2 November/3 November 2019 ★ † FT Weekend 3
Life
P
ast graffiti-covered ware-
houses and wholesale super-
stores; past railway sidings,
public housing blocks and a
shanty town. This is a subur-
ban railway journey from central Paris,
through the grim outskirts and into the
resentfulgilets jaunes ountry of small-c
town France, neither prosperous nor
poor. There are no taxis at the station, so
I walk through a litter-strewn wood and
across a deserted industrial estate to
reach my destination.
Priscillia Ludosky has set our rendez-
vous for lunch in the unremarkable Bois
Sénart shopping centre near her home
in Savigny-le-Temple, south-east of
Paris. I sense that this is not going to be
the sort of Lunch with the FT where film
stars and financiers greet us discreetly
from across the restaurant while we are
attended by a solicitous chef.
I have been trying for months to meet
Ludosky to try to understand thegilets
jaunes prising that has shaken Presi-u
dent Emmanuel Macron’s government
since November last year. She helped
launch the movement with an online
petition against rising fuel prices for
motorists — caused partly by Macron’s
carbon tax — that garnered more than
1m signatures andtriggered the first big
gilets jaunesmarch through Paris on
November 17.
Her demand struck a chord among
residents of France’s small towns, who
depend on their cars to go about their
daily lives and feel neglected by Macron’s
elitecoterie of scooter-riding twenty-
and thirtysomethings ensconced in a
French capital well served by public
transport. That was why thegilet jaune—
the high-visibility yellow waistcoat that
must be carried by all motorists in case of
accidents — became the movement’s
enduring symbol.
Many of the demonstrators were
angry. A large number at the start were
elderly backers of the far-right, anti-
immigration Rassemblement National
party of Marine Le Pen, while the recent
demonstrations in Paris were more
influenced by anarchists and the far left.
Ludosky, a 33-year-oldentrepreneur
and former back-office employee in the
investment banking arm of BNP Pari-
bas, is none of these things.S
he is certainly not angry when,
in dreadlocks, casual shirt and
jeans, she greets me cheerfully
at the mall’s Columbus Café,
our lunch venue. Nor, she
says, has she so far been tempted by
repeated offers to join French political
parties of left and right, although my
research suggests she is the most politi-
cally and economically coherent of the
motley collection ofgilets jauneswho
have periodically emerged as unofficial
leaders of the movement.
It was a difficult uprising to manage —
and difficult for the government to sup-
press. Protesters staked out suburban
roundabouts. Every Saturday for
months, thousands descended on city
centres from suburbs and small towns
across the country with an expanding
and sometimes contradictory set of
demands: they wanted Macron to
resign; they wanted lower taxes and
more public services; they wanted refer-
endums among citizens to supplant the
decisions of their elected (and overpaid,
they thought) representatives.
So how on earth did a child of immi-
grants from Martinique, living in the
suburban Seine-et-Marnedépartement,
come to launch this popular uprising —
one hatt sent Macron into a funk for
weeks,and echoed the UK and US rebel-
lions against the metropolitan elite crys-
tallised in Brexit and the election of
Donald Trump?
We are alone in the clean, well-lit and
desperately bland café. I disconsolately
examine the ham and cheese ciabattas
in their paper bags that we have chosen
as our main course. Was she surprised, I
ask, by the response to that call for the
first big protests?
“Yes,” she says. “I was deluged with
emails and requests via Messenger fromAmerican-style cookies, she concludes:
“I find him very disconnected from real-
ity, from people on the ground.”
Drouet talked of marching on the
Élysée Palace and was convicted in Sep-
tember of carrying a wooden club.
Ludosky favours negotiation over con-
frontation. She has already met two
ministers in the course of the crisis and
only cancelled a meeting with Édouard
Philippe, Macron’s prime minister,
when he insisted on excluding the press.
Ludosky and others have this week
requested a meeting with Macron
before the first anniversary to address
the issue of police violence nd take intoa
account the protesters’ demands.U
nlike some of the other
gilets jaunes, Ludosky —
who worked on letters of
credit in her 11 years at BNP
Paribas after a diploma in
international trade — rises to the chal-
lenge when asked by sceptics such as
myself how protesters can demand both
lower taxes and more public services.
“People are not saying they don’t want
to pay taxes,” she retorts. “They’re say-
ing ‘What are you doing with the taxes?’
When there’s no street lighting, or no
childcare facilities or a shortage of hos-
pitals and you’re building four unneces-
sary roundabouts, that’s what we’re
complaining about. So, yes, we’re asking
to put a stop to tax rises until you justify
what you’re doing.”
