There’s an
unmistakable similarity to the yellow vests (gilets jaunes, en francais) protest
to what we experienced the 10
th anniversary season after 9/11 in the
neighborhood of the Twin Towers attacks.
Occupy Wall Street
started on Sept. 17, 2011, and ended on Nov. 15, 2011, 59 days later.
Meanwhile, in
France, the gilets jaunes are rocking this kind of spontaneous eruption of public
discontent.
Like Occupy, it’s
leaderless, as close to a popular uprising of the aggrieved as can be imagined.
But let’s not sugarcoat this: there is destruction of property and some loss of
life – as the article below makes clear.
Perhaps, most
remarkable is that like Occupy, which occurred before every young person’s nose
(in public and otherwise) was directed at an LED screen, the events are
happening non-cyberspace: in church halls, on streets, on roadways …
These
disenfranchised folks have forced government officials in France to respond to
them.
Say the liberte
that threads the fabric of the nation’s founding principles is being used to
draw attention to the second thread: egalite.
But don’t talk my
word for it … check out this piece by Jeremy Harding, in the March 21, 2019,
edition of the London Review of Books.
It’s long … but so
is the history of a people fighting for their rights …
Next: Running for Your Life Reading
“Commendatore:
Among the Gilets Jaunes
By Jeremy
Harding
When they
gathered at roads and roundabouts at the end of last year, the French
government was caught off guard. Within a week of their first nationwide
mobilisation, they were turning out regularly at intersections across the
country to slow up traffic, and marching through Paris and the big provincial
cities. Hasty polls announced that 70 or 80 per cent of the population,
including many in France’s largest conurbations, supported this massive show of
impatience. Yet the gilets jaunes first came together beyond the margins of the
major cities, in rural areas and small towns with rundown services, low-wage
economies and dwindling commerce. They were suspicious of the burgeoning
metropolitan areas, which have done well on a diet of public funding, private
investment, tourism and succulent property prices. Among them are people who
grew up in city centres but can no longer afford to live in them: these
barbarians know where they are when they arrive at the gates. Parading in
central Paris and the new, carefully massaged hubs of French prosperity –
Toulouse and Bordeaux especially – they end proceedings with a show of violence
and destruction. After 15 weeks of costly protest, public sympathy in the big
metropolitan areas has only recently begun to fall off. That is one of many
puzzles.
Another is the pace at which a
provincial revolt about fuel prices and speed limits broadened into a radical
rejection of Macron, the office he holds, the National Assembly and the
political parties, including Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National – formerly
the Front National – and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise. State
expenditure and tax rates for rich and poor alike were also called into
question: public services in the hinterlands (schools, doctors’ surgeries,
childcare, care for the elderly, job creation) and local government
institutions were felt to be poorly resourced and staffed, while cities
flourished as immense enclaves of prosperity.
On 17 November last year, a
Saturday, a motorcade of bikes and cars swept down the grands boulevards in
Paris. The bikers were wearing yellow hi-vis vests; you could see them in the
cars as well, placed ostentatiously on the dashboard. The procession passed in
less than two minutes. I was watching with a journalist from France 24, the
state’s international television network, who gave a derisive shrug. But
280,000 gilets jaunes were out across France, creating go-slows at roundabouts,
motorway tolls and intersections. It was a triumph; they were ready for more.
On their Facebook pages they began referring to 17 November as ‘Act I’.
I’d already been stopped that
morning at a roundabout not far from where I live in south-west France. A small
group of gilets jaunes were blocking the road, complaining first about the cost
of fuel, then the cost of living, then of having to scrape by on low-paid work
with nothing in hand at the end of the month, then of Macron. One called him
‘le roi Macron’: she wanted his head to roll. They were playful and serious by
turns and they had a plausible case. It didn’t cross my mind that two months
later, after round upon round of violent demonstrations in France’s major
cities, I’d be with a group of protesters – many in their late sixties – caught
between two baton charges by riot police in central Bordeaux, watching young
men with jemmies prising the thick plywood panels from a bank which had taken
the trouble to seal off its glass front. Or look on as a demonstrator with an
aerosol can sprayed an 18th-century monument with a tweaked version of a line
from the ‘Internationale’. On one venerable limestone column he wrote: ‘Nous
sommes rien.’ On the other: ‘Nous voulons tout.’ Rapturous applause from a
crowd of thousands.
Bordeaux is a paragon of France’s
spick-and-span ‘metropoles’, with their impoverished hinterlands. The press has
described it as ‘the capital of the gilets jaunes’. After ‘Act II’ on 24
November the weekly protests in the city were well attended, with six or seven
thousand participants at their height. The demonstrations were rowdy,
carnivalesque, occasionally provocative, but they usually unfolded peaceably
for most of the afternoon. Around dusk, groups of demonstrators would take the
fight to the police while others left for home.
These outings have ritual echoes
from a long past of French contestation, but the gilets jaunes who converge on
the big towns on Saturdays are thoroughly 21st-century citizens, left out in
the cold by globalisation. The success of their protest depends on social
media. They mobilise and reach last-minute decisions mainly on Facebook. They position
themselves theatrically: giving every Saturday ‘act’ a number commits them –
and everyone watching – to a weekly cliffhanger, in the style of a serial
podcast or reality TV show. About one in four demonstrators in Paris, where I
last tried to count (in early February), had their smartphones up, recording as
they marched, chanted or struggled through a haze of tear gas. Demonstrations
are produced and curated as they unfold, becoming a series of ‘scenes from a
demonstration’, with hundreds of director/participants live-streaming or
waiting to upload content from their phones at the end of the day.
