The winter of the gilets jaunes

From my home in Pennsylvania, I have watched the evolution of the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) protests in France.

The phenomenon has been badly misunderstood by much of the Anglophone media (who often seem puzzled by the peculiarities of Gallic history and culture, and couldn’t quite figure out the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, for example, either), and I thought it might be worth writing a short explainer and analysis for my English-speaking friends. By way of background, I've been visiting France regularly for the last 24 years, lived there for a number of years in two working class communities (Château Rouge in the 18eme and Bagnolet in Seine-Saint-Denis), follow its media and culture and have traveled relatively widely there.

There is a lot of legitimate anger at the French state and political class as whole, which, make no mistake, for many people includes the whole political spectrum, from President Emmanuel Macron's La République En Marche! to the traditional left Parti socialiste to the traditional right Les Républicains to even the far left La France Insoumise of Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the far right Rassemblement national (formerly Front national) of Marine Le Pen

A lot of people in France really have seen their lives becoming worse, with wealth distribution over the last decade (at least) concentrated among the urban upper classes, while middle and working class people - especially in non-urban areas - have seen their services cut in terms of public transportation (leading people to depend more on cars) and healthcare. People have seen their wages stagnate as the cost of living has increased.

The comments of a 32 year-old mother of three interviewed by the Guardian’s Angelique Chrisafis, who bemoaned the fact that she “lived in misery” and was “constantly overdrawn at the bank” (a struggle I can relate to all too well) and that should couldn’t “see a better future” for her children are fairly typical.

For people like this, the glittering “startup nation” that Macron - who himself was elected only last year as a rupture with the traditional political establishment - has talked about might as well be as distant as the moon, as they are really struggling just to get from one week to the next, to raise a family on 2,000 euros a month, to figure out how to get to work every day. One can see why the new fuel tax, which would impact this strata of society immediately and brutally, would prove a spark to a tinderbox. To view this mass of people - many of whom have few if any connections to traditional political parties, labor unions or other linchpins of French civic life - as mere pawns of local or foreign powers would be a big mistake.

In many ways, the movement is schizophrenic, on one hand demanding more services while on the other hand demanding lower taxes, restrictions on immigration and other, frankly reactionary, aims.

However, it would also be deeply naive to see the violence that has wracked France in recent weeks as the simple cri de coeur of France’s working class, and to miss the more ominous signals coming from the gilets jaunes.

It is worth noting that, thus far, France’s non-white working class, the inhabitants of the cités and habitation à loyer modéré (often abbreviated to HLM, and meaning rent-controlled public or private housing), who demonstrated after the deaths of youths in the Paris suburbs of Clichy-sous-Bois in 2005 and in Villiers-le-Bel in 2007 (I reported on the latter) have thus far been largely absent from the gilets jaunes movement. There are several reasons for this, including the fact that they often have even-lower paying jobs than the gilets jaunes, use public transportation within and around major cities (and thus are less dependent on private cars) and may simply not want to expose themselves to the violence that has been an inescapable element in recent weeks.

However, there are other, more troubling signs. Last month, at a gilets jaunes roadblock in northern France a truck full of migrants was stopped and turned over to police amid gloating abuse from the demonstrators. The fact that, at various points, outside agitators, including those from the extreme right and those from other countries, have been involved in the Paris violence is beyond dispute. Policewomen working at the protests have been the subjects of base, misogynistic abuse.

Some demonstrator have called for Pierre de Villiers, a French army general and former Chief of the Defence Staff, who had publicly criticized Macron’s plan to reduce defense spending, to replace Macron. As Daniel Cohn-Bendit, better known as Dany le Rouge (Danny the Red), one of the leaders of France’s May 1968 student uprisings has pointed out, the uprisings of 50 years ago sought to oust a general (Charles de Gaulle) from power, not put one in as head of state.

The parties of France’s bitter, naysaying extremes have also, quite naturally, attempted to use the unrest to their advantage and as a recruiting tool.

As is their wont, accounts known to promote Kremlin views have signal-boosted news of the gilets jaunes protests and encouraged extremism and recrimination across a variety of social media platforms.

