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.

9 comments:

  1. Yellowjackets sting above their weight class.

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  2. That's for sure.

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  3. There is a nice little book by Martin Walker: Bruno, Chief of Police Investigation. It's set in the Perigord region of France and a part of Bruno's duties is to help the street market vendors of his town get early warning of the food inspectors from the central government, sent to enforce the EU rules about cheese and eggs and wine and every other food the local French make, sell, buy, and enjoy.

    Much of the resistance to these rules is peaceful (shutting down food stalls when the inspectors are spotted, lying about what the unstamped eggs are for) but some is more violent (slashed tires on the inspectors' cars, sugar in the engines). It reads like the current and, according to the second article cited, previous, protests, writ small.

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  4. Just ordered it on Audible! I need vast hours of audio books to fold a million Moravian stars by.

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  5. "Overcentralized authority produces incoherent, spontaneous protest."

    When I was a college freshman, there was a minor controversy over our dorm rules which I nevertheless remember feeling extremely strongly about, in the way of 18-year-olds chafing under adult restrictions. I geared myself up into protest mode and got a meeting with the house master, a faculty member assigned to administer that dorm, one of 8 on campus. He listened to my impassioned outburst, then observed mildly that I seemed to have very strong feelings on the subject. (He was really a very nice man; on another occasion he comforted a fellow resident whose father had died suddenly, and got her back from shocked collapse to an ability to make arrangements to travel home and deal with the tragedy.) Anyway, to this day I remember the stunned sense of relief I had upon the experience of simply being listened to. Suddenly I became rational again. We reached a simple accommodation that fixed the problem without having to escalate to the Board of Trustees or anything equally silly, like campus-wide riots.

    There's a lot to be said for decentralized power and rational local solutions crafted face-to-face. It's one reason I ran for local office. I think it's the job of local governments to resolve local disputes so successfully that no state or federal authority need ever intervene.

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  6. Just ordered it on Audible! I need vast hours of audio books to fold a million Moravian stars by.

    I hope you enjoy it - I was introduced to it by the library's mystery book club. Next up, the mystery book club is reading Girl Waits With Gun. And I'm working my way back through Charlaine Harris' Aurora Teagarden mysteries (cozies that turn dark somewhere in the series) with a surprisingly enjoyable side-trip to her An Easy Death (Wild West with a heck of a twist).

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  7. Adam Gopnik's article would probably be more practical for the incoming Congress to read than Aristotle.

    But equally likely they'll read neither.

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  8. "Overcentralized authority produces incoherent, spontaneous protest."

    I think that I would by the T-shirt that had that imprinted. I may have to make one myself. Much as I hate fluorescent yellow, that might be the correct color for said shirt. Or maybe just the text, on a dark grey background.

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  9. It'd be kinda cool to design the T like one of the yellow vests, a T-shirt version of the vest, basically. Then have the text printed in bright red, maybe.

    An alternative might be a gray-scale version of the yellow vests, then the text itself in yellow, or white.

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