Among this vast reservoir of
images is material that can be useful when demonstrators challenge the police
account of a fight or an injury. And there is another distinguishing feature of
the gilet jaune marches: half a century after 1968, the French police are
equipped with far more dangerous ‘non-lethal’ technology, including dispersion
and tear-gas grenades and a kind of ‘flash-ball’, or rubber bullet, discharged
from a handheld launcher. Since Act II, ‘deterrent’ weapons in the hands of the
police have produced hundreds of serious injuries, though remarkably only one
death – an elderly woman in Marseille who had nothing to do with the
demonstrators. By contrast, several gilets jaunes have been killed in traffic
incidents during go-slows and blockades on the roads.
The roads, of course, are where
the story of the gilets jaunes began, more than a year ago, when the government
proposed to reduce the speed limit from 90 to 80 kph on 400,000 kilometres of
single carriageway in France. In the Dordogne an ‘anger’ group, which had
mustered on Facebook, took to the streets of Périgueux calling for the plan to
be scrapped. In other rural departments similar anger groups were on the rise.
Some of the protesters wore hi-vis jackets (French law states that drivers have
to have them in their vehicles). No one was calling them gilets jaunes at that
stage, but the protests seemed to be the start of a focused movement with a central
demand. Another demand was added last summer, when Priscillia Ludosky, a young
entrepreneur with a small-scale cosmetics business, launched a petition on
change.org calling for a reduction in petrol prices. Ludosky works in a
built-up, peri-urban landscape (beyond the capital and the banlieues), where
car travel is a necessity. She’s also a perfect fit for Macron’s vision of a
new, striving France full of initiative-takers from all walks of life,
including minorities: a thirty-something black Frenchwoman. By the autumn her
petition was edging forward with 12,000 signatures. Then in October Jacline
Mouraud, a talkative, eccentric figure from Brittany – accordionist, ectoplasm
hunter and hypnotherapist – posted a video on Facebook in which she denounced the
tax burden on motorists, along with speeding fines, as systematic pillage. The
80 kph law had been in force since July and dissident drivers were already
destroying speed cameras. Fuel tax had risen significantly since 2017 and was
set to rise again by nearly 10 cents a litre for petrol and 19 for diesel by
2022 as part of a plan to achieve an ‘ecological transition’ away from fossil
fuels. Before long the number of visits to Mouraud’s Facebook page reached six
million and signatures on Ludosky’s petition passed the one million mark. Eric
Drouet, a lorry driver in his thirties, went on Facebook to call for a mass
blockade of the roads; the call spread; similar posts appeared on other
Facebook pages. Wherever you went, drivers had a hi-vis jacket on the dashboard,
to signal their allegiance, or their sympathy, or as a passport through
go-slows.
The success of Act I must have
surprised the gilets jaunes as much as it did the rest of the country. Over the
next few days a leaderless movement with a handful of social media figureheads
(Drouet, Ludosky and others) became a leaderless revolt against the president,
the government, high taxes and low pay. The following Saturday in Paris – Act
II – a crowd of thousands did their best to ransack the Champs Elysées, raising
barricades, setting them alight and smashing shopfronts. Five policemen and 19
demonstrators were injured in fierce clashes; hundreds of people were taken
into custody. In the rest of France nearly 160,000 gilets jaunes came out to
protest. The executive was in disarray: Macron had been trying to keep a
‘Jupiterian’ distance, while the prime minister, Edouard Philippe, and various
members of his cabinet were shoved forward to condemn the violence and announce
that there would be no change of position on fuel tax. But the gilets jaunes
now had bigger, more nebulous ambitions than the price of fuel. The time had
come for Macron to take to the airwaves. A few days after the fracas on the
Champs Elysées he used a speech on energy and climate change to propose a
floating tax on fuel pegged to the price of crude, as Lionel Jospin had done
when he was prime minister in 2002.
But the gilets jaunes already had
the tempo, and like many road users they were sceptical about talk of higher
fuel prices in the context of reducing carbon emissions. France’s so-called
‘carbon tax’ is not a distinct component of the overall levy on fuel, so it’s
impossible to know how the government will spend it. But even supposing it was
a hypothecated tax, with revenues channelled to renewable energy etc, why
should it be a flat levy on rich and poor alike? In the turmoil of the next two
months, it became easy for their detractors to scorn the gilets jaunes as rural
idiots addicted to fossil fuels. And just as easy for sympathetic commentators
and green-left radicals, broadly supportive of the gilets jaunes, to call for
an alignment of ‘environmental justice’ with social justice. What this meant
wasn’t clear beyond the principle, which the government endorsed, that the
state should ‘accompany’ less prosperous people – i.e. give them financial
support – during the transition away from carbon. But increasing a universal
tax on fuel proved that ‘accompanying’ poorer citizens wasn’t what it had in
mind, even though in the EU – from Luxembourg, with the highest per capita
carbon footprint, to Romania, with one of the lowest – prosperous consumers are
far greater contributors to global warming than those with a smaller disposable
income. Key questions of this kind – who pays for environmental jeopardy? –
would hang just beyond the reach of the executive, the press, social media and even
the gilets jaunes, once they were committed to a showdown with Macron.