As for taxes, she wants to know what
the government means when it says it is
spending the money on the “transition”
to cleaner energy. “Given there’s no pub-
lic transport in the countryside what
exactly are they financing for this transi-
tion?” Ludosky, in short, is not opposed
on principle to environmental policies
but resents their imposition by a heed-
less elite that has not thought about the
consequences on the ground.
I have read that since leaving the bank
Ludosky has been running a small aro-
matherapy and cosmetics business from
her home, and I am curious — as we turn
to our espressos — to know whether she
has managed to make it work amid the
distractions of running a revolution.
She laughs. “Well, until April or May I
had no life, I was 300 per centgilet jaune,
I put my shop on hold — and I had just
launched my aromatherapy advice page
but I’ve never advised anyone because I
didn’t have time. From May onwards, I
began to ease off and to choose projects
that I really wanted to pursue for the
gilets jaunes ovement.m
“Right now, I’m earning nothing.
When I left BNP I got two years of sup-
port for creating a new business [via a
government programme] and the two
years are up in November.”
But has it all been worth it? udosky —L
who is neither Polish nor married to a
Pole, and whose name probably derives
from one of the first slaves freed in Mar-
tinique — says she has been strongly
supported by family and friends amid a
flurry of TV debates and interviews.
I ask whether the publicity has
exposed her to racist abuse, and I recall
that there has been violence and intoler-
ance on all sides: at onegilets jaunes
march in Paris in February, the French
philosopher Alain Finkielkraut was
subjected to an anti-Semitic tirade by agilet jaunetelling him to “go back to Tel
Aviv”. Ludosky shrugs. There has been“
some of that, but fewer than the insults
without racist connotations. Mostly I
was insulted by people because they
were pro-Macron.”
Although she wants to go back to
making her living, Ludoskyis helping to
prepare “a big deal” of a first anniver-
sary demonstration on November 17.
(The most recentgilets jaunes rotestsp
have attracted only a few hundred par-
ticipants in the biggest cities.) In the
longer term, she wants to establish a
“citizens’ lobby” group to address prob-
lems she thinks are not dealt with by the
authorities and parties in power.
“The idea,” she says, “is to create a
network all over France... to mobilise
people on local issues that are very, very,
very neglected. It’s something I realised
when I wandered around everywhere to
demonstrate withgilets jaunes n thei
south, the east, the west, the north.
They often said to me when we have a
problem in ourdépartement, no one
gives a damn. Some have extremely
serious unemployment. In other places
like the south they are breathing pol-
luted air and are all sick. In Carcas-
sonne, it’s arsenic that is contaminating
the land and the water.”
Before we go our separate ways, I ask
if she has hopes, ambitions or fears for
the future. “Worries.. .Not for me, for
France,” she replies, explaining that the
country known for its 1789 revolutionand now for thegilets jauneshas a
responsibility to show the way for oth-
ers, including the young Hong Kong
democracy activist who sought her out
at the end of last year.
“There’s something I perhaps didn’t
mention a moment ago, and that is that
in going here and there and meeting
people from other countries, lots of peo-
ple said to me, ‘We’re watching you,
we’re using you as an example for deal-
ing with our own problems, and the fact
that you dared to say something’... This man waited for me and said,
‘Hello, I’m from Hong Kong, I’m passing
through and I just want to know how the
movement started.’ ”
With Hong Kong’s uprising against
China’s heavy-handed rule in full
swing, and the world in turmoil from
Brazil to Brexit Britain, she has given
me food for thought.
“It’s true, things are boiling over eve-
rywhere,” she says, and heads across the
corridor of the mall to do her shopping
while I start for home. It is only 40km
away but it will take two hours, and
Ludosky has already convinced me that
the distance between central Paris and
the Seine-et-Marne heartland of the
gilets jaunes s measured in more thani
kilometres or minutes.
Victor Mallet is the FT’s Paris bureau chief‘It’s allowed people to
express themselves
because ordinary peopledon’t usually get access to
the media to put theirpoint of view’
A year of protests by the ‘gilets
jaunes’ has shaken France. Over
ham and cheese ciabattas in the Paris
suburbs, the activist whose petitionhelped inspire the movement tells
Victor Malletabout forging a new
fraternité — and why this has strucka chord around the world
COLUMBUS CAFÉ
Bois Sénart shopping centre,
Cesson, FranceLunch formule x2 €17
cham and mozzarella
ciabatta x2
c darkchocolate fleur de sel
cookie
cmilk chocolate and
hazlenut cookie
c Minute Maid apple juice
cFanta lemon
cespresso x2
Total €17loads of people who shared their experi-
ences and said, ‘We’re going to take to
the streets, but you know we’re not
going to do it just because of the petrol
price, or the environment, but because
of everything that’s wrong’ — and the
main subject was the cost of living.
