t only been Macron. GJs who accepted the invitation to meet with PM Édouard Philippe at the Matignon on December 4th renounced after receiving death threats. One of the more moderate public faces of the GJs, the 51-year-old Bretonne hypnotherapist Jacline Mouraud, told Le Figaro (December 7th) that she and her family had received death threats on account of her televised appearances as an informal GJ spokesperson. The climate of intimidation in the movement was palpable.
None of this is acceptable, regardless of the difficult economic situation individual GJs find themselves in. Barely being able to make ends meet—which is the case for the majority of GJs—does not give one the right to smash stuff and threaten people with violence. The abject political inculture of the GJs is breathtaking. A number of intellectuals and high-profile journalists, e.g. Libération’s Jean Quatremer, have been denouncing the GJs for all this since November, drawing historical parallels with the fascist factieux of February 1934 or the Poujadist movement of the mid 1950s, which started out as a non-political anti-tax reaction of shopkeepers and artisans but veered to the extreme right. I didn’t accept the views of the said intellos and journalists at first but then started to get on board. And then my friend Claire Berlinski published a lengthy (6,700 words), somewhat incendiary piece on the GJs in The American Interest on January 21st, expressing her dim view, to put it mildly, of the movement and how it was playing out, and with which I agreed.
But now I have to pull back. J’allais un peu vite en besogne, i.e. I was getting ahead of myself. It was not right to pigeonhole the GJ movement as extreme right tout court. Some of it clearly is but a lot of it is not. The operative word is hétéroclite: politically-speaking, the GJs are made up of men and women who vote for the left and right, or don’t vote at all, in more or less equal proportions. The grab bag of GJ revindications include as many that may be seen as left-wing—particularly the denunciations of the filthy rich and demands for greater redistribution—as right-wing. What is noteworthy, though—and why the GJs cannot be classified as extreme-right—is the absence of immigration and identity in GJ rhetoric. Individual GJs interviewed in the media will say that immigration is a problem—as do the majority of Frenchmen and women—when the question is posed to them—the classes populaires tend not to be cosmopolitan, après tout—but it simply has not been an issue for the movement. Moreover, the quiet, under-the-radar effort by Marine Le Pen and her renamed Rassemblement National to co-opt the GJ movement at the ronds-points appears not to be bearing fruit (and with some RN strongholds, such as the Hauts-de-France region, not having witnessed significant GJ activity). The GJs are allergic to the established political parties, including the RN. If the GJs manage to structure themselves into a lasting movement that contests elections—which is doubtful—it will surely resemble the Italian M5S, i.e. politically unclassifiable.
It is commonplace to refer to the GJ movement as inédit, i.e. unprecedented. There’s never been anything like it in France: a mass social movement in which the urban population is all but absent. There have been plenty of rural movements and protests in the course of history but of farmers and who are concerned solely with farmer-related issues (and who care about nothing else). The GJs are not peasants, as we know. They are the union of non-urban “petits-moyens,” in the words of sociologist Isabelle Coutant, or the “société des petits,” dixit Pierre Rosanvallon, and with a large participation of women (a few of whom have taken part in the violence). The inter-generational character of the GJs is equally noteworthy, forged in the fraternization on the ronds-points (the latter was the subject of a remarkable reportage by Florence Aubenas in Le Monde dated December 16th-17th). The movement has also evolved since November. The GJs were initially over-represented in the “diagonale du vide“—the swath of central France that has suffered population decline and economic stagnation—but the locus has shifted to the southwest and Mediterranean rim. The central role played by local leaders has also been observed, with GJ activity in a given locality dropping significantly with the arrest or departure of the charismatic personality.
I’ll no doubt come back to all this, particularly as teams of social scientists are studying the GJs—whose early findings have been extensively reported in Le Monde—and with edited collections of essays by academics and intellectuals already hitting the bookstores. And then there’s the Emmanuel Macron part of the equation, which I’ll take up soon, as well as some of the institutional revindications of the GJs, such as the citizens’ initiative referendum (to which I am hostile). In the meantime, here’s John Lichfield’s January 31st Brussels talk:
I’m here to explain the Gilets Jaunes. It might be easier to explain black holes. I’ll do my best. But there is no simple explanation of the Gilets Jaunes, no monolithic, single-minded movement, no leadership structure, no single, accepted programme of demands. That’s what makes them fascinating. And baffling. And worrying. I will give you a brief narrative of the story so far. Then I will offer some clues on how to understand the movement. And what may happen next.
