The gilets jaunes

French protests have often seemed like a dance between demonstrators and police - direct action has a long and cherished history here. But these weekly confrontations between people and state are different.

Not led by any union or political party, the “yellow vest” protests have unleashed the worst civil disorder Paris has seen for decades.

Four people have been killed, many hundreds injured and billions of euros of damage inflicted on the country’s urban centres.

The French government at one point warned of “serious violence” and “fears for democracy and its institutions”, with at least one protest spokesman calling on people to march on the Elysee Palace, the home of the president. There is a difference between legitimate protest and unacceptable violence, the government has repeated, time after time.

And yet the power of this movement lies, not in the violence at its margins, but in the quiet support of what polls suggest is more than half the country for its basic aims.

President Emmanuel Macron came to power vowing to face down protesters and drive through long-postponed economic reforms.

For the first 18 months of his presidency, that’s exactly what he did - forcing through changes in the labour law against a backdrop of noisy public protests, and bulldozing past broad, union-led demonstrations on railway reform.

This current crisis erupted - not over a flagship issue - but over a fiscal detail in the budget for next year, a routine rise in eco-taxes on fuel. It wasn’t even a policy that the current government had made. The commitment to annual tax rises on fuel - and especially diesel - in order to fund eco-friendly projects had been part of the previous government’s legacy to Macron.

But it was enough to spark a small local rebellion - a handful of motorists who started displaying their regulation hi-vis jackets, or gilets jaunes, in the windscreens of their cars and posting their actions on Facebook.

Now a movement created on social media, with no recognised leadership, has forced President Macron into concessions that were unthinkable a few weeks ago. How? Because this is not a confrontation about fuel taxes, or any one issue.

It’s about power.

It’s no accident that cars were the spark that ignited this anger. Not needing one has become a status symbol in France.

Those in city centres have a wealth of public transport to choose from, but you need to be rich enough to live in the centre of Paris or Marseille or Bordeaux, and most people are not.

“Economic growth happens in big globalised cities, but the working classes no longer live there,” says Christophe Guilluy, an independent researcher specialising in human geography. “That’s a major change. For the first time in history, they don’t live where wealth and jobs are created. They live in a ‘peripheral France’, characterised by weak economic growth, high unemployment and high anxiety.”

“This economic model creates enormous wealth,” he continues. “But it creates it in a concentrated and unequal way. Since the 1980s, what we are seeing is a weakening of all categories of the middle class.”

Outside the ring roads that encircle Paris, and other major French cities, you will find the suburbs and satellite towns where workers like Nouria Benatia live. And the gap between the world she works in, and the one she can afford to live in, is growing.

She commutes into central Paris every day to work as a receptionist in a smart hotel just off the Champs-Elysees. After this month’s violent protests in the capital, she says the hotel has emptied and bookings have nose-dived. But she has little sympathy for business owners here.

“To be honest, I still have the same salary, so what does it change for me if the business is working or not?” she says. “I [still] have to go outside Paris to live, and come in to work every day. If the protests were more peaceful, maybe I’d join them.”

Without a car, those in France who have been priced out of the big cities would struggle to get to work, take their children to school and even to shop for groceries.

Petrol prices here are roughly the same as in Germany or the UK - and French diesel prices generally lie somewhere in between its two neighbours. But there is a more general sense of unfairness - a feeling that the struggling middle class are being asked to shoulder more than their fair share of the burden, while France’s millionaires have seen their top rate of tax slashed. And the pain was felt especially keenly this year, because rises in the global oil price had already made fuel more expensive.

In September this year, the government announced its planned increase in the eco-taxes levied on petrol and, particularly, on diesel. Shortly afterwards, the first motorists began showing off their hi-vis jackets in the windscreens of their cars, and Jacline Mouraud, a hypnotherapist from Brittany, published a video on social media saying that motorists were being “hunted”.

Months earlier, Priscillia Ludosky, the manager of an online cosmetics company from just outside Paris, had launched a petition on the website Change.org calling for petrol prices to be lowered. After the announcement on tax rises, it really began to take off, quickly gathering a million signatures - but still, she says, there’s been no response from the government.

“We are not understood, we are not heard, our opinions are not sought on the big decisions,” she explains. “I get the impression that when the president speaks to people in the street, he’s completely detached from reality.”

Then, in October, truck driver Eric Drouet, another initiator of the movement, suggested on Facebook the idea of a national blockage, calling on protesters around the country to block roads in their area on 17 November, obstructing and slowing traffic in order to get the government’s attention.