“People said, ‘We’ve got to the stage
where even if you earn €2,000 a month
you can’t make ends meet because there
are too many taxes, too many expenses,
we’re completely crushed, and when you
do the shopping or go to the doctor you
have to pay in instalments’. Eventually
people said, ‘We can’t take it any more.’ ”
So Ludosky teamed up with Eric
Drouet — a truck driver also from Seine-
et-Marne who had created a acebookF
page calling for a national blockade over
rising fuel prices, but with whom she has
since fallen out — to launch the protests
across France. “I was in Paris myself and
we came singing the Marseillaise on the
Champs-Elysées, and we were suffo-
cated with tear gas.”
Her original contribution, a detailed
fuel-price petition setting out the envi-
ronmental and fiscal arguments, had an
inauspicious start when she published it
online in May last year. A few hundred
relatives, friends and acquaintances
signed up before France went on holiday
in July and August. She later distributed
it more widely via Facebook and was
interviewed by a local radio station and
the local newspaper. But it was only
when her story was picked up by Le
Parisien, a national paper, that “the
number of signatures exploded”.S
natching a bite of ciabatta —
fresh butflavourless — and a
sip of lemonade to the sound
of the shopping mall’s tinkling
muzak, I ask Ludosky the
obvious question: can thegilets jaunes
phenomenon e counted a success as itsb
first anniversary approaches?
I expect her to boast about Macron’s
climbdown on the fuel tax and his subse-
quent attempts to defuse public anger
with some €25bn of tax cuts and extra
spending plans aimed at the working
middle class. Instead, she talks about the
way the protests have brought together
France’s disparate communities.
“I wouldn’t call it a success, but it’s
changed quite a lot of things,” she says.
“What’s changed is that people have
come out of solitude and isolation to
share their problems. And they have
helped each other, there has been a
great movement of solidarity and frater-
nity which basically didn’t exist in
France because people are so tied up in
their daily lives, their worries, and then
their work, work, work that peopledon’t talk to each other any more.
“It’s also meant that different types of
people get together who never normally
meet. When you think that there have
been discussions, conferences and
movements organised between
working-class people and members of
the elite, that’s unheard of in France.”
She chews her own ciabatta. “In fact it’s
incredible to see these kind of things,
and it’s allowed people to express them-
selves because ordinary people don’t
usually get access to the media to put
their point of view.”
Like manygilets jaunesprotesters,
Ludosky has a complicated relationship
with the media. The weekly marches
have been organised largely over social-
media platforms such as Facebook, and
the movement has been generously cov-
ered n 24-hour television news sta-o
tions. But she complains that news bul-
letins tend to summarise a six-hour
march with a 90-second video clip
showing clashes between police and
rioters after mostgilets jauneshave gone
home. “Thegilets jaunesis not just about
burning rubbish bins,” she says.
And what about Macron, the man who
revolutionised French politics with an
insurgent campaign from the previously
invisible liberal centre to win the 2017
elections? Does she hate him as much as
her fellowgilets jaunesseem to?
“At the beginning, when people
shouted ‘Macron resign!’ and told me
‘We don’t hear you shouting with us’, I
said, ‘I’m not out here particularly so
that Macron resigns, I’m here to con-
demn the problems I’ve been talking
about, whether it’s him or someone else
in charge’... But now, given the way
he’s handled the news and dealt with the
gilets jaunes risis, yes, today I think itc
would be good if he did resign, and espe-
cially [Christophe] Castaner [the inte-
rior minister] as well.”
Police weapons, including so-called
“Flash-Balls” that shoot projectiles for
crowd control, caused hundreds of eye
and other injuries among protesters.
Not that the demonstrators have been
entirely peaceable: some attacked
police and went on the rampage in city
centres, notoriously sacking shops along
the Champs-Elysées and defacing the
Arc de Triomphe on December 1.
Macron, Ludosky says, was at first in
denial over thegilets jaunes, then scorn-
ful, and then decided to defuse the pro-
tests with his nationwide “great debate”,
a two-month consultation exercise that
she dismisses as an “enormous con-
trick” and a chance for the president to
put on a “one-man show” (she uses the
English term) of his rhetorical skills. As
we embark onour intensely sweetLunch with the FT riscillia LudoskyP
‘Things are boiling over
everywhere’
NOVEMBER 2 2019 Section:Weekend Time: 11/20191/ - 15:14 User:andrew.higton Page Name:WKD3, Part,Page,Edition:WKD, 3, 1