Raphael Lafargue/Abaca/Sipa via AP Images
Yellow Vest protester near barricades on the Place d'Italie, Paris, France during a demonstration marking the first anniversary of the movement, November 2019.
On Saturday, December 1, 2018 in Paris, three weeks into the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vest) movement, the Champs-Elysées was barely visible through the clouds of teargas and smoke. Parked cars, trash cans, and street construction barricades were set ablaze on the normally calm street, in an expensive part of the city that would have been full of shopping tourists any other Saturday in December. Between the smoke, the teargas, and the jets from the water cannon trucks, the only thing visible was the sea of luminous yellow vests on the street.
Patricia, 57, has lived in Paris all of her life, and was among that sea, wearing the yellow vest every driver must have in their cars by law in case of emergency. Having never participated in a protest before, she said she was motivated by her disgust for President Emmanuel Macron and his economic policies. “Macron is a dictator. He doesn’t respect the French people at all. Every time, he insults and humiliates the French, the lower and middle classes. He’s disagreeable, a boob and very bad,” Patricia said to me, in the street of the 17th arrondissement. “There are too many taxes … (and) certainly the taxes are most affecting the middle class.”
When the movement started, Macron tried to ignore the civil unrest in France’s major cities, graffiti on the Arc de Triomphe, and numerous accusations of police brutality (which is only now resulting in an overuse of force trial of two police officers). But the movement had swelled to more than gas tax protesters to include many different workers unions, the backbone of lasting French protest movements. After five weeks of mobilization, Macron made several major concessions. He cancelled his gas tax, increased the wages of public-sector workers, and directed local city officials to collect written grievances from their residents, which would better inform the national policy agenda. (The last part, known as Le Grand Débat, hasn’t worked out; Macron has used it as a lecture series. An online investigative reporting magazine called Mediapart published a cartoon of Macron engaged in Le Grand Débat with the speech bubble “I came to hear you listen to me.”)
The concessions stunted the seemingly unstoppable momentum of the movement. But a year later, Gilets Jaunes continue to protest for further reform and add stress to the already-fractured French political landscape composed of Macron’s struggles, the far right’s Marine Le Pen, and several left-leaning parties irreconcilable and doomed to perpetually split up the progressive vote in future elections. The political impasses cause lasting feelings of discontent with politicians across the country. Macron’s approval rating was at 20 percent at about the time the movement started, according to an Ipsos poll, and has only risen to 33 percent in the most recent data—even lower than President Donald Trump’s ratings.
Macron’s tax on oil, seen as a sign of disrespect against the middle class, sparked the Gilets Jaunes. Their collective action forced Macron to abandon the gas tax, which would have raised the price of car fuel and home heating. But their resolve to take to the streets every Saturday for the last year was fueled by a larger struggle for economic justice, and its continuation still reverberates throughout the country.
Before the Gilets Jaunes, there was the Nuit Debout, which means roughly “standing up at night.” At the Nuit Debout, from March to June 2016, people occupied the country’s public squares, like in a sit-in. A microphone was passed around and people shared their discontent with former President François Hollande’s policies. In Paris, the rendezvous site was the Place de la République, and the proposed policy that elevated the movement was a change in the labor laws. The laws would have loosened regulations on hiring and firing employees for cost-cutting reasons and allow some to work more than 35 hours a week (the regulated norm in France). These weren’t the kind of work reforms that people expected or could accept from a Socialist Party president.
Macron inherited this discontent when he became president in 2017. His gas tax didn’t solely cause the Gilets Jaunes movement, nor is he alone responsible for its intensity. But perhaps emboldened by his victory over far-right Le Pen, Macron did not learn the lessons of the administration before him.
Macron’s first action in office was a repeal of a Wealth Solidarity Tax (l’impôt de solidarité sur la fortune, or ISF), which when combined with his background as a banker was not well received. Patricia said, “He’s the president of the rich, the president of the bank, the president of lobbyists,” when asked about Macron’s policies. Macron also changed the rate of the tax on property wealth (l’impôt sur la fortune immobilière, or IFI) and replaced it with a flat tax, capping government revenue from capital at 30 percent.
Consequently, inequality has been exacerbated in France and poverty has grown. Inequality has increased to the highest levels since the aftermath of the global financial crisis, according to an October report from the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (Insee). The organization shows the driving forces of the inequality increase rest with Macron’s lessening of wealth redistribution taxes coupled with the implementation of other non–income-based taxes on products like petrol and tobacco. And what the Gilets Jaunes saw in Macron’s gas tax proposal, his administration could not anticipate.
Macron branded his gas tax as a way to help the environment and curb France’s overall emissions. But he was not able to hide behind the urgency of climate change to convince the public. The tax would have added a disproportionate burden on people who live outside of Paris. In the large metropolitan area, there is easier access to the Métro and high-speed trains for transport, in addition to generally higher incomes that would make the rise in home-heating prices less cumbersome.
Additionally, Macron’s reasoning was perceived as disingenuous because he had never prioritized the climate previously. Just a couple of months before, Energy Minister Nicolas Hulot quit his job on a France Inter radio show because he “didn’t want to lie to [himself] anymore” about Macron’s lack of action on climate. After the Gilets Jaunes movement started, Hulot said on a TV panel that they were not acting against the climate crisis, but against financial injustice. He supported a carbon tax while in office, but only with a complementary social dimension for solidarity. Hulot also added that the Gilets Jaunes crisis, at least as it relates to the gas tax and the environment, was avoidable.
France’s largest frustrations with the system come from a natural distaste for the neoliberal policies served to them in the past several presidencies. Mediapart aptly noted social and democratic protest movements across the world, from Chile’s transportation taxes to Hong Kong’s struggle for autonomy, are fueled by the globalization of neoliberal economics. “The current crisis of neoliberalism,” journalist Romaric Godin wrote, “has three faces: an environmental crisis, a social crisis, and a democratic crisis.” The current economic system is simply unable to handle these three components at the same time. In France, Macron’s floundering attempt at focusing on the environmental crisis caused a social one, which built off the already existing frustrations of a democratic crisis, in a culture that is still mostly allergic to American-esque capitalism.
The 53rd consecutive Saturday of protests brought a revival to the economic-justice movement. The protests at their height closed down every Métro station in the Gilets Jaunes’ path, along with the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower last winter. But by the summer, the protests persisted mostly in more suburban and rural parts of France without disruption to the capital. For the one-year anniversary, the movement’s protesters returned in mass numbers to the Champs-Elysées and across the city at the Place d’Italie. According to the minister of the interior, 28,000 people protested in France, of which 4,700 were in Paris. Twenty-three Métro stations were closed across Paris, and the 2,500 police present were armed with teargas and water cannons.
Last year, Patricia told me, “I was here last week, this week, and will be here for the future weeks.” Without learning the lessons of the past and the importance of economic solidarity to La République, Macron’s tenure will continue under the shadow of the yellow vest, and future administrations will also be subject to the power of protest from the people.
