The Old Regime and the Yellow Revolution

France’s protest movement has become a crisis of legitimacy for Emmanuel Macron—and the country’s constitutional order

By Robert Zaretsky January 15, 2019

French President Emmanuel Macron is desperately seeking a consistent and credible answer to a question that refuses to stand still. When the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) movement started this past November, Macron’s government treated it as a one-off protest that could be ignored. By December, the president decided that the continued weekly demonstrations were a threat to his policy goals. Macron’s response was to deliver a national address in which he announced an altered agenda, including economic concessions such as annulling the gas tax increase and raising the minimum wage.

The compromises weren’t enough to end the protests. This weekend, for the ninth consecutive Saturday, the protest movement took center stage, mobilizing over 80,000 demonstrators across the country. The principal stages were Paris and Bourges, the latter chosen for its symbolic significance as roughly the geographical center of France. Though the demonstrations were mostly peaceful, there were once again eruptions of the nearly ritualistic acts of violence on the part of some protesters, and the equally ritualistic reaction of police and security forces............To Read More.....

My Take - None of this should surprise us. France has been a mess forever. There's no fixing France by Macron or anyone else. There will be violence, either now or in the very near future and the Fifth Republic will be gone.

What will replace it?

It’s my view the EU will be gone and Europe will revert to the social paradigms of centuries past – a huge patchwork of small countries like Switzerland, Luxembourg, etc. Europe isn’t a nation, it’s a geographical designation with huge differences in culture, language and views of reality.

The collapse of the economic system in Europe will send them back to who they really are, and then there will be violence on an unprecedented scale between ethnic Europeans and Muslims.

It seems to me that Europe is on the verge of a nightmare, with criminal organizations growing and playing a major role in what goes on, and who knows, like Russia, they may become the government in these much smaller nations.

But in all this mix, there's bound to be a nationalist socialist, a Mussolini if you will, waiting in the wings to take control, but he won't be concerned about world conquest. He will be concerned about survival, and the general population will follow him, if for no other reason than the desire to have stability, peace and security. That will be the rallying cry, stability, peace and security, and they will turn power over to any dictator who will offer that!