The last politician she liked, she said, was Charles de Gaulle, but — dead for nearly 50 years — he is little more than a childhood memory.

But also there was Mr. Laziou, an admirer of the far-right, nationalist leader Marine Le Pen.

At the other end of the table, Mr. Huvé, the carpenter, described himself as an environmentalist and supporter of a far-left, anticapitalist party.

Divorced with grown children, he can afford to live only in the house he is renovating — two open-plan rooms with a hodgepodge of tools, an old wardrobe, a simple wooden table, a sink and a spotlight for doing carpentry late at night.

He worried that the Yellow Vest frustration with government would sweep up the movement, perhaps unwittingly, in far-right politics.

“It’s not that people are extreme right, but they find in it a way of saying, ‘We don’t agree,’” he said — with the government, with the way things are.

“Then they say, ‘Well, we’ve tried everything except the extreme right, so why not?’”

That may be the danger of the government’s approach of dispersing the eclectic clusters of protesters and taking back their public space.

As Ms. Laplanche watched the gendarmes dismantle the camp on the roundabout where the protesters had gathered since mid-November, her reaction was telling about the great distance Mr. Macron needs to close.

“The government has no response to us,” she said. “Now they are taking away our right to demonstrate; they don’t want to hear us.”