Are the Gilets Jaunes just another example of the French being French? Is it all Macron’s fault? Or Putin’s fault? Or is it an internet phenomenon – Facebook populism – which could have happened anywhere? What are the similarities with other populist movements
in the social media age, Brexit, Maga-Trump, Five Star? Is it a movement remotely piloted by the far right? Or far left? Who is responsible for the violence? What does it all tell us about the fragility of democratic institutions, and all institutions, in an age when the old channels of authority and opinion-forming have broken down? Political parties, trades unions, newspapers, TV and radio news, even the Church.
FIRST, A BRIEF NARRATIVE:
The Gilets Jaunes movement began as long ago as May. A very intelligent, young businesswoman of French west Indian origin, Priscillia Ludosky, 31, placed a petition on line complaining about the high cost of petrol and diesel in France. Reaction; practically nothing. I have interviewed her. She is an intelligent, calm, moderate person, who has now fallen out with some of the more radical figures who have since taken over the movement.
She – a young, black woman with dreadlocks, a woman who runs her own cosmetics business from home – is an unlikely pioneer for a populist movement, which is sometimes accused of being racist and far right (as parts of it undoubtedly are). She is, still active, but I sense, losing influence and also motivation. She sums up better than anyone the complexity and oddity of the Gilets Jaunes.
In October, she was contacted by a lorry driver Eric Drouet, 33, who teamed up with her promote her original petition. Drouet is a car fanatic, a petrol head, but also someone with extremist political tendencies. He is now, many weeks later, probably the most influential figure in the movement. There is genuine muddle in France about whether he should be seen as far right or far left. I think he’s far right. I may be wrong. This is the not the same as saying the whole movement is far right, which it’s not.
Anyway, his original motivation may well have been his car obsession rather than politics– more Top Gear than Das Kapital or Mein Kampf. By the time he intervened, petrol prices were spiking because of a rise in world oil prices. There had been no new increase in carbon taxes since January, but one was due in the New Year. Priscillia Ludoskys’s original petition now exploded on line, attracting hundreds of thousands of signatures. It was Drouet who thought of idea of nationwide protest on 17 November. Someone else had the brilliant PR idea of dressing everyone up in the yellow vests which French motorists have by law to carry in their cars.
At same time, another woman Jacline Mouraud, a hypnotherapist from Brittany, placed a video blog on Facebook on 19 October in which she pointed out– inter alia – what a large proportion of the pump fuel price in France goes on tax (60 % as has long been the case.) This video was rapidly seen 6.2 million times. Another early figure was FlyRider – Maxime Nicolle – a blogger of conspiracy theories which are anti-globalist, anti-elite, anti- European. He has connections with the far right but nothing very formal. He looks like any young man on the street: red hair and beard, baseball hat always worn backwards. He is a |French nationalist of sorts, an anti-globalist but very global in his looks. A paradox. In both appearance and views, he could be a Trump supporter.
So, petrol prices were important in touching off the movement. But they rapidly set alight other grievances, some concrete, some more existential. A lack of public services, high taxes, a new tax on some pensions, the fact that Macron had partially abolished a tax on wealth. One must not underestimate the importance of a decision last July to reduce the two-lane speed limit in France from 90kph to 80khp.
This aroused a long-simmering belief in peripheral France that rural areas and outer suburbs are somehow subsidising the insolent success of the cities. Speeding fines, in this view, are just another way of taxing “ploucs” or “péquenauds” – yokels or rednecks. Also fed a belief in lower and middle France that they are taxed unfairly in favour of rich. Both are factually untrue. If anything, the rich subsidise the state services of poor and lower middle and the metropolitan areas subsidise Peripheral France.
