CULEY-LE-PATRY, France — Emmanuel Macron is right. He is also wrong.
The French president claims the Yellow Jacket rebellion, now in its 34th week, has been misrepresented. To describe the gilets jaunes as angry citizens demonstrating on the streets, he told the New Yorker, is “bullshit.”
Macron is right about the movement as it exists today. The original broad movement — rural and outer-suburban, apolitical and anti-political — that began last November died several months ago.
The rump — down to less than 6,000 during the baking-hot weekend, according to the interior ministry, compared to 280,000 at the beginning — is dominated by ideologically driven city-dwellers, most of them already politically engaged and most of them from the left.
Where Macron is wrong is in his claim that the Yellow Jackets were never a spontaneous explosion of extraordinary anger by ordinary people.
The movement’s decline is also partly the result of exhaustion and fear of violence — on both sides.
The initial movement grew from anger at the success of a score of French metropolitan areas which, according to the Yellow Jackets, exploited rural areas and cared little that parts of the country are being left behind.
That anger hasn’t gone away. But in many cases, it no longer has a channel through which to express itself.
Protests these days are much reduced in size and heavily colonized by young urban, left-wing activists. The rhetoric is increasingly anti-capitalist.
‘Pure arrogance’
As the movement mutates, it is creating its own set of left-behinds — those who feel the Yellow Jackets have strayed too far from the original cause and don’t agree with the new trajectory.
Vincent Bergot, 28, a Yellow Jacket — or rather an ex-Yellow Jacket — from a village in Calvados in Normandy, was part of the action from day one.
“I was never interested in politics. I had never been to a demonstration in my life,” he said. “On the first day of nationwide protests on November 17, I went to a roundabout on the Caen ring-road. I was astonished.”
There were 1,000 people there, Bergot — a plumber from Culey-le-Patry, 30 kilometers south of Caen — recalled. Some were young, some were old, some poor, some not-so-poor. Most had never been actively engaged in politics before.
“I thought, yes, wonderful, amazing, this is what I’ve been waiting for … Now we can show them, the politicians, the people in Paris. They can’t just keep hitting us over the head with taxes. People in the countryside have a right to live too.”
During the movement’s first three or four months, Bergot did as much as he could. For 10 days, he manned a picket line day and night at a fuel depot just north of Caen.
“For me it was about the cost of diesel and petrol, about the cost of living, about my father’s pitiful pension after a lifetime’s work,” he said.
He added that “what really drove [him] crazy” was the decision last July to drop the speed-limit on two lane roads from 90 km/h to 80 km/h. “That was pure arrogance, a decision imposed by people in big cities who don’t drive.”
Yellow Jackets, some of them claiming to have been seriously injured during demonstrations, hold a banner reading “Liberty, Equality, Blinded in one eye” as they take part in a march in Paris | François Guillot/AFP via Getty Images
Fear of violence
Today, he thinks it’s time to give up the Saturday protests. Most of the early supporters have already fallen away, he said.
Why? Partly because of concessions by Macron (including a promised revision of the 80 km/h law). Since mid-December, the French president has granted €17 billion in lower taxes, increased pensions and other measures intended to alleviate the Yellow Jackets’ concerns.
This has already had a positive effect on purchasing power and has boosted the French economy — and Macron’s popularity, which rose to just under 40 percent in several polls from a low of 18 percent last autumn.
The movement’s decline is also partly the result of exhaustion and fear of violence — on both sides.
Some prominent Yellow Jackets are talking of hitting pause for the summer and starting up again in the fall, when several controversial Macron reforms will come before the National Assembly.
“Yes, the police can sometimes be rough and aggressive but the violence is also coming from a fringe of gilets jaunes,” Bergot said.
“The mixture of ages and types of people we had at the start, it’s all finished. It’s become very political, very ideological,” he added. “The truth is that the Yellow Jackets, as they were in November-December, don’t exist anymore. The numbers have fallen to the point where we risk being made to look ridiculous.”
Enough is enough
The movement’s refusal to identify leaders — at first a source of support and strength, and a way to contrast the movement to the elite structures it opposed — has become a major weakness. It means there’s no one to call it a day, or to decide when enough is enough.
“The Yellow Jackets movement has become a headless duck,” said Olivier Babeau, head of the French think tank Institut Sapiens. “It has no sense of where it wants to go or why, but it keeps on running all the same.”
The movement could grow stronger later this year when several controversial reforms will come before the national assembly | Nicolas Tucat/AFP via Getty Images
From the beginning, everyone saw what they wanted to see in the Yellow Jackets. To the Brexiteers in Britain, they were Frexiteers. To the MAGA legions in the United States they were honorary Trump supporters. To the radical international left, they were the downtrodden proletariat.
Today, the movement’s momentum is largely being provided by diehard gilets jaunes, who dismiss Macron’s concessions as insignificant. They remain hypnotized by the Yellow Jacket’s utopian, and never properly explained, demands for a new system of direct government by permanent referenda.
An attempt last month to reclaim the main locations of the November and December protests in rural areas was largely a failure.
‘Now we know’
Some prominent Yellow Jackets are talking of hitting pause for the summer and starting up again in the fall, when several controversial Macron reforms will come before the National Assembly.
Others in the movement have announced the creation of a parallel “yellow” network or society, in which members will organize their own politics, their own distribution networks, their own shops and their own public transport.
Nothing in the movement’s history so far suggests that such an ambitious project will survive the tribal quarrels and petty jealousies of the gilets jaunes themselves.
Still, the idea does point to the possibility of a second life for the movement that could be more constructive for the country — although not necessarily more comfortable for mainstream politics and politicians.
“The movement, the original movement, is finished, for now,” Bergot, the ex-Yellow Jacket activist, said.
“Before the Yellow Jackets, we were suffering alone in our own corners,” he said. “We didn’t know that so many other people shared the same problems and the same anger. Now we know. We also know how strong we can be.
“The Yellow Jackets will come back in some form – something more organized and practical maybe.
“For me, it should always have been about the cost of living, pensions, concrete things. All this stuff about referenda and grassroots government, it may sound good but I don’t see how you can run the country that way.”
John Lichfield is a former foreign editor of the Independent and was the newspaper’s Paris correspondent for 20 years.
This article has been updated.