Riots in Paris

The police underestimated the madness of the crowd.

Claire Berlinski December 7, 2018

 

The Gilets Jaunes, or Yellow Jackets, are now entering their fourth week of nationwide protests. They claim to be leaderless and unaffiliated with any party, politician, or unions. They are mostly working- and middle-class people from France’s abandoned rural provinces. Christopher Caldwell described this group, sociologically, in City Journal last year; he was in turn appealing to the well-known work of the French geographer Christophe Guilluy.

 

The proximate cause of the rage of the Yellow Jackets was a proposal to raise fuel taxes. Macron’s government has now announced that it will suspend the tax hike, but the gesture seems only to have encouraged the protesters and vindicated in their minds the use of violence. So now what?

First, this development should tell you that the gas tax was not the real issue—so this is not “the first mass uprising against eco-elitism,” as some hopeful Anglophone journalists have suggested. There are superficial similarities between these protests and populist movements elsewhere, but France has its own culture and history—one so rich in popular uprisings and demonstrations that the French commentariat is not asking whether this resembles earlier episodes in French history, but which revolutionary episode it best resembles. All liberal democracies are alike, but every populist uprising is illiberal in its own way..............To Read More.....