But it IS that true that energy and life and local sources of wealth have been sucked out of large swathes of France in recent decades – as they have in parts of the UK or US. All adds up to an existential conviction that peripheral France is not only being left behind but mocked and cheated by those who are forging ahead. I believe that this resentment, an existential sense of being slighted, or ignored or despised or abandoned or humiliated, explains the yellow vest movement more than any particular grievance.
The first day of action on 17 November mobilised 284,000 people across France. This figure has never been reached since. It was impressive but fell well below numbers which have turned out for other social protests in last 20 years. Its significance was that it did not just take place in cities but also in small towns and on almost every local roundabout. Like the Tour de France it was a national event which came down your way. This created a sense of camaraderie. It also gave people a uniform. People who had previously felt powerless, felt abruptly powerful because they could hold up cars and trucks at a roundabout. People who had been invisible became highly visible in their high viz vests.
Here is our second paradox. The Gilets Jaunes are an internet spawned and driven movement. They could not have existed 20 years or maybe even 10 years ago, before the triumph of Facebook. But their attraction is that they are also something tangible, physical, a social club as well a social movement – something that brought people together. The movement was created, and brought to a white heat pitch of anger, by the halls of facing mirrors of “anger groups” on line. But it was also successful because it gave people a sense that they could escape from the isolation of their terminals or smart phones and come together and do things.
Anyway, 17 November was mostly peaceful. There was little violence, except a few scuffles with Police in Paris and with motorists on blocked roundabouts. The police and government stood back and allowed the protests to happen, even though the Gilets Jaunes deliberately defied the usual rules of seeking advance permissions for gatherings etc. Police stopped a small crowd led by Eric Drouet from reaching the Elysée Palace. Otherwise GJ’s were allowed to wander around Paris at will, blocking traffic on Place de la Concorde for hours for instance. It is important to remember this when GJs and others allege that Macron has tried to “suppress” the movement. The rural roundabout blockades/social clubs were also allowed to continue for days undisturbed, severely reducing deliveries to shops etc. Police and government did nothing at first, waiting for the movement to peter out.
On 24 November, Act 2 of the movement, another Saturday, there was some violence in Paris. Police responded robustly to being attacked by a militant fringe of GJ’s on Champs Elysées. There were some serious injuries among protesters from police weapons. This was treated on GJ sites as deliberate police violence and repression, stoking tempers for the next weekend…
On 1 Dec, Act 3, I was out on streets of Paris from early morning. I happen to live near the Arc de Triomphe. I was in middle of a street battle when I walked out of my building at 9am. This was the day the movement shifted to something more militant, more violent, out of control of its peaceful majority. Whether this was spontaneous or planned is open to question. It was certainly encouraged by the extreme anti-police and anti-Macron rhetoric on GJ sites.
There was a large minority of GJs that day – not just hard left- and right-wing militants but rural/provincial disaffected men and women in their 20, 30s and 40s who attacked police from early morning and tried to break through the police lines that were searching demonstrators before they could enter the Champs Elysées. They were pushed back by police. More and more GJs arrived. The police were outnumbered. The Arc de Triomphe was tagged with graffiti and vandalised. At various points, police were pelted with acid, paint, iron bolts, stones, bottles. There was nothing spontaneous about that. Buildings around the Etoile were set briefly alight. Things seemed to calm then a mob went down the Avenue Kléber overturning and burning cars and smashing bank and shop and restaurant windows. I got in trouble for writing this was an insurrection, not a protest. But that’s what it felt like.
Then a further mob arrived from the multiracial inner suburbs– no demands, no political agenda, just scenting easy pickings. They smashed and looted shops all over Paris. Some of the shops and restaurants are still closed, two months later. From what I saw that day, police behaved with great restraint overall but were overwhelmed. Since then their tactics have become more aggressive, and more pro-active in stamping out any signs of violence. Their so-called defensive weapons – rubber bullets and stun grenades – have become a serious problem which the government has been too slow to recognise.
