JUNE 8 2019 LISTENER 23
T
hey’ve been at it for more
than six months. Every
Saturday, in Paris and in
many towns and cities across
France, protesters gather
for mass marches, wearing
gilets jaunes, fluorescent
reflective vests that the law
requires all motorists to carry in their
cars. Their uniform is now being copied
elsewhere in Europe: during the European
Union elections last week, police in the
Belgian capital, Brussels, clashed with
demonstrators who have become known
by the name of their vests.
Almost 300,000 attended the first march
on November 17 and nationwide the
Saturday average remains about 35,000.
They continued to challenge the authority of
President Emmanuel Macron as he and New
Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern were
leading their Christchurch Call social media
summit in Paris. And although gilet jaunes
candidates failed to make a mark in the EU
elections, Macron’s centrist party was beaten
into second place by the French far right.
So, are these demonstrations a popular
revolution, or just a general, vague
expression of the French term “ras-le-bol”- being fed up or pissed off?
It depends on who you talk to. When I
visited France late last year, my taxi driver
from Orly Airport to central Paris had very
firm views. They’re just bloody nuisances,
he fumed, with police blocking off main
roads and forcing him to navigate through
obscure backstreets.
Shopkeepers and restaurateurs in Toulouse
and Bordeaux in the south-west, were
equally furious at the way their businesses
were being disrupted every Saturday by
street closures. Banks and some shops were
regularly boarded up for the day.
Even the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bor-
deaux was forced to shut on protest days,
because it backs onto the town hall where
the city’s gilets jaunes assemble, in an almost
carnival atmosphere, to wave banners and
chant as police helicopters buzz overhead
and riot squads assemble. They gather on
the Place de la Bourse, next to the Garonne
river, for their long march through the city
to the town hall, shouting slogans amid the
explosive booms of pétards – large firecrack-
ers that sound like artillery shells – that are
regularly thrown along the route.
The marches can turn violent: on
December 8, 70 people were arrested and
26 injured in clashes with police who fired
GE
TTY (^) I
MA
GE
S
Under siege:
French President
Emmanuel Macron.
tear gas to disperse the protesters. As the
demonstrations continued into 2019,
Bordeaux’s popular mayor, Alain Juppé,
announced his resignation, a year before
the end of his third consecutive term, to take
up a position in the national government.
LUNATIC FRINGE
Any mass protest movement attracts a
violent fringe. In January, the French press
concentrated on “casseurs” (smashers, or
vandals) from both the far right and the far
left – small, destructive groups who have
attached themselves to some of the gilet
jaunes demonstrations, especially in Paris.
These groups include everybody from neo-
nazis to “bloc noir” anarchists and militant
anti-fascist Antifa. They smash shop
windows, daub slogans, fight with police
and sometimes overturn and burn cars.
According to the centre-left magazine
L’Express, by February, more than 3000
members of these fringe groups had been
arrested. In that month, Prime Minister
Édouard Philippe sponsored strong “anti-
casseur” laws, extending police powers of
arrest when demonstrations turn violent.
In the endless panel discussions that
dominate some French TV channels, these
measures were condemned as an attack on
civil liberties, but the laws passed.
Responding to more riots in February and
March, Interior Minister Christophe Castaner
ordered that gilets jaunes be forbidden from
marching up the Champs-Élysées. After fire
gutted Notre-Dame, they were also banned
from the Île de la Cité on which the cathedral
stands. A contingent was involved in the big
Paris May Day riot, when there were 380
arrests. But that was less a gilets jaunes affair
than the usual confrontation between police
and the militant left that happens on most
May Days.
RURAL RAGE
As for the gilets jaunes themselves, they are
an amorphous bunch, channelling
many different forms of discontent.
They are “all things to all people”,
according to political journalist
They smash shop
windows, daub slogans,
fight with police and
sometimes overturn
and burn cars.
Thomas Legrand. When the protests
began, the yellow vests were worn in what
was essentially a rural outcry at tighter speed
limits, the increased number of speed cameras
on country roads and a new carbon tax.
Macron claimed all these measures were
necessary to protect the environment, but
in France’s towns and villages, his ecological
motives were questioned. The new regula-
tions were seen as raising petrol prices and
forcing growers of primary produce to pay
more to transport their goods to cities.
In a long think-piece in the New York
Review of Books, James McAuley, the
Washington Post’s Paris correspondent,
characterised gilets jaunes as mainly lower-
middle-class people who had been driven
out of cities by gentrification and rising
house prices. Although this might have
been true to begin with, their modest acts of
dissent transformed into a general rejection
of Macron’s whole economic agenda.
In Paris, media outlets initially dismissed
gilets jaunes as unsophisticated bumpkins
who knew nothing about finance and pol-
itics. Yet, there was something ambiguous
about their contempt. It was often mixed
with the same growing criticism of Macron’s
government that the protesters display. In
January, the mass circulation magazine Le
Point ran an editorial scolding gilets jaunes
for naively imagining that there was unlim-
ited wealth the government could draw on to
raise pensions. But a long cover story in the
same issue was headed “C’est qui le patron?”
(So, who’s the boss?). It depicted Macron as
the helpless puppet of technocrats.
This is the problem. In the general
election of May 2017, Macron’s new party,
La République En Marche, thrashed the
centre-left Socialist Party and centre-right
Republicans (formerly Gaullists) to take over
France’s lower house, the National Assembly,