Dismissive of his offer to rethink the fuel tax, they were readying for Act III
and a new steeliness had set in. There were probably 135,000 people on the
streets (and the roads) the following Saturday, 1 December. There were also
hundreds of injuries and arrests and a fatal accident at a go-slow. In Paris
the Arc de Triomphe was vandalised. Astonishingly, public support appeared to
hold up.
Macron and the government now had
their backs to the wall. Philippe had tried to open a dialogue with the gilets
jaunes ahead of Act III, but there were no leaders: he managed to collar a lone
gilet jaune prepared to talk to him for an hour. After the impressive turn-out
on 1 December he attempted to set up another meeting between a group of
‘spokespersons’ and the heads of France’s political parties, but it was
scuppered when death threats were issued on social media to some of the gilets
jaunes who had agreed to take part. Leaderlessness and horizontality were
non-negotiable: a charismatic gilet jaune like Eric Drouet might surface and
rally the troops, but that person could not speak directly to government on
behalf of any other gilet jaune. If they’d believed in leaders, delegates and
representatives, after all, the gilets jaunes might still have had faith in the
National Assembly, the political parties and the unions.
Their
suspicion of ‘mainstream’ media, TV news in particular, was also deepening
(several journalists were attacked at subsequent demonstrations). The gilets
jaunes spurned any narrative they weren’t in charge of, with thousands of hours
of crowd-sourced uploads swelling their own radiant news bubble. They were the
story and only they would tell it. This dislike of any mediation other than
their own had a wild, hubristic edge: you got a sense from the slogans on the
backs of their jackets and their social media posts that they would have liked
to stride through any institution – from the fourth estate to the judiciary –
which stood in the way of a face-to-face showdown with Macron. In a
re-enactment of the women’s march on Versailles in 1789, le roi Macron would
appear to the crowd and then retire from his balcony full of contrition. The
crowd would then demand an audience with the queen. How much did the Sèvres
dinner service Brigitte had commissioned for the Elysée Palace really cost? Was
it €50,000, as palace officials claimed, or nearer €500,000, as Le Canard enchaîné had
suggested? The crockery scandal had come at the same time as Macron’s
ill-judged remarks about the ‘crazy amounts of dough’ draining into the
benefits system.
*
In the first
week of December the executive caved in on fuel tax. Philippe announced that
the rise, due in January, would be put on hold for six months. The news was
greeted with contempt by the gilets jaunes and the following day word came down
from the president’s office that the fuel tax hike was no longer part of the
2019 budget. Even this was not enough. A list of 42 demands, addressed to MPs,
was now circulating and you had to get to number nine before fuel taxes were
mentioned. The origin of the document is unclear – perhaps one gilet jaune, or
a group, in a department a couple of hours from Paris – but it was soon being
reproduced in the press.
If there was antagonism from other
gilets jaunes over the creation of this list of ‘People’s Directives’, at least
there were no death threats. The document began with a demand for ‘zero
homelessness’ and ended with a call for taxes on aviation and maritime fuel.
There was a call for a ‘popular referendum’ mechanism, allowing laws to be
proposed by citizens: if a proposal garnered 700,000 signatures it would go
before the National Assembly and a final version would be put to the
electorate. Variants of this idea were already doing the rounds: once it
crystallised into a demand, known as the ‘Référendum d’initiative citoyenne’,
you began to see the letters ‘RIC’ on hi-vis jackets and signs at
demonstrations. The RIC would also enable the repeal of laws, moot changes to
the constitution, and approve or vote down international treaties: imagine the
response to a new transatlantic trade treaty modelled on the TTIP.
The
People’s Directives were short on ideas about revenue for the Treasury, but
long on wealth redistribution, protecting French industry, caring for the
elderly, bolstering rent controls, raising the minimum wage and the minimum
pension, and capping monthly salaries at €15,000: the earnings gap touches a
raw nerve with the gilets jaunes. The luxury goods tycoon Bernard Arnault –
Dior, Louis Vuitton, Givenchy, fine champagne and cognac – alleged by the
weekly magazine Marianne to
make €3 million an hour, has cropped up twice in my exchanges with activists,
on one occasion with a volunteer medic tending demonstrators injured by the
police. She told me she earned around €1100 a month from her job as a
careworker for the elderly. That’s hard to live on in France, unless you have
parental support or a partner in work. Quite a few gilets jaunes work in the
care sector, and as the state opts for outsourced labour, or simply lets
recruitment dwindle, they can find themselves on reduced earnings in the
private sector, selling their skills via agencies, which take a cut from their
wages.