Before the next Saturday – Act 4 on December 8 – there were dark reports that this would indeed be an insurrection, using live weapons and explosives. Macron, shaken, visited the Elysée nuclear bunker the day before to make sure there was somewhere he could take refuge. In the event, 8 December was again a horrible, violent day – not just in Paris but in several cities. But it was not the feared revolution. The violence this time was mostly provoked by militia of the hard right and hard left. Some “ordinary” GJ’s waded in. Police were more aggressive in their response. But it was not the prelude to civil war that some had feared.
Since then there have been seven further Acts or Saturday protests or putsches, some more violent than others, some better supported than others. Violence has switched from Paris for the most part to provincial cities, especially Toulouse, Bordeaux, Caen, Rouen. Rennes. Regional variations in the movement are interesting. Alsace has barely been involved. The North and east generally have been relatively calm. Lille, for instance. Marseilles likewise. The areas of France which are traditionally strong for the far right have mobilised the least. Areas which are usually left-leaning – the southwest, Brittany – have been very militant for the Gilets Jaunes. So, another paradox, if you believe that this is largely a far-right movement….
Now, two months on, the roundabout rebellion is almost over. Support in rural areas is slackening. In Early December the count of yellow vests on car dashboards in my part of Normandy was 40%. It’s now 14%.
But support for the Saturdays Only putsches in cities, which fell away around Christmas, has recovered again. There were 84,000 on the streets of France two weekends running after the New Year and down to 69,000 last weekend.
ANALYSIS:
Is this just the French being the French? No. This movement is very French – but it’s also very un-French.
French… because it’s true that protest goes to the street in France more rapidly than in almost any other democratic country. That’s a tradition that goes back to 1789 but there were street rebellions in France throughout the 19th century up to the Commune in 1870 and then again in the 1930s, the Poujadistes in the early 1950s, the Algérie Française movement in the late 1950s/early 1960s and of course 1968. There is a default position in France that protest/ political/social demands will not be taken seriously without street demos and demos will not be taken seriously without a dose of violence.
In my 22 years in France, I’ve seen more or less violent demos by farmers, fishermen, wine producers, truck drivers, students, kids in the banlieues, sixth formers, chefs and even police officers. So, it is understandable/ predictable that a movement like the Gilets Jaunes, which started with petitions on the internet, would go rapidly from the virtual to the physical and then to the very physical.
But there is also something very un-French about the Gilets Jaunes movement, which resembles nothing I have seen in my 22 years in France.
Un- French… first of all, because it has broken all the usual unspoken and spoken rules of French manifestations and protests. They are usually choreographed within certain limits, with agreed venues and routes and marshals. Riots happen but they are predictable riots. The Gilets Jaunes refused from the beginning to be bound by any of these rules, though this – interestingly – is now changing. As a result, the movement, supposedly peaceful, rapidly allowed its own violent fringe as well as opportunist militia of hard right and hard left to take over.
The protests have been the most violent for 50 years or more – arguably even more violent, and has certainly been going on longer, than May 1968. And the violence is not limited to the Saturdays Only putsch in French cities. There have been scores of arson and other attacks on Macron- supporting MP’s offices. There have been attacks on motorways toll booths, newspapers, radio stations, a starred restaurant whose boss criticised the Gilets Jaunes, town halls, prefectures and other public buildings. The words terrorism has not been used – yet – but…. Imagine if the Yellow Vest movement, ethnically almost but not exclusively white, had been mostly brown or black. The word terrorism would have been for sure. You have to go back to Algérie Française and the OAS in the early 1960s to see such domestic political violence.
The responsibility of police? French police are rarely gentle. There have been scores of incidents of police brutality and misuse of their defensive weapons, flash balls and stun grenades. But, in all cases, this has been reaction or over-reaction to initial violence from the GJs and allies. There has been NO systematic attempt to repress protest as some GJ media and Russian media sites would have you believe. Any peaceful demonstration, including many illegal ones, have been left alone unless blocking traffic etc. But there is now a case for removing the rubber bullets and stun grenades – no longer used by other EU countries – before they cause a very grave incident indeed. Seventeen eyes and four hands have been lost so far. That is quite enough – whoever is initially responsible for the violence.