About 290,000 people took part. The gilets jaunes movement had begun.

“The movement started around a tax rise,” says Christophe Guilluy, “but I think it’s simply a pretext, in the same way that Brexit is not fundamentally a confrontation with Europe, but first and foremost a way for people to say ‘we exist’.

“In France, people are using the gilets jaunes as a way to say ‘we exist’ to the elites, to the political class, to those who have forgotten about them for the past 20 years, for the simple reason that they no longer live in the same place.”

The irony, for Emmanuel Macron, is that he came to power promising to rebuild trust in politics, especially among those struggling to thrive in the new, globalised economy. This is the last chance, he told me on the campaign trail last year - if he was to fail, next time it would be Marine Le Pen.

The reforms he promised were designed, he said, to create wealth in order that it could be shared with those who needed it most. It was a policy that aimed to liberalise and protect, but many here feel that the social protection for workers has fallen short compared with the liberal reforms enjoyed by businesses.

President Macron pushed through reforms where previous presidents had feared to tread - reducing the power of the unions in workplace relations, ending the special benefits enjoyed by railway workers, and making it easier for companies to hire and fire staff.

He also ended the wealth tax on all assets apart from property, meaning a 70% cut in the tax for France’s millionaires.

It was meant to boost investment in the economy, but it was seen by many poorer voters as further proof that this former banker-turned-president was still primarily a friend of business, not of the squeezed working and middle class.

France’s Public Policy Institute recently published a review of who had gained and lost under Macron’s presidency so far. It found that the buying power of the poorest in society had slightly shrunk, while those in the economic middle had slightly gained. But the biggest winners were the richest 1%.

This sense of unfairness emerges time and again in the graffiti that has appeared on walls and monuments in Paris. Much of it calls for the resignation of Macron, or simply the “fall of the regime”. On the Republic’s famous monument at Republique, someone has changed the revolutionary right of “universal suffrage” to read “universal suffering”.

If the roots of protesters’ frustration lie in the big economic shifts of the 1980s, how far did Macron himself encourage it to bloom into open opposition?

“In the last election, many people voted to change their situation and they still find themselves here, so they’ve started to get frustrated,” says protester Antonin Olles. “They’ve realised that those who govern them don’t know what real life is like - for them, poverty is just a set of numbers.”

The call has gone out for another day of national protest - the fifth consecutive weekend for the gilets jaunes, or “Act 5” as it’s being called. Franck is already planning to come back to Paris with his friends to see more of the action.

The violence he saw last week near Republique will stay with him for the rest of his life, he says. But he liked the atmosphere: “Everyone is together, we are all one, a very good team. It’s not every day you see that.”

That sense of unity among the protesters is what has given the movement its energy, and its power.

Sylvie and Christophe arrived on the Champs-Elysees last Saturday by 09:00. I met them walking up the near-empty boulevard towards the Arc de Triomphe with a group of friends.

“She’s far left,” Christophe told me, “and I’m far-right - and we’re here together for the gilets jaunes!”

“That’s what Macron doesn’t like,” he continued. “That we’re united. He’s brought back solidarity among the French. He’s turned everyone against him. We’re united in combat - at least for now. After that, who knows?”

“Our strength is that we’re apolitical,” Sylvie said. “Maybe later when there are new presidential elections, we’ll put together a leaflet, but for the moment we don’t need a leader - that’s our strength.”

Are you scared there might be violence here today, I asked her?

“No,” she replied. “We have nothing left to lose.”

Back at the barricade at La Ciotat, Antonin Olles has gravitated towards the makeshift barbecue as some of the protesters watch a few small piles of sardines crisp on the coals.

There is talk about the next protest - some in La Ciotat say they’re planning to demonstrate here, rather than make the trip up to Paris.

Many have cautioned against dismissing this movement too quickly, even if the level of protest and violence in the capital falls. “The absence of a complete eruption last Saturday doesn’t mean the protest is easing,” cautioned the daily Le Figaro earlier this week. “[The president] won’t win over the country by pulling out his cheque-book or flaunting his intellect, he needs to open his heart.”

“We want a second French revolution,” Olles says. “We want to show the rest of Europe that the people have some power.”

France was seen from the outside as having avoided a populist revolution 18 months ago - but the election of Emmanuel Macron simply papered over France’s problems. Fixing them will take a whole lot more.