On the Gilets Jaunes

Two interesting articles on the current French revolt by the Yellow Vests, apparently another front in the rural-urban cold war. In some ways, their descriptions remind me of the Tea Party movement here, but in others, not. These are longish articles and I'm just quoting some interesting bits from them below the fold.


Over at City Journal, Claire Berlinski offers "Riots in Paris." She got on the ground with the Gilets Jaunes.

I spent Saturday speaking to the Gilets Jaunes near the Bastille, where I figured I’d have a good vantage point on a traditional protest site. I walked with them as they slowly made their way to the city hall, or Hôtel de Ville. It was obvious from a single glance that these weren’t Parisians, but rural people who couldn’t afford to buy expensive Parisian clothes or get chic haircuts. I instantly understood why Macron rubs them the wrong way. They looked worn out; their hands and faces were lined; they were mainly in late middle-age. They seemed to be decent, respectable, weary people who had worked hard all their lives, paid their taxes, and played by the rules. ...

I concluded they were just what they were advertised to be: family men and women who couldn’t make ends meet and who were tired of Macron’s attitude. ...

People at the Charles de Gaulle Étoile saw something else entirely. There, the police were physically overwhelmed by about 5,000 Gilets Jaunes who had come explicitly prepared to do violence. ... The police were physically overpowered ... They were overrun. There were no cops behind the rioters to stop them from burning cars on the other avenues around the Étoile.

The rioter demographics were surprising. They were mainly aged 30-40, the police reported ... Of the 378 people taken into custody on Saturday, only 33 were minors. Most were rural men.

And at the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik offers "The Yellow Vests and Why There Are So Many Street Protests in France."

That fact is, in itself, the first fact to pay attention to: the local causation of the yellow-vest movement, this tax hike or that insult by Macron—or even the larger draining away of his mandate—seems less significant than that the group is one in a series that, since at least 1995, has taken to the streets to protest a program of what governments of the right, the left, or the center have imagined as “reform.” In this way, the attempt to understand the movement in narrow, immediate political-economic terms rather misses the point. The dynamic of violent street demonstration resulting in government recoil—on Tuesday Macron’s government folded and suspended the fuel-tax hikes—is not only familiar in France, it is pretty much the most predictable cycle of its modern political life. As “France’s Long Reconstruction,” a fine new history of the Fifth Republic by Herrick Chapman, a professor of history at New York University, makes explicit and highly explanatory, the Constitution of the Fifth Republic, as established by Charles de Gaulle in 1958, so centralized power in the Presidential palace that it had the unintended cyclical effect of making street protests and manifestations the only dynamic alternative to government policy. Even the National Assembly is meant to be subsidiary to the Élysée Palace, where the President resides. This is not a bug but a feature of the regime. Anyone who recalls the much larger demonstrations of late 1995, which brought the Juppé government to an end, over pension reforms that seem, in retrospect, minute, will recognize the permanence of the dynamic. Indeed, it is an irony of the movement that it takes its name from a rule of centralized government: those mandatory yellow vests. Overcentralized authority produces incoherent, spontaneous protest. The Fifth Republic French feel that, to be seen at all by centralized authority, they have to take to the streets in, so to speak, luminescent vests.