PhotographGetty Images>> Britain are perplexed about how a whole
movement can have been mobilised by what
is widely understood here to be irritation at
the rising price of diesel.
“What the gilets jaunes represent,” he says,
“is universal. What are we asking for? For
people to earn a salary that allows them to eat
properly and put a roof over their kids’ heads;
basic provision for the unemployed; an end to
this obscene situation where people are left on
hospital trolleys through a lack of medical
staff; the abolition of extortionate prices for
privatised gas and electricity. We have a word
for this vision. It’s called humanity.”
In the several demonstrations I attended,
beginning in late March of this year, the
common message from the gilets jaunes was
not so much a questioning of their own disil-
lusion with the French state, as bewilderment
that the British – who they understand to be
suffering similar privations in the form of food
banks, deteriorating healthcare and charges
for basic utilities – are not just as furious as
they are.Paris’ Montparnasse Station, on
the morning of 1 May, was the
assembly point for a workers’
day march dominated by the
gilets jaunes, where numbers
were well in excess of 40,000. In a gesture
that was unsporting even by their own
standards, the CRS surrounded the gath-
ering demonstrators, who were in festive
mood, blocked off all exits, then teargassed
us before we had even set off. (In the words
of one retired CRS officer, speaking off the
record: “If you resort to using teargas, that is
already an admission of defeat.”)
One of the people choking from the fumes
that day was Françoise, a woman in her late
sixties from the eastern town of Belfort. She
told me that half her meals consisted of bread,
water and coffee and that she was “frightened
and ashamed” at the thought that her children
might discover how she lived. In England, she
asked, were there people struggling? I told her
about the food banks. “Are they out protest-
ing?” she asked. “Why not?”
Some might be surprised to see someone of
her age attending what promised to be a fairly
intimidating event. “You don’t have to be
young to be in the street,” she said. “And you
don’t have to be in the street to get hurt. Look
at that lady from Marseille.” (Zineb Redouane,
80, was killed in Marseille in December 2018;
she was trying to close her shutters when she
was struck in the face by a teargas grenade.)
By coincidence, an hour after that conversa-
tion, I saw a group of middle-aged women
who had chosen to while away the public
holiday by taking drinks on their fourth-floor
balcony and watching the gilets jaunes proceeddown the Boulevard du Montparnasse. They
were interrupted when a teargas grenade- fired, you can only assume, by a CRS marks-
man blessed with a mischievous sense of
humour – exploded on the side of their build-
ing, a few metres away from them.
The massive deployment of riot police does
seem to have put an end to the serious damage
to property, such as the torching of Fouquet’s
brasserie on the Champs-Elysées on 16 March.
Such actions are usually precipitated by “black
bloc” activists – young anticapitalists who
have borrowed the tactics and sombre dress
code from groups that have led protests in
Berlin and London since the Eighties. At the
gilets jaunes Actes in Paris, the black bloc
represent a small minority. The gilets jaunes
themselves are, with the very occasional
exception, not confrontational, predominantly
white but ethnically mixed, of all ages and
comprising a fair balance of men and women.
Their attitudes towards the sprinkling of black
bloc activists vary, but most are sympathetic.
“We see them as protection,” Rodrigues told
me, “against the police.”
In the weeks I was out with the protestors,
the most threatening experience I encoun-
tered was to find myself in a group of gilets
jaunes close to the Place de la Bastille and
having to flee down a side street to escape
around 20 CRS who were charging at us for
reasons that were unclear. Street medics are
singled out by the CRS: I’ve seen them robbed
of their protective eye masks, verbally abused
and, in one instance, struck on the head. In
most cities, when things get intense, an inter-
national press card will get you to the calmer
side of a police line. Here, it’s a matter of the
mood of the officers in the cordon.
I was present at Acte XXIII on 24 April,
when the CRS kettled (the French use the
phrase la nasse, literally “keepnet”) thousands
of us in the Place de la République. For two
hours they lobbed in teargas grenades, occa-
sionally launching baton charges. Gaspard
Glanz, a freelance cameraman sympathetic to
the gilets jaunes, gesticulated at a CRS officer
and was dragged away in handcuffs. It’s
common for riot police to remove the unique
identifying number they are required to
display on the breast of their uniform. “Thingscan get lost,” one said, explaining what had
happened to his ID patch.
I soon stopped taking along an eye mask:
they are routinely confiscated by the police
and there’s a general perception that wearing
protective equipment makes you a more inter-
esting target. I never wore a yellow vest at a
demonstration (aside from anything else, even
having one at a demonstration now enables
the police to fine you ¤135 should they so
wish) and, like most of the print media, I soon
discarded my press armband.
“There are two groups singled out for special
treatment, the street medics and the media,”
said David Dufresne, one of France’s most dis-
tinguished journalists. Dufresne is a leading
authority on French policing and cofounded
the highly respected French news site
Mediapart. “People have had recording equip-
ment smashed, memory cards snapped and
have been beaten and shot at with LBDs.
Reporters Sans Frontières has documented
well over 100 cases of journalists who have
had serious problems. The prevailing climate
in the police,” he added, “is particularly hostile
to the press.”
The gilets jaunes are no angels: one after-
noon in late May I sat in a café opposite the
main police headquarters with the movement’s
most prominent feminist activist, Sophie
Tissier. Tissier, who has criticised some gilets
jaunes for excessive machismo, showed me film
of herself being slapped by a male comrade she
had somehow irritated. Footage of the violence
on the Champs-Elysées in the early spring
speaks for itself. But in the time I spent on the
streets of Paris, the only physical aggression I
witnessed was dispensed by the forces of law.The gilet jaune movement began on
24 October 2018, when Ghislain
Coutard, a truck driver from
Narbonne, south of Montpellier,
stuck in traffic and angered by his
conditions of work and, specifically, increased
tax on diesel, posted a rant live on Facebook.
As a choice of symbol the high-vis jacket was
inspired. They are everywhere: since 2008
every French motorist has been required
to have one in their vehicle. They’re cheap
and – unlike black, brown or red shirts – are
associated with safety and wellbeing rather
than insurrection.
Coutard was not a born activist and these
days his Facebook page contains posts offer-
ing sports cars for sale and that clip of a dog
playing Jenga. If there’s one thing that unites
the current gilets jaunes, it’s a detestation of
Macron and Castaner. The notion that Macron
may deem it legitimate to teargas, beat and
maim civilians is confirmed, in the minds of
most protestors, by the notorious YouTube
clip that shows the president’s then deputy >>‘ Twenty-four peoplehave lost an eye.Five have had a limbblown off.Thousands havebeen injured’GILETS JAUNES08-19FeatureRobertChalmers.indd 167 05/07/2019 15:22
SEPTEMBER 2019 GQ.CO.UK 161