<nettime> John Lichfield: Who Are the Gilets Jaunes? (Guardian)

[Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

My reason to 'filter' this article to the list is that it gives a useful 
round-up of the somewhat convoluted nature of the French Gilets Jaunes 
movement. It's up to to reader to fill in or dissent with some 
interpretative elements. I for one, do not agree with Lichfield's take 
on the 'fed up' (a simpler translation for 'ras le bol') feeling which I 
think is all too real and all too justified. That rural France is 
culturally urbanizing and at the same time (infra)structurally 
desertifying is fact, not fiction.

Whatever one thinks of the GJ movement, my friend JNM would probably say 
that it's all part of the 'effondrement' ...



Original to:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/09/who-really-are-the-gilets-jaunes

Just who are the gilets jaunes?

In just weeks they have brought upheaval to France and President Macron 
to tear up key reforms. Now they have caused the worst rift between 
France and Italy since the second world war. We unravel the story of the 
yellow-vest protests

by John Lichfield, The Guardian, Sat 9 Feb 2019

The gilets jaunes movement is the longest-running protest in France 
since the second world war. It has lasted for 13 weeks but has mobilised 
fully for only 13 days – all of them Saturdays.

In the protesters’ own eyes, this is not a protest. It is an 
insurrection which happens mostly at the weekends. Through a series of 
Saturday putsches, the yellow vests hope not merely to bring down 
President Emmanuel Macron but to rip up the constitution of the Fifth 
Republic and replace representative democracy with popular government. 
Their support, always limited compared with previous French rebellions, 
is waning. They will not give up easily or soon. They are mostly 
peaceful, but acts and words of great violence are committed and spoken.

There is no simple explanation for the gilets jaunes. It is not a 
monolithic, single-minded movement. It has no leadership structure, no 
single, accepted programme of demands. That’s what makes it fascinating. 
And worrying.

In May last year, a young businesswoman of French West Indian origin, 
Priscillia Ludosky, 31, placed a petition online complaining about the 
high cost of petrol and diesel in France. Reaction – practically 
nothing. Ludosky is a calm young woman with dreadlocks who runs her own 
cosmetics business from home. She is an unlikely pioneer for a populist 
movement which is sometimes accused of being racist and far right (as 
parts of it undoubtedly are).

In October she was contacted by Eric Drouet, a 33-year-old lorry driver, 
who teamed up with her to 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 gilets jaunes.

There is confusion in France about whether he should be seen as far 
right or far left. Drouet’s original motivation may well have been his 
car obsession rather than his politics. Pre-gilets jaunes, he was a 
loud-mouthed young man more likely to watch Top Gear than to read Das 
Kapital or Mein Kampf.

By the time he intervened, petrol prices were spiking because of a rise 
in world oil prices. Ludosky’s original petition exploded online, 
attracting hundreds of thousands of signatures.

It was Drouet, from Melun in the brie cheese country east of Paris, who 
thought of the idea of a nationwide protest against fuel taxes on 17 
November. Someone else had the brilliant PR idea of dressing everyone up 
in the yellow hi-vis vests that French motorists must by law carry in 
their cars. Petrol prices rapidly set alight other grievances in rural 
and outer suburban France, some concrete, some more existential: a lack 
of public services, the high cost of living, a new tax on some pensions, 
the fact that Macron had partially abolished a tax on wealth. No one 
should underestimate the importance of a decision last July to reduce 
the two-lane speed limit in France from 90kph to 80kph.

This aroused a long-simmering belief in “peripheral France” that the 
countryside and outer suburbs are somehow subsidising the insolent 
success of the cities. Speeding fines, in this rural view, are just 
another way of taxing ploucs or pecnos – yokels or rednecks. There is 
also a belief that lower and middle France is taxed unfairly in favour 
of the rich.

Both beliefs are factually untrue. If anything, the rich subsidise the 
public services of the poor and lower-middle. The metropolitan areas 
subsidise peripheral France.

But it is true that energy, life and local sources of wealth have been 
sucked out of large swathes of France in recent decades – as they have 
in parts of Britain or the United States. All this 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 – a 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 283,000 people across 
France. This figure has never been reached since. It was impressive but 
fell well below the numbers that have turned out for other social 
protests in the last 20 years. Its significance was that it took place 
not just 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”.