I’d say that the movement is also UNFRENCH – or at least atypical – because it has not come from the usual or expected sources of protest – unions, farmers, students, the multi-racial banlieues – but from a section of French society that is usually invisible, permanently grumpy but little engaged in politics. I mean rural, non-farming France. I means small town France. I mean outer suburban France. I mean many people who have not voted for years as well as many who have voted hard right or hard left and many who have recently voted centre right or centre left (but those twin pillars of French democracy have now virtually ceased to exist).
GJ’s do include people right at the bottom of society, the unemployed, the marginalised but more typically they are people who are above the bottom but think they should be doing better. People with jobs; artisans; small business people; technicians and people at lower-level of caring professionals. This mixture of supporters explains in part the heterogeneous character and demands of the movement, which in traditional terms points both left and right, to higher welfare payments and pensions but also to lower taxes, to less state and more state at the same time. Both Poujadist and workerist. There is no coherent ideology, even a refusal of ideology.
Some see this as a camouflage for a movement whose heart beats on the far right. Certainly, the two leading figures now left in the movement both young men in their early 30s have a record of support for far right, conspiracy politics. But at surface level at least many of the usual far right hot topics – migration, Islam, abortion, gay marriage, Europe – are not the first things that you hear on the lips of GJ.s. In many respects, the different programmes they have tried to draw up – including a new one in a gathering of Gilets Jaunes delegates from all over country in Commercy in Meuse last weekend – are heavily influenced by hard left. Anti-Semitism and violence were specifically condemned.
There is something else. In 22 years in France I think I have learned to recognise different social types. I know FN supporters when I see them. I know hard left supporters. There are people of both tribes in GJs. But also, many people who you would never expect to see in either of those camps. Many women especially.
What are the sources of grievance and how justified are they? Here it is difficult to prise apart French and un-French elements.
The words you do hear most often are “mépris” and “ras-le-bol”. Mépris means contempt. Gilets Jaunes are convinced, or have been convinced, that the little or middling people like them are held in contempt by the trendy, rich, globally oriented people of successful metropolitan France. That’s why, I think, Macron has sparked such anger and hatred. Not so much for what he has done in last 20 months but for what he represents and some of the things he has said. He typifies the kind of person that GJ’s didn’t like even before they were GJs or before there was Macron. The rich, clever, self-replicating people from the governing classes who’ve been to the finishing schools of governing elite and think they know everything.
I think the real reason why this grates so much is rarely expressed by Gilets Jaunes themselves but explains, if you like, the submerged, unrecognised frustration/anger of the movement. France may be an egalitarian country, but it is no longer a country of social mobility. That has got worse, not because of anything any recent French government has done, let alone Macron. He arguably recognised the problem and is trying to fix it – maybe clumsily.
Fact is that the collapse of a range of middling jobs, not just in France – banks clerks, secretaries, junior administrative, assistants – has removed several rungs from the ladder of advancement, especially for clever rural and outer suburban kids who don’t have skills or connections to make it in the high tech or financial service or luxury goods industries which are booming. Beyond that, there is a sense of local sources of pride and employment having vanished. There is a sense that the high living cost in cities has driven people into unlovely outer suburbs where services are poor and the cost of transport, especially road transport, is exploding.
These things, I think, explain some of the anger. They are rarely articulated by GJ’s themselves who prefer the kind of simple but dotty explanations they find on their Facebook “anger” sites. IE Politicians are living a high life at the expense of taxpayers. Brigitte Macron has a salary of Euros 550,000. Actual salary: zero.
And so, to the second word or phrase you hear. “Ras-le-bol” means sick to the teeth. It conveys a sense of having been pushed to the breaking point. In my experience, French people almost always have a sense of ras-le-bol about something or other. But the white-hot anger of the GJ movement is something new and different. Can only be explained I think by the silos of facing mirrors of social media sites, which fill head with exaggerated real grievances blended with utter bullshit. France has been sold to the UN, Alsace has been given back to Germany.
This bullshit is always accompanied by a message telling you that the mainstream media is lying. Thus, suspicion of mainstream media, already high, is cranked up to the point where journalists have become targets for GJ violence. Strangely, France now has more sources of mainstream media than ever before. Four 24 hours news channel for instance.