It remains to be seen whether or not Marcon's address to the nation yesterday - during which he announced a range of measures while admitting  he knew he had "hurt" some by his words and actions and pledged that he "fought to shake the system in place... precisely because I want to serve our country and I love it"- will be enough to placate the gilets jaunes and the potentially far more destructive forces percolating around their fringes. 

Before night falls: An American’s letter to France

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Before night falls: An American’s letter to France    

by Michael Deibert

It has been a wrenching few years in France, hard to witness for an American like me who holds the country in great affection. From the attack on the satirical journal Charlie Hebdo (itself a champion of an inclusive, liberal, secular France) in January 2015 to the Paris attacks in November of that year, to sundry assaults in Nice, Magnanville, Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, the Champs-Élysées and elsewhere, France has had its sense of security badly shaken. Layer on top of this an anemic economy that grew at a rate of barely more than 1% in 2016, national unemployment that hovers at close to 10%, and youth unemployment that sees nearly one in four under 25 years old out of work, and it is no surprise that a sense of malaise and pessimism has settled on the country. The two traditional major political currents, today represented by the left-wing ruling Parti Socialiste and the right-wing opposition Les Républicains, seemingly utterly out of ideas for how to address these severe challenges.

And now, I fear, France might build upon these terrible events with a self-inflicted wound that would be the greatest tragedy of all: Electing Marine Le Pen as president.

It is a testimony to how much the traditional political system in France has broken down that in last month’s presidential election, the two top vote-getters who proceeded to the second (and final) round were Le Pen, of the extreme-right Front National, and Emmanuel Macron, a former finance minister whose own political party, En Marche!, was only formed in April of last year.

As Le Pen and Macron head into the 7 May runoff election, most polls put Macron comfortably ahead, but threats of abstention by France’s far left (whose candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has declined to advise his voters to support Macron) raise worrying specters of the 2016  U.S. election, where two candidates with no serious program for the country siphoned off just enough votes from Hillary Clinton in key states to give Donald Trump the White House (Clinton lost Pennsylvania by 44,312 votes. while Jill Stein and Garry Johnson, neither of whom had any chance of winning, drew away 49,947 and 146,711, respectively).

As the far left and the far right attempt to paint Macron as a tool of the establishment given his background as investment banker at Rothschild & Cie Banque (a barely concealed antisemitic dog whistle among France’s far right), observers like myself are left to gaze upon the disheartening spectacle of one of the world’s most highly educated and wealthiest democracies having so many of its voters potentially seduced by a political figure who represents, in word and deed, a number of the demonic tendencies in France’s body politic that many thought they had left behind.

Marine Le Pen took over the Front National from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, a man of intemperate speech who once suggested that Nazi gas chambers that killed Jews and others during the Holocaust were “a detail of history” and praised Philippe Pétain, who headed France’s collaborationist Vichy government during World War II, a transgression for which he was fined by a French court. When the elder Le Pen reached the 2002 general election for president (which he would lose to Jacques Chirac), Le Monde ran an article accusing him of having tortured prisoners during Algeria’s war of independence, during which Le Pen served as a lieutenant in a paratroop regiment.

Though the young Le Pen succeeded in expelling her father from the party in August 2015 and has attempted a (largely cosmetic) makeover, the Front National remains a deeply nasty organization, a party overflowing to the brim with Holocaust-deniers and assorted antisemites, virulently and violently anti-immigrant agitators, Islamaphobic harpies and royalist quacks

Just last month, referring to the Rafle du Vélodrome d'Hiver, a Nazi-directed mass arrest against Parisian Jews that took place in July 1942 (an enterprise aided by French police), after which children as young as 18 months old were shipped off to Auschwitz and killed, Le Pen said that “I don’t think France is responsible.” After Le Pen made a grand show of stepping down as leader of the Front National to “feel more free and above all, above party politics,” the man who replaced her, Jean-François Jalkh, was forced to step down after he told journalists that it was “impossible” that the chemical agent Zyklon B was used “in mass exterminations.” 