Oddly, a
key demand was missing from the list of 42, even though it was gaining traction
at demonstrations and go-slows: the reintroduction of the wealth tax. Macron
scrapped this ‘solidarity’ tax on the rich last year and replaced it with a tax
on property worth more than €1.3 million. If France continued penalising
equity, the argument ran, it would stimulate capital flight; better to target
high-end real estate, whose value grew while its owners sat on it. But the
gilets jaunes were not convinced: why humiliate low-wage earners, they asked,
by rewarding the wealthy with a tax break? Neither was Thomas Piketty. On his
blog for Le Monde he
rejected Macron’s assertions about capital flight – ‘totally false’ – and
showed that receipts from the tax on global wealth had increased fourfold
during the previous three decades, even though the threshold at which French
fortunes were liable had risen over the years. ‘A bas les priviliégés!’ was one
of several anti-wealth slogans I saw on a hi-vis vest. The wearer was a tiny,
tousle-haired woman in her late fifties, marching arm in arm with a tall, much
younger blind man. Another: a lame, elderly man with two bright pink ski-poles
and a slogan on his back calling for his pension to increase at the same rate
as ‘share dividends’. A third: a youngster fifty metres from a police cordon
spraying the front of an upmarket Bordeaux estate agent in silver lettering:
‘Coucou les riches!’ (‘Coucou’, as in hide-and-seek, means roughly: ‘I can see you!’)
Ultra-egalitarian sentiments are
widespread among the gilets jaunes, and hard to gainsay in a country where
‘equality’ is emblematic. English Brexiteers have donned the hi-vis jacket, but
their copy-cat bravado is misleading. In Britain we’re not taught equality as
part of the national mantra; income inequality (higher than in France) has been
offset – a little, for some – by an overall rise in property prices, at least
until Brexit (wealth inequality is less pronounced than it is in France
according to the OECD). The British do irony and ‘tolerance’; we have
top-of-the-range costume drama and other traditions which help us to live with
inequality; we like our judges and lawyers, our lord mayors and equerries, to
appear in pantomime clothes on solemn occasions. Among the gilets jaunes there’s
no shortage of ‘Frexit’ advocates on Saturday demonstrations, with their
elaborate combination of hi-vis uniform and fancy dress. But Frexit packs a
stronger egalitarian punch, based on the belief that the EU can’t allow too
much social justice – a more generous minimum wage, say, waved in by a
‘populist’ administration – because that would mean contravening the rules on
budget deficits laid down in the Stability and Growth Pact. There are similar
left-wing objections in Britain to membership of the EU, but Lexit is a Leave
fringe. And the Frexit contingent, unlike the Brexiteers, are not driven by
infusions of cash and propaganda subsidised by finance barons.
Macron’s bottom line is that
France needs an abundance of very rich people to fund equality, but once his
capitulation on fuel tax had failed to appease the gilets jaunes new
concessions were in order. On 10 December he announced that a planned rise in
social contributions to pensions would not go ahead. But pensioners, hit by an
earlier rise, were still militant. He also announced that any end-of-year
bonuses from bosses would be tax-free. (Over the next few days journalists
buzzed around CEOs asking whether they were prepared to do their duty and shell
out generous bonuses for their staff.) The minimum wage would go up by €100 per
month, to about €1100 after deductions, although things turned out to be more
complicated. A 1.8 per cent rise that was already due would be rolled up in the
new offer, and that figure of €100 also included a rise in supplementary income
for the low-paid. The trouble is that only around 40 per cent of people on the
minimum wage are eligible for the top-up income. People were suspicious and
confused. Macron, the gilet jaunes decided, was one clever banker. Whatever Frexiteers
had to say, it was obvious too that he would need a nod of assent from the EU:
the cost of all these concessions was likely to take the budget deficit beyond
3 per cent. In his address, Macron announced that a ‘great national debate’ was
in the offing. Angry citizens would get a hearing and their grievances would be
relayed to the president and National Assembly. But gilets jaunes weren’t
interested in being listened to politely. Go-slows on the roads and big marches
through smart city centres continued.
*
Until mid-December the
militant anger on Saturday protests was mixed with a sense of relief: people
had discovered they were visible at last; and at that stage public support was
strong. They had broken their resentful silence and produced a cacophony of
slogans, often anti-capitalist, always anti-Macron, naively opposed to
globalisation. Deafening firecrackers ensured that the crowds could be heard as
well as seen. Rockets rose above the marchers with an eerie pathos, like
distress flares, despite the mood of festivity. But in the run-up to the new
year, there was an edge of anxiety. Numbers appeared to be falling away, and
the pressing question remained: how long could the gilets jaunes go on in a
blaze of negative capability, unstructured, leaderless, adamant in their
rejection not just of this or that tax, or pittance earnings, but of the
political order as a whole, and the economic system that sustains it?
The executive had abandoned its
plans on fuel, pensions and the minimum wage, but remained adamant on two key
issues. Macron would not reinstate the wealth tax and Christophe Castaner, the
minister of the interior, would bear down hard on public disorder. Just how
hard was another source of anxiety for the gilets jaunes. Whatever they thought
about violence among their own, demonstrators were being maimed and disfigured
by the security forces at an alarming rate. By the time Macron made his second
round of concessions, there had been roughly eighty serious injuries, some to
the hands and feet from dispersion grenades and tear-gas projectiles, others to
the face and eyes, from the rubber-bullet launcher known as the LBD-40: too
many of the police were aiming at the head. Fear was now a factor in the
Saturday protests, but outrage was greater. As the confrontations continued,
the number of injuries rose. The executive held firm to its law and order
stance. Castaner was already considering an ‘anti-wreckers’ bill. Among other
measures, individuals could be barred from attending demonstrations. The aim was
to single out troublemakers or move against people with previous form, but if
you were tangled up in the crowd during a spell of violence the distinction
between ‘troublemakers’ and ordinary citizens looked far from straightforward.
