A Paris Street just after the use of tear gas grenades

Photo: me Paris Dec. 15th

Something that anyone covering the Gilet Jaune (yellow vest) movement will have noticed, at least if they’re diligent, is how difficult it is to characterise it. Support for the movement has remained, until recently strikingly high (though it is currently hovering around 55%) but people with a progressive leaning have always had their reservations, even if they support the movement. These reservations rise and fall in people’s perceptions depending on the direction the movement is taking. Author and secondary school teacher (and full disclosure a colleague) John-Phillipe Blondel says that he is fed up with them, he moved from disagreeing with them over the fuel tax, to support over their attempts to improve the quality of life for the working class — exemplified by their success in forcing a rise in the minimum wage — back to a critical position as the reactionary elements of the movement have come to the fore, and based on intimidation of his wife at the hands of the movement in Troyes.

“On the roundabouts here, you won’t find les insoumises” he says warily “The majority here are on the extreme right”. Jean Phillipe is not the only one to experience this. In parts of the country the movement struggles to tolerate disagreement. In Troyes certainly at the original demo on the 17th of November people trying to get on with their day were greeted with cries of conard (wanker) — journalists have been harassed and MPs threatened. Jean-Phillipe’s experience will have been replicated on some of the roundabouts around the country currently occupied by the GJs.

The issue when analysing this movement, is that it has become a front for so many grievances nationwide– with such an ideological diversity existing with in it that it is incredibly hard to sketch an accurate picture of it within the limited word count of an op-ed or a feature in a mainstream news platform. There are so many angles at which one could come to the movement and still technically be truthful in reporting; the burning anger of the working class at a crisis in cost of living, a racist and bigoted undercurrent endemic from the beginning, the disproportionate often brutal and repressive response from the security state, the weakness and hubris of Emmanuel Macron, the impossibility that he faces as president of such a divided nation, the propensity of some GJs for petty violence, the steadfast commitment to peaceful protest of others, a thriving progressive, ecologically minded and anti-capitalist tendency in the movement, a thriving far-right reactionary tendency, Facebook’s role in enabling democratic demands and protesting, Facebook’s role in conspiracy spreading, climate change denial and radicalisation based on misinformation. There is at the very least a grain of truth to each and every one of these aspects. It is telling that the movement receives vocal support from Jean-Luc Melenchon, the far-left politician and Marine Le Pen his counterpart on the Far-right. It is supported by Edouard Louis the left-wing novelist and studious chronicler of the travails of working-class life, and the right-wing contrarian writer for le Figaro Eric Zemmour who in the past has been convicted of incitement of racial hatred. There is no one way to think about this movement.

On the streets of Paris on the 15th of December thousands of people marched in protest, as they had every weekend since the 17th of November, and as they continue to do now. Millie, Bryan and Michel travelled 300km to brave the tear gas and kettling of the riot squad. Millie made the journey because the geriatric hospital in which she works “is a business, there’s more admin, more bureaucracy, but not enough real staff”, Bryan because he is unemployed and has found the last 4 months very hard, and because like his friend Michel he believes they are on the cusp of democratic change. Michel is training to go into the army, but despite his military ambitions he offers a measured criticism of the state response saying, “it’s too much”. They sigh as they recount the repression, they experienced the week before and the fact that it is justified under anti-terror legislation. Two of the loudest chanters marching down the road by the Tuilerie gardens are true believers in the democratic potential of the GJ movement. At first, they joined the movement for financial reasons, because they were feeling the burn of a crisis in the cost of living, but said that for them, and they thought for the wider movement too, it had become about “the values of the republic and participatory democracy”. They do not feel well represented and said they believed “the people should be able to express themselves with more than just a vote for someone who decides for [us] on the most important issues like health and the environment”. These people were not the thugs hassling dissenters on the roundabouts and yelling wanker at passers-by.

There was an elderly contingent of radicals at the back of the march complete with the usual regalia of veteran protesters; raised fist pins, Palestinian flags and the like. They belted anti-capitalist and progressive slogans through a megaphone boosting the morale of the protesters as they did so. When kettling began and people were bottlenecked into a series of streets near the Elysee Palace, one of them unfurled a banner. It displayed a caricature of a Jewish person, mocked up like the devil, defecating onto France complaining about anti-zionists and calling the working class ignorant. It bore the slogan “Macron, dictator of the Rothschild banks”. This is not to say that all the left-leaning progressives in the movement are anti-Semites, many are truly committed leftists with liberal social attitudes, but the left anti-Semitism that has plagued the British Labour party in recent months is certainly present within the movement. Masonic conspiracy theories claiming Jews run the world can be found on their pages, with what seems like increasing regularity and lurk in the YouTube comments beneath videos dedicated to proponents of both left and right-wing politics in France. Moderators try and filter out the racism, sexism and homophobia, but when some groups have upwards of 100,000 members its an impossible task.