People who had previously felt powerless felt abruptly powerful because 
they could hold up cars and lorries at a roundabout. People who had been 
invisible became highly visible in their hi-vis vests.

Here is our second paradox. The gilets jaunes are an internet-spawned 
and driven movement. They could not have existed before Facebook 
existed. But their attraction is that they are also something tangible, 
a social club as well as a social protest.

The gilets jaunes were brought to a white-heat pitch of anger by the 
halls of facing mirrors of “anger groups” online. But they also allowed 
people to escape from the isolation of their terminals or smartphones to 
come together and do things.

The 17 November protests – Act One – were mostly peaceful. There was 
little violence, except a few scuffles with police in Paris and with 
motorists on blocked roundabouts. The government stood back and allowed 
the protests to happen, even though the gilets jaunes deliberately 
defied the law which demands advance permissions for large gatherings.

It is important to remember this when gilets jaunes and Russian news 
sites allege that Macron has tried to “suppress” the movement.

On 24 November, Act Two of the movement, there was some violence in 
Paris. Police responded robustly to being attacked by a militant fringe 
of protesters on the Champs-Élysées. There were several serious injuries 
from police weapons. This was treated on GJ sites as deliberate police 
violence and repression, stoking tempers for the next weekend.

On 1 December, Act Three, I was out on streets of Paris from early 
morning. I happen to live near the Arc de Triomphe, and when I left my 
building at 9am I walked out into the middle of a street battle. A 
number of yellow vests – not just hard left and right militants but 
rural or provincial disaffected men and women in their 20s, 30s and 40s 
– attacked police from early morning.

The Arc de Triomphe was tagged with graffiti. Police were pelted with 
acid, paint, iron bolts, stones and bottles. Buildings around the Étoile 
were set briefly alight. A mob surged down the Avenue Kléber, 
overturning and burning cars and smashing bank, shop and restaurant 
windows.

Before the next Saturday – Act Four on 8 December – there were dark 
reports that there would be an insurrection, using live weapons and 
explosives. Macron, shaken, visited the Élysée nuclear bunker to make 
sure there was a place that he could take refuge. In the event, 8 
December was again a violent day – not just in Paris but in several 
cities. It was not the feared revolution. The violence this time was 
mostly provoked by militia of the hard right and hard left. Some 
“ordinary” GJs waded in. Police were more aggressive in their response.

Since then there have been nine further Acts or Saturday 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 and Rennes. The numbers 
taking part have fallen to around 60,000.

The roundabout rebellion is almost over. Support in rural areas is 
slackening. In early December my own unscientific poll of yellow vests 
placed on car dashboards in rural Normandy was 40%. It’s now 10% to 14%.

There has been no systematic attempt to repress protest. But the 
police’s so-called defensive weapons – rubber bullets and stun grenades 
– have become a serious problem that the government has been too slow to 
recognise. Seventeen eyes and four hands have been lost so far. That is 
unacceptable, whoever is initially responsible for the violence.

Is this just the French being the French? Not really. It’s true that 
protest goes to the street in France more rapidly than in almost any 
other democratic country. There is a default position in the country 
that social demands will not be taken seriously without street demos, 
and demos will not be taken seriously without a dose of violence.

But there is also something very un-French about the gilets jaunes 
movement. It has, first of all, broken all the unspoken and spoken rules 
of French manifestations. Protests 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, although this is now changing. The movement, supposedly peaceful, 
allowed its own violent fringe as well as opportunist, urban, 
state-hating militia of hard right and hard left to take over.

The violence is not limited to the Saturdays-only protests in French 
cities. There have been scores of arson and other attacks on the offices 
of MPs who support Macron. There have been attacks on motorways 
toll-booths, newspapers and radio stations. A starred restaurant whose 
boss criticised the gilets jaunes was burned. Town halls, prefectures 
and other public buildings have been vandalised. The gilets jaunes are 
also un-French – or at least atypical – because they have not come from 
the usual or expected sources of protest: unions, farmers, students, the 
multi-racial banlieues. They come from a section of French society that 
is usually invisible, permanently grumpy but little engaged in politics.

I mean rural, non-farming France, small town France, 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.