As I saw a few weeks later in Paris, an intuitive complicity exists between
heterogeneous groups of people facing off against the security forces: some
were resolute black blocs; some were angry, able-bodied young who might have
run at the police during Act II but marched peacefully the following week;
others were much older people, fumbling with their anti-tear-gas equipment as
they tried to stand their ground.
Some gilets jaunes were already
speaking out against spontaneous violence on their social networks and though
it may have been a complicated algorithmic lie, they looked to be a majority.
But by January, with seven ‘acts’ down and more to come, trying to focus on who
was or wasn’t up for a fight seemed pointless as long as huge questions still
hung in the air about the uprising itself. Who were the gilets jaunes? Would
their non-party, ‘anti-system’ position, strangely symmetrical with Macron’s
during the 2017 presidential race, turn out to reveal a predisposition – to
left or right – as his had during his first year in office, when his bedrock
economic liberalism became apparent?
The answer to the first question
was easy at first sight. A gilet jaune was probably not someone who lived in
Paris or a prosperous provincial city: Montpellier, Rennes, Grenoble, Brest,
Nantes, Aix-Marseille, Bordeaux, Toulouse. Many were people from small to
middling rundown towns in the countryside where work, skills, traditions,
thriving commerce and public funding have dried up. Others came from rustbelt
communities in the north. You can also find gilets jaunes in the mosaic of
villages and tiny hamlets in the back of beyond, where I live. Few of them are
unemployed. People in low-paid jobs on precarious contracts, exasperated
pensioners, and small-scale entrepreneurs like Priscillia Ludosky unleashed
this surge of impatience, which is the reason it was easy to dismiss it, as
Macron did, as a reincarnation of Pierre Poujade’s petty bourgeois tax revolt
in the 1950s. But as the protest gathered pace and ambition, the comparison
began to look threadbare.
Long
before the gilets jaunes started blocking roundabouts and motorway tolls the
geographer Christophe Guilluy was working on the widening gap between the large
metropoles and the ‘periphery’, ‘the forgotten land of small and medium-sized
cities and rural areas, home to most of the working class’.＊ In Twilight of the Elites, which appeared in French in
2016, he tells us that this vast space holds about 60 per cent of the
population. They are living out the worst effects of globalisation and
represent a force ‘that threatens to overturn the existing political order’.
This, he believes, is the reason ‘peripheral France’ must be ‘made to disappear
from public consciousness’. As a description of gilet jaune terrain, the book
was astute; it was also prescient: Guilluy had seen the anger coming, and
forecast the shock it would deliver to the political system, even if it was a long
way from ‘overturning’ it. He, too, is angry, especially about the ‘elites’, a
word that was not in his original title, but can now be taken to apply not only
to experts – he doesn’t trust the Insee, France’s bureau of statistics – but to
the political class, and often simply to wealthier citizens in the major
metropolitan areas. His contempt for ‘multiculturalist blather’; his mistrust
of ‘anti-fascism’, which he sees as a bogus distraction from inequality; his
dislike of bien-pensant intellectuals who applaud immigration (and pay a low
price for a lunch prepared by Malian wage-slaves in the restaurant kitchen):
all this resonates with the mistrust of the gilets jaunes for the cities and
the globalist assumptions of their inhabitants.
Guilluy is not a conspiracy
theorist but he can sound too knowing when he hints that his peripheral French
have been wilfully marginalised as part of a grand plan, or that the myth of a
middle class has been kept alive as part of an elitist strategy to mask the
fact that only two classes are left in France: impoverished peripherals and the
‘new urban overlords’. This kind of knowingness is common among gilets jaunes
as well and they can toy with far more reckless insinuations than Guilluy’s. A
high-profile figure in his early thirties, Maxime Nicolle – alias Fly Rider on
social media – has hinted that the killings in Strasbourg by an Islamist
gangster last December were the work of powerful forces aiming to drain support
from gilet jaune mobilisations and depress the turn-out the following Saturday.
Expressions of antisemitism from extremists have also risen on conspiracy
thermals (Macron was a banker, he’d worked for Rothschild Bank, therefore he
must be serving the interests of ‘the Jews’).
All the same, Guilluy’s depiction of
the gilet jaune hinterland holds up well. The question is whether his spatial
distinction between poorer people scraping by in evacuated spaces and
flourishing urban communities is as hard and fast as he’d like. A 2015 study by
the Insee found that remote, rural communes in meridional France did indeed
have high proportions of people living in poverty: as much as 24 per cent.
(You’re considered poor once your standard of living falls below 50 or 60 per
cent of the national average, depending on the institution counting.) But it
also discovered alarming pockets of poverty in city centres, while the finding
that puts the biggest strain on Guilluy’s model is that Seine-St Denis, a
sprawling Parisian banlieue with large numbers of migrants or their descendants,
has the highest proportion of poor inhabitants – 27 per cent – in the survey.
And Seine-St Denis is not ‘peripheral France’.
The
banlieues were a conundrum for the press now that white people were causing
trouble in the inner cities. Wasn’t rioting and violence what people in the
banlieues did best, as they had in 2005 when a state of emergency was declared
in several big banlieues? This was another way of asking why people of African
descent hadn’t come out on the streets. Reaction in the banlieues was faintly
amused, verging on cynical. Reporting for Libération in December, Ramsès Kefi heard a range
of views – for instance, ‘Why should we join them when they never joined us?’ –
and learned that young people who were ready to march had been discouraged by
worried elders. With levels of violence running high on Saturdays there was
always a chance that the security forces would come down harder on non-whites
than whites. Or as Youcef Brakni put it when I met him at a demonstration in
Paris in February, if young blacks behaved like the gilets jaunes in the centre
of Paris, they were liable to get killed.