But to categorise the movement as split between left and hard-right is too reductive. There are anarchists and communists who coexist with Islamophobic fascists all trying to claim the ‘voice of the people’ as their own, alongside outspoken feminists and vocal supporters of Assileneu who leads a UKIP style party offering Frexit and a kind of US Republicanish brand of libertarianism. More often than not though people aren’t expressly party political. Millie, Michel, Bryan and the two jovial chanters were expressing grievances stemming from neoliberalism and corporate capture of civil and social life, but they were hardly red flag waving radicals. They weren’t quoting Gramsci or Marx on the march or clutching a copy of Discipline and Punish. They were ordinary people pissed off with the system and angry about the lack of democracy and transparency. For all the anti-democratic instincts of the far-right and the Maoists at the edges of the movement, democracy does seem to be a genuine concern for many. This movement is largely leaderless, where people have tried to claim it they have been rejected which is why despite the far-right’s desperation to hijack it fully they have not succeeded, though people like Jean-Phillipe think it is growing, or at least is becoming proportionally greater as people fall away content with the raise in the minimum wage and the halting of fuel tax hikes. Organised labour have tentatively tried to get involved with the bases of the more radical unions pushing for support, but they have not been central to this struggle by any means.

The lack of, indeed the hostility towards, formal political representation of the movement differentiates it from many of the post-2008 social movements we have seen. In Spain the Indignados, 15m and PAH found representation in Podemos-Unidos. In the UK, alumni of UK uncut and the anti-austerity movement form the outriders for the Corbyn project. In Greece the occupiers of Syntagma’s square voted in Syriza to try and achieve what they couldn’t. Viewing it as a combination of the Occupy movement and Italy’s 5 star is probably the only way one can draw contemporary comparisons and obviously there is a limit to the usefulness of analogy. The lack of institutional representation of the Occupy movement meant that they never had to get too specific so it could act as a front for a wide range of grievances, like the GJs. Occupy produced left voices such as Micah White, and voices like Weev, the Neo-Nazi hacker, simultaneously. The activists and commentators that come out of this movement will most likely span the spectrum too. In terms of content, it probably has a cousin in Five Star — they both dispensed quickly with the civility norm (not necessarily a bad thing, but it can quickly collapse productive discourse when it gets out of hand). The Grillini of 5 Star would yell “vaffanculo” (fuck off) to the establishment, (some of) the GJs yell conard at their detractors and mock up various porn stills of Emmanuel Macron’s face on the body of someone at the centre of an orgy. If you consider some of their more widely circulated demands to constitute a programme, then they resemble 5 Star further in the bizarre generation of an almost centrist populism that occurs. On the one hand the calls to end neo-colonial activity in Africa, break apart financial and media monopolies and institute certain environmental protections drawn from the anti-pesticides movement indicate an intriguing style of left radicalism. But then, the calls for Frexit and “stemming the flow of migrants” are a troubling reminder of the breadth of ideology and the depth of the anger people are feeling.

Much of the coverage of the Gilets Jaunes has focussed on violence. Most recently boxer Christopher Dettinger was filmed throwing punches at riot cops in the Act 8 protest in Paris. Initially the coverage of violence focussed on a minority of anarchists and thugs called “casseurs” who used the movement as cover to smash and burn their way along the Champs Elysees in protest. Cars were torched, graffiti sprayed and windows smashed. There is still an element of this petty vandalism within the movement, after the big Act 8 march in Troyes, the bus stops by IUT college are covered in blue mounds of crystal fragments resembling the methamphetamine in Breaking Bad, where people have smashed out the advertising boards. But, the focus on rioters almost exclusively by some media outlets denies the reality that many feel that the disproportionate responses of the security state exacerbated the violence. I witnessed the Act 5 protest on the 15th of December, which was recognised as being relatively low key compared to the week before when over 1000 people were arrested. Previous weeks and weeks that followed may have been more violent, but the 15th was by no means a calm affair.