Gilets jaunes do include people at the bottom of society, the 
unemployed, the marginalised, but more typically they are people who are 
above the bottom but think that they should be doing better. They are 
people with low-paid jobs or pensioners or artisans or small business 
people or technicians or people at the lower level of the caring 
professions.

This mixture of supporters explains in part the heterogenous character 
and demands of the movement, which point both left and right, to higher 
welfare payments and pensions but also to lower taxes, to less state and 
more state. 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. But 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 gilets jaunes.

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 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 the past 20 months but for what he 
represents and some of the things he has said. He typifies the kind of 
person that GJs didn’t like even before they were GJs or before there 
was Macron.

He is the embodiment of the rich, clever, self-replicating people from 
the governing classes who’ve been to the finishing schools of the 
governing elite and think they know everything.

And so to the second word or phrase you hear: ras le bol, which 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. It can only be 
explained, I think, by the silos of facing mirrors of social media 
sites, which fill heads with exaggerated versions of real grievances 
blended with complete bullshit.

“France has been sold to the UN”; “Alsace has been given back to 
Germany”; “Politicians are living high on the hog – if we sweep them 
away, we can have lower taxes and higher welfare payments”; “Brigitte 
Macron, as first lady, earns €550,000 a year from the state”. Actually 
she earns, nothing, zero, rien.

This nonsense is always accompanied, as it often is in the United States 
and Britain, by a message telling you that the mainstream media is 
lying. Thus suspicion of the media, already high, is cranked to the 
point where journalists, newspapers and radio stations have become 
targets for GJ violence.

The gilets jaunes rapidly moved from a protest movement with specific 
demands to a revolutionary movement of unlikely revolutionaries. The 
view in much of the 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 referendums.

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 the same time anti-globalist and nostalgic for 
a simpler, more traditional kind of France. Yet another paradox.

The movement is now splitting. Some gilets jaunes have decided to enter 
the mainstream political system to try to reform it or destroy it from 
the inside. Three rival GJ lists, broadly left, right and centrist, are 
being prepared for the European elections in May.

An extraordinary diplomatic row exploded last week when the Italian 
deputy prime minister, Luigi Di Maio, leader of the populist Five Star 
Movement, arrived unannounced in the south Paris suburbs for a photo 
opportunity with one of these electoral lists.

France withdrew its ambassador from Rome in protest. It emerged that Di 
Maio had been invited by Christophe Chalençon, a gilets jaunes figure 
with far-right connections, not by the leader of the list, Ingrid 
Levavasseur. She described both Di Maio and Chalençon as “sharks”.

All of this may help Macron. He is already recovering strongly in the 
opinion polls as well-heeled, urban France turns to him to save them 
from yellow chaos. He has made €10bn of concessions to motorists and the 
low-paid. He has started a “great national debate” in hundreds of 
village and town meetings.

Even one yellow vest list in the European elections will take votes from 
Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s far-left 
La France Insoumise. For Macron’s party to top the European poll in 
France would be a “mid-term” triumph.

There is talk of Emmanuel Macron calling a referendum on the same day as 
the EU poll on 26May to take further wind from the sails of the gilets 
jaunes. This is probably a silly idea. Senior ministers are campaigning 
against it.

If the referendum asks marginal questions – ie should there be fewer 
French MPs? – it will seem like a betrayal of the promise of Macron’s 
“great debate”. If it asks explosive questions – should Macron resign? 
Should he push ahead with his state-shrinking reform programme? – the 
results could be catastrophic for him.

LeVavasseur, an auxiliary nurse from Normandy, is one of the more 
thoughtful gilets jaunes (and therefore detested by many others). She is 
leading one of the GJ lists in the European elections. Asked to sum up 
yellow-vest demands in a single sentence, she said: “That we should feel 
recognised and valued.”

The anger of the gilets jaunes is understandable. What is scary is their 
fury. Where does that come from? What explains the radicalisation of 
home carers and garage mechanics in small towns who don’t understand the 
basics of how their own country’s political and tax system works but 
want to tear them both down?

That fury has many sources but its depth and strength can only be 
explained by the compound or viral effect of social media. The gilets 
jaunes are a French phenomenon and a French crisis.

They also point to a wider, existential crisis for 21st-century 
democracies.

This article is adapted from a talk given to a conference of the 
Brussels European Employee Relations Group


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