Image: Peter Mercer
"Je marche sur la glace" said Emmanuel Macron, somewhat incongruously, as he walked across the sands of Egypt to see the temple of Abu Simbel at the end of January. But the problem wasn’t how to express France’s concern at the rather disappointing record on human rights of his host, President al-Sisi, let alone the propriety of his wife’s footwear (the British tabloids were in a lather about her trainers – ‘baskets’ in French – even though they were, naturally, Louis Vuitton). What was worrying him was yet another Saturday of chaos in the streets, of Paris and throughout France, as the gilets jaunes continued their long-running protests against, well, everything really. But especially him.
This Saturday around 70,000 of the yellow vests demonstrated across the country, rather fewer than the 280,000 who launched the campaign in November. But the turnout has never been less than 30,000 and in the last two weekends it has been more than 80,000. Long-time connoisseurs of revolutionary street theatre, the French have taken to referring to the repeated protests as scenes from a drama – last Saturday’s demo was acte XI. Although Mr Macron might agree with Shakespeare’s Berowne (himself a French courtier) in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’, that this is already too long for a play.
It’s also getting more violent. Most of the gilet jaunes have been relatively peaceful from the start but there have always been plenty of ‘casseurs’ (people who like breaking things, especially shop windows) happy to join in. After all, in Paris there’s not much for disaffected young folk from la banlieue to do on a Saturday night except burn cars. But the casualties are mounting. Figures from the Interior Ministry show that some 1900 demonstrators have been injured to date as well as 1200 police. Ten people have been killed. And more than 100 official enquiries have been launched into police violence.
So what are they all so fired up about? The protests may have started over hikes in diesel taxes – the rural French didn’t see why they should have to pay for the president’s lofty ambitions to lead Europe in meeting climate change targets. They were people who were more worried about getting to pay day at the end of the month than about the state of the planet in a thousand years, as the saying went. But the discontents have multiplied. They don’t like Macron’s pension reforms or the abolition of the wealth tax, they don’t like austerity or the decline of public services in rural areas. Like the folk who voted for Trump or for Brexit, they feel they are the forgotten ones. And they have had enough.
Pas content
You could see this coming even last May in La fête à Macron – a tongue in cheek name for a street party, a picnic even, to mark, without enthusiasm, the president’s first year in power. Of course that event was organised by the far left, La France Insoumise, but among all the usual banners demanding ‘Macron Must Go’, ‘Down with the President for the Rich’ and ‘A Year Too Many’ was a solitary placard proclaiming ‘Je ne suis pas content’. The French too can do understatement.
Well now half the country, at least, is not happy. And it’s quite clearly not just a left wing protest anymore. Most of the yellow vests are white, lower middle-class and rural, not at all like the Parisian working class (and radical lawyers and students) who have spearheaded every previous insurrection since 1789. They have resisted attempts to hi-jack their movement by the far left and the public sector unions on the one hand and Marine Le Pen’s far right on the other. Indeed, French commentators have been intrigued by the movement’s agility in refusing to have anything to do with a general strike – the traditional recourse of left-wing protest – preferring to do their demonstrating on Saturdays and continuing to pick up their wages.
Of course, for the French, being the French, all this unhappiness can only be understood as some kind of existential crisis. Maybe a ‘crise de sociabilité’ in which the conventions of tolerance have been abandoned. Le Figaro sees France descending into a sinister circus in which everyone feels free to express without shame their fiercest passions – anger, hatred, envy, scorn. And Macron himself speaks of a wave of discontent – a dissatisfaction that is ‘sociale, économique, morale et démocratique’ and which is breaking over all western democracies.
So is this the familiar populist revolt against globalisation, de-industrialisation, international capitalism, soaring income inequality, the urban elite, big tech? Probably all of that. Macron, for the yellow vests, may well be the incarnation of Davos man – an aloof, disconnected technocrat, an investment banker who knows nothing about the lives of ordinary people. Though it would be unwise to call him a ‘citizen of nowhere’ – in France, unlike in the UK, everyone is a proud citizen of somewhere – of France itself. Fraternité is as important as liberté. But there’s a distinct lack of égalite these days and many blame the president for trying with his reforms to make the gap between the winners and the losers wider.
The ‘left-behind’ are changing the structure of politics across the western world. In Europe no less than in the USA, traditional conservative and social democrat parties are being pushed to the margins by populist responses to the ‘hollowing out’ of towns and villages and the anxieties of immigration in the cities. In the UK the Conservatives may have succeeded in neutralising the populist threat by embracing, however reluctantly, Brexit. But Macron came to power by breaking the parties of the centre right and left and offering himself – the man above party – as the new De Gaulle.
So when people are unhappy they have no-one to blame except him.
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