Brakni is a spokesperson for the
Truth for Adama committee, headed by Assa Traoré, whose brother Adama, a young
black Frenchman, died in police custody in 2016. The committee is still
campaigning to uncover the facts about his death. Its sympathies with the
gilets jaunes increase in proportion to the injuries they suffer at the hands
of the security forces. With white French experiencing police violence, Assa Traoré
told me, the issue was out in the open and her ‘mission’ was easier. She said,
as she often does, that people like her brother in the sprawling suburbs of
Paris were gilets jaunes long before the name was invented. In other words,
peripheral French and disadvantaged people in the banlieues have more in common
than they’d thought. As for skin-colour racism among gilets jaunes – one or two
incidents were by then notorious – it shouldn’t discourage support from the
banlieues. Or that was Brakni’s view. You might not want your headstrong youth
to come out in the place de la République, but calmer activists and
intellectuals of colour should march with this predominantly white crowd in the
centre of the capital. That is what supporters of Truth for Adama, black and
white, have been doing.
From the
gilet jaune viewpoint, the big cities are not places where you go to seek out
solidarity: they’re where you show your face to citizens who wouldn’t normally
give you a moment’s thought. Bordeaux is a good case. Le Monde has
begun to refer to this provincial ‘capital’ of the gilets jaunes as their
‘bastion’. Better to say that it’s the bastion they’re besieging symbolically
in the hope of being acknowledged. They can no longer afford to buy or rent in
France’s second most expensive city, with a shortage of social housing and
property prices increasing by 40 per cent in the last ten years. Its
well-appointed satellite towns have also seen property prices soar. I haven’t
met a demonstrator in the centre of Bordeaux who actually lived there. They’re
making their way from the urban margins or further afield, somewhere in
Guilluy’s periphery, which in the Bordeaux region includes some of France’s
wealthiest wine-growing areas.
A member of the Confédération
générale du travail marching with the gilets jaunes in the centre of Bordeaux
first alerted me to the fact that parts of the wine-growing areas were
‘desperate’, and agricultural workers vulnerably under-unionised. At the end of
the demonstration the following Saturday, as events took a violent turn, I met
three marchers stuffing their hi-vis vests into their backpacks and preparing
to negotiate a bristling police cordon. All three – a homeless man in his
fifties and two retired women – lived an hour or more from Bordeaux. One of the
women told me she’d recently worked in the vineyards of Entre-deux-mers,
trimming the vines to top up her pension. She’d heard that the rate for casual
work was €10 an hour. In fact it was piecework at four cents a vine. She’d left
after six hours with €15 in her pocket. According to research published by the
Insee in 2011, the Bordeaux hinterland has thousands living in straitened
circumstances in the shadow of the great vineyards, from the tip of the Gironde
estuary down through Pauillac and St-Estèphe, east through the Pomerol, and
south along a ‘corridor of poverty’ as far as Agen.
*
The initial phase of
Macron’s ‘great national debate’ was supposed to wind down in mid-January, but
the deadline was deferred in thousands of town halls around the country, where
citizens continued to deliver their views in writing about the crisis and why
they believed matters had come to a head. Near enough the original due date of
15 January, a first batch of testimonies from around five thousand small town
halls in rural areas was collated by the national mayors’ association and
readied for presentation to Macron, his prime minister and the presidents of
the Assembly and the Senate. The gilets jaunes had already expressed scepticism
about the national debate: it was surely a ruse to stop them in their tracks, a
masquerade by the executive, posing in listening mode. Many said they wanted
nothing to do with it. But the mayors’ introductory summary listed ‘social
justice’ and ‘fiscal justice’ as the two subjects most often raised, accounting
for nearly a third of the material they had received. This was fully in tune
with the gilets jaunes’ concerns.
The depositions were known as
‘cahiers de doléances’, after the testimonies from the three estates
commissioned by Louis XVI in 1789. Eventually the texts were bundled up and
sent on to the préfectures of the relevant departments; from there they went to
the Bibliothèque Nationale for a massive labour of cross-referencing and
indexing. If nothing else, they would be a resource for generations of social
historians. Beyond that, there was no knowing how the synthesis would shape
Macron’s strategy in the months to come. Perhaps it would be enough for him to
say he’d heard the people out, before returning to business as usual.
Yet it was the gilets jaunes, not
Macron, who forced this consultation. As the sociologist Bruno Latour wrote in
AOC, an online daily, they had created the ‘perfect opportunity’ for a
political reappraisal in France, based – as he saw it – on the need to face up
to climate change and hold the fraying line on ‘social justice’. (A flat fuel
tax seemed to do one without the other, quite possibly neither.) Latour was
more receptive than the gilets jaunes to Macron’s great debate: the state, he
argued, was admitting that it no longer knew what to do. And he thought that
the cahiers de doléances were a promising idea. If the material piling up in the
BN was anything like the cahiers assembled by the Third Estate in 1789, they
would contain detailed accounts of inconvenience, perceived injustices, abuse
and bad environmental practice. Crucially, if participants could make careful
descriptions of their circumstances, as they had in 1789, their testimony would
be a good source for a state – and a society – in search of ‘workable
solutions’. And if they couldn’t, well, so much for the people. Latour’s
antithesis of careful description was the Brexit campaign, with its thin
generalisations and underexamined grievances.
