The Gilets Jaunes are no ordinary protestors

France’s national great debate is unlikely to get to the root of the country’s travails: the death of the middle class dream.

France’s gilets jaunes movement is preparing for its tenth ‘act’ this weekend. Faced with an endless vista of protests, president Emmanuel Macron has been forced to go to the people, the bastards, and ask them to speak.

In truth, numbers on the weekly marches have begun to dwindle—crowds on the streets are down to around a fifth of what they were during their height—but they have not declined so much as to make the protests an irrelevance. Despite widespread revulsion at property damage and violence, public opinion remains on the side of the protestors, currently polling at 59 per cent according to a survey from Ifop, down on 79 per cent in November 2018.

Complaints that the protests have been hijacked by the far right, or for that matter the far left, are wide of the mark.

Anglophone commentators have been quick to diagnose the gilets jaunes as an army of ignorant backwoodsmen, turbocharged by racism and high on diesel fumes, and in this they have been aided by the emergence of an obviously right-wing a copycat micro-movement in the UK. The beaufs of the gilets jaunes are France’s Brexiteers, they argue.The beaufs of the gilets jaunes are France’s Brexiteers, they argue. Or they would if they knew enough about French language, culture or politics to use terms like beauf.

Commentary in France has often been little better, with journalists typically drawn from the same ‘bobo’ (bourgeois bohemian) milieu that created and sustains not only Macron, but the majority of our contemporary cultural prejudices.

The left, meanwhile, should be in accord with the gilets jaunes, and the likes of former presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon have attempted to ride the movement’s coat tails. That the left as a whole has not succeeded indicates that the division between the graduate school radicals and men and women of the streets is no less stark in France than it is anywhere else in the West: ostensibly in agreement about all manner of things from wages to taxes, the two groups are not only drawn from different classes but speak utterly different languages.

Attempts to paint the protestors as a mob of the ignorant rampaging against an imminently approaching kinder, gentler modernity—the modernity of carbon taxes and riding to the creative hub on your electric unicycle—fall flat in the face of Macron’s own acts as president: abolition of France’s wealth tax, cuts to social welfare, a reduction in employers’ social security contributions and a raid on pensioners’ incomes.

Our hyper-moral, organic, carbon neutral, equal opportunities Jerusalem always seems to have a habit of being built on the backs of the poor.

Despite being pilloried as backward oil addicts, early on in the movement protestors interviewed said they did not object to green measures; simply to ones that destroyed their livelihoods in the name of some elusive greater good. In short, what they objected to was the self-serving austerity ecology of the well-off, who enjoy urban living, including subsidised public transport, paid for by hiking taxes on those without access to the a metropolitan railway network, decent jobs or, frankly, the opportunity to get on in life.

Recognising early on in the protests the disconnection between his own class and that of the protestors, Macron ditched his planned diesel tax escalator. This move was not enough, however, and disturbances continued, expressing a wider anti-government and anti-élite sentiment. This minor policy climbdown, however, is more than the trade union left, dominated by public sector workers and equally opposed to Macron, has been able to do despite calling numerous strikes since he was anointed president.

Openly loathed by the well-heeled, these people of ‘peripheral France’, as geographer Christophe Guilluy dubbed them almost five years ago, are not even subject to the cloying pity doled out to the banlieusard immigrants and their descendants walled-up in the suburbs. People across France have not failed to notice that casual and precarious employment is increasingly the norm, particularly for the young, and as wealth is sucked into the cities those on the outside find it hard to make it to the end of the month.

Faced with more protests, Macron has now initiated a ‘great debate’, and although this is unlikely to be a Louis XVI moment for the man routinely mocked as an elected king—the estates-general debate may have precipitated the French revolution but Macron is in no immediate danger of being forced to resign—the fact that Jupiter has been, even momentarily, sucked back down to Earth from his orbit in the startup belt is itself instructive.

In an open letter to the country, the president sang the country’s praises with the chauvinistic claim that France is somehow a special, more caring country than any other.

“France is, of all nations, one of the most fraternal and the most egalitarian,” he wrote.

Nice rhetoric, and France, with its strong culture and traditions, is a pleasant place to live in many ways, but if this were an axiomatic truth then there would be no grievances to animate the gilets jaunes.

There is also little sense that Macron’s government is serious about this debate, and it is unclear just what a formal national debate would actually mean other than the bizarre spectacle of the opening of grievance books in town halls across the country. The population seems to agree: one poll, conducted by Odoxa for the newspaper Le Figaro and radio station France Info, said 77 per cent of people did not believe the debate would be conducted “independently of power”.

The leaderless nature of the gilets jaunes may mean that the movement is not only dynamic but has, so far at least, been spared a takeover by either Marine Le Pen’s far-right or the sclerotic left officialdom of the unions, but it also means that that it is necessarily incoherent. How can any politician meet the demands of the general will when there is no-one to embody that will? Macron’s gambit is that, like a psychologist allowing his patient to ramble incoherently, the upshot will be a letting-off of steam that evacuates the dynamism from the complaint.

There is also no real agreement on how to mend France’s sclerotic economy, which suffers from chronic structural unemployment, currently at around eight per cent. Some, like Macron, urge a dose of free-market medicine while others demand dirigisme. The gilets jaunes, to whatever extent one can even speak of their demands, often advocate both at the same time.

Nonetheless, while moving France’s body politic from a moment of primal scream to the therapist’s couch is a wise move for Macron, but the tarnished golden boy of sensible centrism cannot meaningfully address one central issue: there is a problem, and it is not just in France.

Ten weeks in and we can now see that this is no ordinary protest. It will likely fail as a direct challenge to the authority of the president, unlikely as it is to succeed in doing any more than extracting a few more concessions, but the theme is one that resonates across the Western world: whatever happened to the middle class dream? It seems that in the high-tech world of iPhones and Airbnb, some of us feel that we are destined for little more than driving an Uber or working in an Amazon warehouse. And, in the end, even that job will be replaced by a drone. Sneer at France’s angry suburbanites and rural dwellers as the revolting masses if you must, but, seen this way, perhaps their bitterness and sorrow is a vision of all our dismal futures.