The atmosphere in the centre of Paris was incredibly tense threatening to spill out into violence at any moment. Metro stations were closed, shops boarded up in preparation and areas of the Champs Elysee blocked off by temporary fences, armoured riot police and vehicles resembling tanks. Bottlenecked into tributary streets feeding into a crossroads near the Elysee Palace a huge crowd of probably upwards of a thousand across the various streets were chanting peacefully. Chanting angrily certainly, but chanting peacefully. The state response to people exercising their democratic right to free assembly in this way was to pull the pins on tear gas grenades and clobber anyone that got too close. The use of force by riot control has been frankly shocking. Go on Facebook on a Saturday evening after one of the protests and you will see images, circulating across the Gilets Jaunes Facebook pages and growing social media ecosystem of people’s arms and legs with what look like craters in them. As though they have just squeezed the world’s largest spots. These are not people who have just starred in a doctor pimple popper video, they are the victims of the nastiest end of French state violence; the flashball. It is a rubber bullet fired from a tube-like weapon, used primarily by the CRS riot police in France — if you get hit by one, you will know about it. Its use in a mature democracy like France against popularly supported anti-government protests should worry anyone concerned with the normalisation of political violence. Tear gas too has been a frequent weapon deployed against the protestors whenever crowds get too big. It has been used so often that anyone protesting in Paris now will almost certainly be wearing some kind of gas mask. On the 15th there was the strange situation in which tear gas hung in the air in streets outside luxury central Paris hotels while members of the global elite looked out bemused from behind the glass in a perfect visual metaphor. Yes, the Gilets Jaunes have sowed their fair share of chaos, but some of the worst images from the protests that have helped deter tourists have occurred courtesy of the CRS under state directive. Indeed, as of the 28th of December, 48 enquiries had been opened into cases of police brutality.

Where the movement will go next remains to be seen, it is certainly a fascinating question with possibly a troubling answer. Since the raising of the minimum wage it seems to have got angrier and more creative simultaneously — once again the duality that makes it so hard to convey accurately is at work. There are calls for the establishment of a public bank, people creating events to set up indignados and Occupy style camps outside government buildings for when the weather is better and people adding to the various proposals for a radical new citizen led republic. But in the local groups more than the national ones where the moderators are more stringent, you don’t need to search for long to see the darker side of the movement. In colere 10 — the group for organising blockages in the Aube department, someone has posted a link showing the support of Matteo Salvini (who also now appears smiling next to Le Pen in FN propaganda) for the Gilets Jaunes. The numbers aren’t huge but the response is positive, the people who disagree ignoring it out of fear of fracturing the coalition. Further up the feed in the same group a link has been posted referring to a crowdfunding campaign to “Shut down” the minister for gender equality Marlene Schiappa. “She must be in need of sex” someone says in the comments unchallenged. A comment saying “She has an ass that could earn her money but a gob that would lose it all” is met entirely by laughing reacts. As well as the virulent misogyny someone else makes a comment that could have come from one of the alt-right pizzagaters in the US as if to remind everyone to think in conspiracies “She has created a law to protect paedophiles. Why play being a doctor in a kindergarten? For her pleasure and that of the globalist oligarchy”. At the other end of the country in the group colere 73 for organising in Alberteville, the potential incarceration of Christopher Dettinger is being discussed passionately, unfortunately often in bizarre diatribes about masculinity and paedophilia in the French state. Other people are theorising about whether the photos of him punching the cop is real. Conspiracy thinking has been a problem from the beginning and the movement has been unable to dispense with it.

Stirrings are being made on various pages that the Gilets Jaunes are going to attempt to cause a bank run by all withdrawing their money on the same day . Although probably an overly optimistic goal, this is a fascinating tactic for activists in larger networks to consider and it certainly symbolically strikes at the heart of a deeper malaise in the system as finance is the mechanism by which the rentiers accrue evermore wealth through the arbitrary accumulation of capital while everyone else has to spend half their income on rent alone. The Gilets Jaunes movement has already achieved an incredible amount, scandal-mired though it has been, and it still has incredible potential to resist neoliberalism and sketch the blueprints of an alternative society. The cultural output around the movement, from the support of contemporary literary figures to the rappers producing supportive, and optimistic tracks to the purely aesthetic level of the iconography of the yellow jacket itself all point to a rupture of capitalist realism. Mark Fisher pointed out the French protestors in 2006 couldn’t provide an alternative vision in to neoliberalism because they were performatively protesting out of nostalgia for 1968 and the sense of hopelessness that they felt — exemplified by their use of the old slogans, tactics and iconography. Instead the Gilets Jaunes have brought new proposals, culture and tactics to the table. But, for all that they have achieved and all the good that they’ve done, if they don’t shape up, and I mean that literally — it seems like they will need to create some more formalised structures to deal with their issues — and start clamping down on the bigotry and the darker elements within their ranks, either through a process of political education or continual public rejections of bigotry where it surfaces, then they risk being subsumed by the headbanging racists, xenophobes, thugs and conspiracists that have corralled into the movement.