On 13 January, in a ‘Letter to the
French’, Macron announced a second, more ‘ample’ phase of the debate. The
government opened an online platform where meetings could be proposed.
Prospective convenors named the place and time, gave an idea of capacity at the
venue, and what the themes would be. Four were set out in Macron’s letter: tax
and public spending; the role of the state in local government and public
service provision; the ‘ecological transition’; democracy and citizenship.
Dozens of subtopics were suggested under each rubric. There was no mention of a
possible restoration of the solidarity tax on wealth, but there was a
disingenuous, populist prompt on immigration quotas. Gilet jaune reactions were
decidedly chilly: did the president really believe, two months into an uprising
about wealth and income disparity, that he was dealing with a bunch of
chauvinist hicks?
Despite this suspicion, the
meetings seem to have been an astonishing success. Once a meeting was cleared
and posted online, anyone could register to take part. When I started looking
on the website towards the end of January, there were roughly a thousand
events. By early March ten thousand had taken place or were still to come. Some
are smaller than you’d imagine, others are big political events with celebrity
locals and MPs from Macron’s République en Marche in attendance. Often Macron
himself rolls up at carefully managed events and pitches in with all his
youthful eloquence, like the improbable candidate he was when he decided to run
for the presidency.
I failed at my first attempt to
attend an event. It was advertised to take place in a little café in
Montmartre, maximum ten participants, first come, first served. I arrived early
to find the café closed for refurbishment. In February a debate in Bordeaux on
the ecological transition was organised by Catherine Fabre, a République en
Marche MP for a constituency in the Gironde. We were roughly a hundred,
including Fabre, participating ‘as a citizen’. There was a dignitary from the
government – Geneviève Darrieussecq, secretary of state at the Defence Ministry
– plus a moderator and two recorders. A third was solicited from the audience.
We were each given two bits of coloured card, red and green. Once citizens
began speaking, we should raise the green card if we were in favour, and the
red if we weren’t, to give the recorders a sense of opinion in the room. Much
was said – about carbon taxes, VAT exemptions for the green economy, the future
of France’s nuclear energy, even the pesticides in your favourite claret – and
some of it well said. Only one participant, sitting near the front, wore a
yellow vest. Moments after he rose to speak dozens of red cards were fluttering
like bunting. He had referred to ‘Macron’ without the polite prefix ‘monsieur’
or ‘le président’. He favoured nuclear energy; a tax on aviation fuel; and with
the number of injuries at demonstrations still mounting, he called for Castaner
to be replaced. More red cards flew up in dismay.
Somehow a breakdown of these
thousands of meetings has to be presented to the government in digestible form,
along with a summary of the cahiers de doléances and the responses to an online
questionnaire. With the phase of debates, real or virtual, concluding on 15
March, the next key date falls in mid-April, but there’s only a vague idea of
what it portends. A report back to the people by the president no doubt,
including a few hints about the new ‘pact’ between the electorate and the
government, which this vast consultation is supposed to inform. It’s sure to be
a difficult moment for Macron: if he’s grandiose and vague, the gilets jaunes
will feel justified in their view that the debate was a way of buying time in
the hope that they’d have disappeared by the spring; if he makes specific
promises, he can be held to account on the streets.
Gilet jaune turn-outs fell during
the debate as Macron’s dismal ratings began to improve. A majority of French
people approved of the debate, to Macron’s advantage. It was well organised and
large numbers took part. A million people responded to the online
questionnaire. Others in their tens of thousands made their way through real
cities and real countryside to scheduled events. Something similar had happened
in November at the first gilet jaune rallies. Part of the relief I spoke about
earlier is to do with congregating in a non-virtual space that isn’t a music
festival. Paradoxically, the gilet jaune obsession with recording and posting
as they march has prolonged this exuberance, and helped them keep the
initiative. At the end of a Saturday they find it difficult to part company.
But the price has been high.
Besides the elderly woman in Marseille who died after being hit by a fragment
of tear-gas grenade, there have been around a dozen deaths on the roads at
gilet jaune go-slows (in one the driver of a 4x4 reversed over a 63-year-old
demonstrator). So far there have been no fatalities among participants in the
Saturday marches. But the toll of police and civilian injuries is now in the
thousands. The ‘defensive’ arsenal of the security forces is responsible for
the worst damage. By early February, according to one count, four people had
lost a hand, nearly two hundred had received serious head injuries, and about
twenty had lost an eye.
Then there’s the matter of
self-inflicted harm: the pig-headedness of railing against a lower speed limit,
which figures suggest is already responsible for a drop in road deaths; the
destruction of speed cameras; the demonisation of Macron; the flurries of fake
news and wild theories from the outer reaches of virtual space. But spasmodic
racism has been far more damaging than any of these. From the incident late
last year when a woman in the Paris Métro was insulted by Holocaust deniers in
yellow vests, through a rash of vandalism and desecration, to the abuse hurled
at Alain Finkielkraut in February (‘go back to Tel Aviv’), antisemitism has
become the prevailing racist mode, but not the only one: a Muslim woman was
forced to remove her hijab at a go-slow, a black MP was described on social
media as ‘a fat Macronist negress, fresh out of Africa’; sporadic Arabophobe or
anti-Islamic sentiments surface on social media.