All that aside, Le Pen has a clear and piercing message that resonates in a deeply pessimistic country: France has been betrayed by global elites, is being overrun by dangerous migrants (conveniently ignoring the fact that almost all perpetrators of recent terrorist attacks in France were native-born) and that only by returning to a vanished and idealized past (which never really existed) can France recapture its “greatness.” It is a message that should seem disturbingly familiar to those of us living through Brexit Britain and the current Trumpian dystopia of the United States. And it has already seduced some of the opportunists populating France’s political establishment. Only last week, failed presidential candidate Nicolas Dupont-Aignan of the Debout la France party announced his willingness to serve as Le Pen’s Prime Minister.

As an American who lived in and loves France, it is my sincere hope that this country that has given the world so much does not make this Faustian bargain. 

We have had a long friendship, France and the United States, and we have seen one another through some wrenching times. The Marquis de Lafayette abandoned his comfortable life in France and spent the agonizing winter of 1777 with George Washington and the the Continental Army in Valley Forge (only a few miles from where I grew up) because of his commitment to the American cause. In later generations, thousands of American soldiers would give their lives on the beaches and in the fields of France to help free it from tyranny.

African Americans like Sidney Bechet found relief in France’s embrace from the scalding racial prejudice of the Jim Crow South. Others, such as James Baldwin and Richard Wright, joining Americans such as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Henry Miller, came to bask in the country’s rich cultural ambiance. Beyond the U.S., refugees from wars such as those that afflicted the Balkans and Algeria in the 1990s (I am aware, of course, of France’s tangled colonial relationship with Algeria) also arrived and found in France the democratic and pluralistic embrace they could not find at home.

Lest you think my affection comes from delusion, ignorance or romanticism, let me assure you it does not. Both of the neighborhoods I lived in, Château Rouge and Bagnolet, were immigrant-heavy and lower-middle class, but were vibrant and welcoming to an outsider such as me, and I would often stop off at the local bars along Rue Léon like Les 3 Frères or L'Olympic, where the bartenders and patrons of Maghrebian, West African, European and other extraction would sit, some drinking a Leffe or a glass of vin rouge, some drinking tea or coffee, in easy, democratic amity. When Paris was attacked in November 2015, it pierced my heart the way few things have since I stood in Manhattan in 2001 and watched our iconic buildings fall, walking home over the bridge to Brooklyn with debris raining down on me.

I stood and saw with my own eyes the ashes of the police station at Villiers-le-Bel during the riots there in 2007, and visited Clichy-sous-Bois to listen to and understand the reality of the people who lived there. I traveled through the villages of Normandy and stood on the D-Day beaches there and thought of the sacrifice of those brave soldiers (like my grandfathers) who fought fascism and racial hatred in Europe and the South Pacific, and whose blood and ashes intermingled with those of other patriots on French soil. I discovered the sublime beauty of regions like the Bouches-du-Rhône and the Camargue, and the simplicity of village life in the Vallée de la Loire. I myself hail from an area of southern Pennsylvania not that different in its fading economic model from a place like Amiens, and to some of Marine Le Pen’s wavering supporters, I say this: As a child of the American, if not French, working-class, I share at a molecular level your feeling of betrayal by the political and economic elite.

But I have also seen how fast populist demagogues can destroy a society and hollow out its institutions, leaving a bitter pantomime of civilization in its place. I have seen this first hand in places like Côte d’Ivoire, Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua, and watched it from afar elsewhere, in Russia, Turkey and Venezuela, to name a few. I am seeing the beginning of it now in my own country under Trump

The violent naysayers on the left and the right will tell you that France must close in upon itself, be afraid, shut out the world, or that Emmanuel Macron is too young, too inexperienced, too much a product of the establishment to ever dynamite France out of the deep sense of ennui in which it now dwells. They will tell you that only by leaping into the unknown, by violating the social contract and political norms, by taking a chance on those with a conspiratorial gleam in their eyes - who tell you that in order for some French people to rise, others must be brought low - can France drag itself out of the mire it finds itself in.

My advice to you from embattled America, where we find ourselves, on multiple fronts, forced to fight Trump every day: When the sirens of extremism arise, demanding your support and your obedience, telling you they love your country but truly only loving power itself, tell them to go to the devil.

Michael Deibert is the author of Haiti Will Not Perish: A Recent History (Zed Books, 2017).