The protesters range from the middle class suburban elderly to the rural poor. Most road-blocks were good-humoured and well-behaved, although there was a scattering of racist and homophobic attacks on drivers who refused to halt, including an incident near Lyon where demonstrators snatched away the head-scarf of a muslim woman.
The uniform of the revolt is the yellow hi-vis jacket, or gilet jaune, which French drivers must carry in their vehicles by law. The protest has no formal leaders or organisation and has refused help from political parties or trades unions. It is predominantly rural and outer suburban, anti-Metropolitan and anti-politician but cannot easily be dismissed as a populist trend of hard-Right or hard-Left. [...]
The French sociologist Alexis Spire cautions that these parallels, as well as comparisons with protest movements in other countries, are misleading. Poujadism, like the Tea Party movement in the US, was an attack on the state and on public spending. The yellow jackets are anti-government-as-usual, but they are pro-state and pro-state-spending. They complain that Paris does not spend enough on rural and suburban roads, public transport or hospitals – while piling heavy, new taxes onto non-Metropolitan France. [...]
This pattern is not entirely new. In the last 25 years, Presidents Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande have suffered the same catastrophic collapse in popular support soon after their election. This can, in part, be explained by a characteristically French brand of perversity. The country cries out for “reform”, in the abstract, but opposes all “reforms”.
Something new is happening, however. The yellow jacket protests expose fault lines that stretch well beyond France: motorists v environmentalists; cities v the countryside and outer suburbs; the working class, the struggling middle, the middle-aged and the old v the Metropolitan and the enterprising young. [...]
But there is also a deeper and older issue: a sense that tens of thousands of French people are being left behind, ignored or exploited by the thriving world of Metropolitan France, which includes not just Paris but Lyon, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Grenoble and many other cities. François de Rugy, France’s environment minister – or “minister for ecological transition” – sums up the issue well.
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