This has however helped to undermine the primacy and trust the nightly news on TF1 or France 2. Since all tend to present the Gilets Jaunes in same way – not rejecting them, but not accepting their exaggerations, contradictions and outright lies – this reinforces their conspiracy obsession, a feeling that the media is controlled, and journos are collaborators. None of this is a purely French phenomenon. It matches much of what has happened to radicalise opinion in the US and the UK and elsewhere.
France is more vulnerable because traditional party structure has disappeared; the Catholic church has virtually ceased to be an influence for order in rural France; trades unions are weak and divided and seen as workplace political parties rather than trades unions in the sense known elsewhere.
Finally, the Movement is UNFRENCH in another way. It rapidly moved from a protest movement with very specific demands – on fuel taxes, and cost of living 80 kph limit– to a revolutionary movement, a kind of Saturdays-only putsch, which seeks to bring down the Republican institutions and French representative democracy.
The view in much foreign media is that these are anti-Macron protests and they are. But they go way beyond him and call for the sluicing out of the entire political class left and right, even hard left and hard right, to be replaced by a bottom up direct democracy of permanent popular decisions by referenda. Thus, we have a revolution which did not just start on the internet and Facebook but wants to use the internet to impose a new form of government (and yet is at same time anti-Globalist, anti-Facebook and nostalgic for a simpler, more traditional kind of France). Yet another paradox.
This is rather French because the French love abstraction and ideology. The GJ ideology is to say they have no ideology and adopt a cult-like belief in the possibility of a permanent on-line government by the people – while no two groups of GJ’s can agree anything between themselves.
This is rejection of mainstream politics is by no means exclusively French. There is a similarity between the Gilets Jaunes and the pro-Brexit blue collar and rural vote in Britain and the MAGA pro Trump vote in the US rust belt and flyover states. Also, with the Five Star movement in Italy.
But there are also national differences between these part-nationalist movements against globalism. Unlike Brexiteers, Gilets Jaunes are not obsessed by migration and Europe. Unlike, the Trump supporters, Gilets Jaunes speak little of cultural divisions. Gays, guns and God hardly figure. Unlike, the Five Star movement, the GJ’s do not come from the bobo-disaffected urban ex-left
WHERE NOW?
The movement is splitting. Some have decided to enter the mainstream political system to try to reform it or destroy it from the inside. One moderate GJ list already declared for the European elections in May. Another more right-wing list is in preparation. Paradoxically, this is likely to help Macron. He has already recovered from his shock – both personally and in the polls.
He has made concessions. He has started a Great National Debate which is going well and taken some of the wind out of GJ sails. But government is divided on whether to take the findings of the debate seriously and act upon them. Or just say that’s what we thought and go ahead with Macron’s reform, programme as planned. If it goes that way, there could be another explosion in summer.
Other GJ’s are furious and still believe they can somehow bring down the French state, by demonstrations each Saturday. This militant end of the movement seeks to use police violence to stoke anger and reignite a flagging movement. And there is a danger that a grave incident will tip the fading crisis into more tragic calamitous territory.
OVERALL
The movement has many French characteristics, but it is wrong to see it as wholly or even mostly a French phenomenon. There are obvious comparisons with US, Britain, Italy. Evident that Russia has been trying to exploit the unrest. Evident that there is far right influence.
But it is wrong to see the Gilets Jaunes movement as having been manipulated from the beginning. There are genuine grievances, even if misunderstood and exaggerated by the GJ’s themselves. There is a bewilderment at a more complex world that seems to be leaving large tranches of France behind. Ingrid Levavasseur, leader of the Gilets Jaunes list for the European elections says: “The most important single issue – That we should feel recognised and valued.”
What scares me is not the fact of the GJ movement – not the fact of the anger – but the fact of the fury, the white-hot fury. We speak a great deal about radicalisation, especially of young Muslims etc. But what explains the radicalisation of home carers and garage mechanics in small towns who don’t understands the basics of how their own country’s political and tax system works but know they’re out of the loop, left behind. They have been persuaded that they are being cheated, conspired against.