The national antisemitic mood is
more alarming than outbursts of antisemitism among activists and marchers.
According to a recent Interior Ministry report, France saw a sharp rise in
antisemitic incidents (threats and acts) last year, up 74 per cent on figures
for 2017. It’s worth noting that the gilets jaunes only took to the highways
and cities in the last seven weeks of 2018; and that despite the rise – here is
the real shock – the number of antisemitic incidents is well within the average
for the last twenty years. Impossible to lay the blame at the door of the
gilets jaunes. If they were an organised movement, if they had stewards at
demonstrations and moderators on social media; if they had a constitution, a
disciplinary code or a leadership – as the Labour Party does – then you could
argue that antisemitism had infested the gilet jaune project. But until a
structure emerges, if it does, this remains a spontaneous assembly of angry
citizens living in work-poverty and precarity: people on the far right – the
gilets jaunes have been praised by the Italian deputy prime minister, Matteo
Salvini – and far left, as well as many more who march without affiliations,
and wouldn’t give Marine Le Pen the time of day.
The last
few months have seen a ferment of commentary on the gilets jaunes. Scholars and
partisans on the left have found much to hope for, including the possibility
that a mass of citizens clamouring for social justice would incline, in the
end, to a radical left-wing programme. For the philosopher Sandra Laugier and
the sociologist Albert Ogien, writing in Libération last year, it was clear that left-wing
gilets jaunes were already steering their comrades away from dangerous
distractions – ‘xenophobic, homophobic, authoritarian’ – and sharpening the
focus on inequality. (It’s true that the condemnation of racism by gilets
jaunes themselves has been ferocious.) For Jacques Rancière, a ‘collective of
equals’ had changed the day-to-day rhythms of thought and action by occupying
roundabouts and motorway tolls. Time itself had been interrupted and in this
unfamiliar, slow-motion world, all it had taken was a vigorous tug on a single
thread – the fuel tax – for the ‘entire fabric of inequalities’ to begin
unravelling. For Etienne Balibar in Mediapart, France was at a moment ‘when
those at the top can no longer govern as before and those at the bottom no
longer want to be governed as before’ (a paraphrase of a remark in Lenin’s
‘Collapse of the Second International’). Terrifying masques might suddenly
unfold in this strange turmoil – enactments of hatred or racism – but Balibar
has insisted on the generally ‘civic’ character of the uprising.
There is talk now of organising
and structuring. A dynamic group of gilets jaunes in Commercy, a town of six
thousand people in the Meuse, has been hosting ‘an assembly of assemblies’
since January, and is responsible for some of the most articulate appeals
against racism. A tentative gilet jaune list for the election to the European
Parliament has fallen apart in a flurry of disputation; another is in the
works, but a rush for the May elections could well be premature. And it would
be strangely out of character: there’s no denying Rancière’s observation that
the gilets jaunes have interfered with the clock, slowing down the pace of
daily life and forcing a political hiatus. For weeks now, the humdrum work of
the executive and legislature has ground to a near standstill. At last, a bill
introduced by the finance minister on 6 March proposes, after the failure to
agree on an EU-wide initiative, that the administration should go it alone and
tax the big four – Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple – at 3 per cent of their
turnover in France, as Macron promised in December. Aside from this, Castaner’s
‘anti-wreckers’ law has been almost the only serious project in parliament for
three months or more. Could matters continue like this through April, until
some fanfare is sounded, followed by a speech from the Elysée about the way
ahead?
Gilet jaune numbers dropped again
in Act XVII on 9 March. But the humiliation felt by underpaid people –
careworkers are a striking example – when they hear about disproportionately
high incomes is not about to disappear. Excess at the top is felt as a slight.
Europe has superb codes of practice, charters, laws proscribing insults
levelled at minorities, but there is no code that protects the low-paid against
the endless taunting to which they’re subjected by news of lunatic salaries and
bankers’ bonuses. They feel outcast, and though their numbers are high, they
see themselves as a new minority with no recourse against economic
discrimination.
The bitter stand-off between the
executive and the gilets jaunes – between ultra-liberal capitalism and its
self-described losers – has overshadowed the issue of climate change, which the
fuel tax row brought into focus. Nicolas Hulot, the former environment
minister, summed up the contradiction last year, slightly absurdly, when he
asked whether it was better to get to ‘the end of the month’ or try to avert
‘the end of the world’. Environmentalist groups replied that both were possible
given an intelligent fiscal fix that sheltered poorer citizens from the costs of
a radical green transition. Bruno Latour agreed, but he was troubled by a
larger question about how we ‘land’, as though the last forty years had lifted
our societies into weightlessness, some of us suspended in eerie prosperity,
others spinning slowly and helplessly as livelihood and habitat float out of
reach. Sooner or later, in Latour’s view, we will head ‘down to earth’. The way
we manage that hectic descent and what kind of place we aim for will decide how
well or badly we meet the challenges of the ‘new climatic regime’, as he calls
it. Yet the monumental effort required to agree on mitigation is almost as
daunting as the threat of climate change itself. Which is why the rage and
frustration in France right now so often feel like sublimated panic about the
future, whatever the vexations of the present.
