France’s Yellow Vests Challenge
by Jean-Louis Gassée
I won’t write about the Notre Dame fire that happened a mere fours days after I flew back from Paris. I know the cathedral well, it’s a beacon of one of my preferred Paris walks that goes from the Saint Germain crossing to the rue de Buci, rue Saint André des Arts, the Fontaine Saint Michel, rue de la Huchette, rue du Petit-Pont, crossing the Seine, walking by Notre Dame’s right side to its peaceful Jean XXIII garden in the back, crossing the Pont Saint-Louis into Île Saint Louis and walking to the end of rue Saint-Louis en l’île where the recently and splendidly restored Hôtel Lambert (not a hotel, a mansion) stands. I’ll walk that walk again in July.
Back in our peaceful Palo Alto, people on the street, waiters in restaurants have mentioned the blaze and offered touching words. But for now, the fire is too recent.
Recent isn’t a word that applies to the puzzling Yellow Vest movement, or conflagration, or mystery. As I write, the movement is in its Acte XXIII, its twenty-third week of Saturday demonstrations with more than occasional violence and vandalism, burned cars and newspaper kiosks, broken luxury shops and bank windows, wounded demonstrators and police staff.
One can’t recall a social movement that has lasted this long and burned so red in the last half century. The May ’68 protest durably influenced culture, but it was much more brief and less violent, and everyone understood what it was about: the young against the old guard. In the end, a new class of bourgeois intellectuals were calmly coopted by the same canny politicians that these bearded “revolutionaries” thought they were subverting. (I was there, ready to join HP at age 24.)
Over lunch at an Avenue Matignon café in Paris, I asked a literate media entrepreneur and political expert to explain the Yellow Vests mystery. Who are they, what do they want, who leads them? He started by offering a metaphor. The interior of France, some call it La France Profonde (think of Red States), is like a forest that has been progressively desiccated by climate change. Then gasoline was poured on the trees. Sooner or later a spark would set it ablaze.
I’ve seen the desiccation, the emptying of France. In an October 2017 Monday Note titled The Compostelle Walk Into Another France, I recounted how, with daughter Marie, we walked through empty villages, no café, no bakery, no garage. Barking dogs roamed the streets during the day, the inhabitants having rushed to their distant jobs. I had had a similar impression years before, driving small country roads in Northern Burgundy, but walking the Compostelle (Camino de Santiago) made it more vivid.
Over the past three or fours decades, La France Profonde has been slowly hollowed out as jobs moved out of the country or to larger urban areas. This desiccation isn’t unique to France, but gasoline was poured on the forest in the form of an accumulation of laws and regulations that exasperated the remaining France Profonde population, creating a schism between “real people” and “those people in Paris”.
Emmanuel Macron’s presidency appears to have been the spark, the last straw, with measures that made logical — some would say technocratic — sense, but that only went to exacerbate feelings of injustice and abandonment.
For a start, Macron removed parts of the very French Wealth Tax, a move that earned him the label “president of the rich”. It didn’t matter that a Wealth Tax doesn’t exist anywhere else in Europe, or that it’s generally considered counterproductive. People at the bottom of the economic scale felt The Rich were given an unfair break.
Macrons’s administration then started discussing reforms to the byzantine maze of retirement systems, and the cherished but creaky SNCF railway system. Then came edicts in the name of fighting climate change: Technical controls on cars became more frequent and more expensive, speed limits on secondary roads were lowered from 55 mph to 50, with an increase in the numbers of detested (and regularly vandalized) automated speed cameras. This was followed by yet another increase in the price of gas, in the name of lowering atmospheric pollution by “encouraging” people to use their cars less.
The problem with such measures is that the urban middle class grouses over the price of diesel for their SUVs, but they can afford it, they know depreciation is their biggest expense. Not so for people whose income borders 800€/month ($1,000) or less, who need their old jalopy to get to work, and for whom an additional 20€ every month to pay for gas is not merely irritating, it’s a threat and a constant reminder that the “petits messieurs” in Paris don’t know, don’t care.
Ironically, two of the more benign, if unnecessary, government creations gave the movement a venue and a uniform: The spread of pointless rotary road crossings and the regulation that you must carry a yellow vest in your car to wear in case of a breakdown, a flat tire.
Late last year, and with the help of social networks, the forgotten French began a Saturday ritual of assembling on rotary crossroads wearing their highly visible vests. The Yellow Vests then decided to demonstrate beyond the crossroads by marching to the center of big cities such as Bordeaux, Lyon, Toulouse, and, of course, Paris.
A key feature of the Yellow Vests movement is its lack of affiliation to any existing political party. The Yellow Vests clearly say they don’t trust the current electoral and legislative system. They have no cohesive organization, no functioning hierarchy, only social media subgroups that channel grievances, news (real and fake), and marching orders. As they march, they let the ultra-left fringe do the dirty vandalism jobs that keeps the movement on the front page. Cars and kiosks burn, the Champs Élysées Fouquet’s café-restaurant is vandalized…
But what do they want?
Most protesters claim they want Macron out, but they have no replacement to offer. Over time, they began to gather reform proposals that ranged from instituting a citizens’ referendum to the unsurprisingly contradictory collections of more social programs and less taxes.
Macron’s administration has been busily distilling these complaints and suggestions. A few days before May 1st — French Labor Day, a date with explosive potential — Macron is expected to address the nation with reform proposals meant to address the distilled grievances.
In the meantime, Macron has been traveling around France addressing mayors, representatives who are closer to the ground. With none of the earlier gaffes that confirmed his detached elite image, he’s been brilliant on these occasions, holding meetings for up to six hours, warm, honest, charming — that’s how he got elected. (Still, one recalls what happened last time, in 1789, when the King accepted a Cahier de Doléances, a Record of Grievances. His and many other heads rolled soon thereafter.)
Old union leaders used to say One Must Know How To End A Strike. How do Yellow Vests end their long series of demonstrations? Unions were, by definition, organized; Yellow Vests aren’t and one doesn’t discern what signal concession would make them say that they’re (grudgingly) satisfied.
Sadly, the outpouring of support for the reconstruction of Notre Dame added negative energy to the Yellow Vests demonstrations. Rich people such as the Arnault and Pinault families and L’Oréal heirs led a pledge that quickly reached the $1B level. ‘What about us?’ asked the Yellow Vests who made their point by setting symbolic fires around Paris during this week’s ritual.
We now see more clearly the mounting frustrations that led to the birth of the movement. But the political establishment didn’t realize how distrusted they were. It will be interesting to watch if any political formation manages to recuperate the Yellow Vests energy, or if the distrust will stay active, as an infection of the body politic that is neither curable nor deadly.
The following weeks will be worth watching.
— JLG@mondaynote.com
France’s Yellow Vests Challenge
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