This is partly explained by lack of trusted guides such as political parties, media, church, unions – to shape public opinion. But the white-hot anger can only be explained by the facing mirrors, the multiplier effect, the compound or viral effect of social media. Thus, the Gilets Jaunes is a French crisis but also part of a wider, existential crisis for all 21st century economies and democracies.
UPDATE: Jeremy Harding has a lengthy enquête in the March 21st London Review of Books, “Among the Gilets Jaunes,” that is well worth the read.
2nd UPDATE: University College London held a conference on June 6th on “‘Left-behind Britain’ and ‘France Périphérique’: Challenging representations of social-territorial divides in convoluted times,” with informative interventions by social scientists (and a journalist) on the Gilets Jaunes. It may be viewed on video here.
Excellent summary. My feeling — it’s past time for the GJ to stop. Enough, already.
Thanks. I agree with you. Walking back my blanket characterization of the GJs as extreme-right does not mean that I’m not fed up with them and their weekly demos, which, in addition to being pointless, are causing real prejudice to commerçants and the state (with the overtime pay, among other things, that has to paid to the police, and the bill for which will naturally be footed by the contribuables). Borrowing from Maurice Thorez, il faut savoir terminer un mouvement social….
Excellent.
But… why does it last ? why do 64% of the French still support the G.J according to polls ? That is “inédit”…
Merci. I thought the GJ’s ‘approval rating’ had dropped into the low 50s. If it’s still in the 60s, that corresponds to Macron’s disapproval rating. The GJs are a proxy.
I am extremely worried about the future of this movement. The conjunction of violence, not simply during demonstrations but also and perhaps most importantly against elected officials, of massive numbers of severely wounded demonstrators, of total rejection of organisation and programatic demands, all suggest to me that a part, small perhaps, of this movement will mutate in the months or years to come into organised terrorism, to some extent in a similar way to some Russian movements of the 19th century.
Back in the 1970s, there was a collective decision at the time of Overney’s death to renounce what we called the armed struggle, which is why France never had terrorism like Germany and Italy had (Action Directe was a tiny movement, something of a bad joke compared to the RAF or the Brigadisti). Two major reasons why such a decision could be made and why it stuck was that the extreme left was highly organised in those times and led by people who could actually think. The GJ have neither organisation nor thought, which is why I suspect the future looks bleak indeed.
Like most others, I thought in December that the movement would fizzle by Christmas. Maybe now by the summer, though that leaves plenty of Saturdays for the GJs and other casseurs to do a lot of damage, even with just a few thousand demonstrators. The longer it continues, the more Macron, as the Party of Order, is likely to be reinforced. As for a descent into terrorism à la AD or RAF, I don’t see it. The historical context is entirely different, not to mention demographic (the GJs are too old to take up second careers in armed struggle) and ideological (of which the GJs have none). As for why Germany and Italy were different from France back then, I think their experience with fascism/Nazism had something to do with it.
Chalencon. Never underestimate the capacity for madness.
Hello, I read that piece quite late, so my reaction will be a bit out of time. A lot of very good points actually imho, both from you Arun and from Mr Lichfield.
I would absolutely question the idea that the GJ movement “seeks to bring down the Republican institutions and French representative democracy.” Why? They sing the Marseillaise all the time! Requesting a right to referenda is no serious demolition of representative democracy (or Switzerland would be an anarchy since so long).
I congratulate Mr Lichfield for having noticed the equal participation of women in this movement. Which is as far as I know, something absolutely new in French politics, at least regarding lasting movements. Jean Lassalle had also noticed that since the beginning and I had wrongly attributed that to imprecise expression or unfinished sentences. “Ça ressemble à la France. C’est une France qui se réveille de nouveau, qui a envie de reprendre son destin en main. Ces hommes, ces femmes, ces jeunes… Ces femmes, elles ne sont pas là pour subir, elles ne veulent pas non plus prendre le pouvoir, elles ne veulent plus être traitées comme moins que rien, comme ils disent : comme des sous-merdes.” (around Nov. 27th on Yahoo! news)
Frédéric: A belated thanks for your comment. Take a look at Jeremy Harding’s piece on the GJ, linked to in the update above.