On Saturday morning in Paris, the Arc de Triomphe was surrounded by riot police, gendarmes, and large if somewhat antiquated-looking armored vehicles that had never before been deployed inside the city. One week earlier, protesters belonging to the gilets jaunes movement—so called because of the yellow safety vests they wear—had defaced the monument with graffiti. Elsewhere in the capital, they set cars and buildings on fire, pulled down a section of historic fence at the Tuileries, and wounded some two dozen law-enforcement officers. The violence and vandalism were a culmination of countrywide demonstrations against economic policies, which, in the view of the gilets jaunes, punish members of the lower and middle classes while rewarding the rich.

During the intervening week, the government had vacillated between conciliatory and obdurate. From the G-20 summit in Buenos Aires, President Emmanuel Macron stated, “Those who are guilty of this violence do not want change. They don’t want improvement. They want chaos.” Two days later, however, Macron’s Prime Minister, Édouard Philippe, announced that a new gas tax, which had originally galvanized the gilets jaunes on social media, would be suspended. “No tax warrants putting the unity of the nation in danger,” Philippe explained. When this concession failed to quell calls for another round of demonstrations the following weekend, the government prepared to activate eighty-nine thousand police nationwide, eight thousand of them in Paris. On Friday, a spokesperson for the President told the A.F.P., “We have reason to fear major violence.”

By 10 A.M. on Saturday, thousands of gilets jaunes had gathered at the foot of the Arc de Triomphe, on the Champs-Élysées, which leads toward the Presidential Palace. During a French news program the previous night, an unofficial representative of the movement (there are no official ones) had declared, “If we make it to the Palace, we’re going inside,” but now that plan looked quixotic. Police had cordoned off the avenue a couple hundred yards away while barricading all the side streets. As a result, the gilets jaunes were effectively corralled.

Nonetheless, the mood was festive. The uniquely heterogeneous nature of the movement, which has resisted being co-opted by any opposition party, was on display. Protesters had scrawled postal codes on the backs of their vests, from districts all over France. Although the banners, chants, and slogans voiced a diverse variety of grievances, most shared an underlying theme: anger at a President perceived to be oblivious, or even antagonistic, to the interests of the underprivileged. Among many of the men’s signage, a common symbolism could also be discerned: “I can’t tighten my belt and give you my ass at the same time”; “The people’s asses are stuffed with Macron”; “My car blows me, my scooter robs me, and the state sodomizes me”; “Macron, you’re fucking me deep.”

I inserted myself into an animated discussion between a woman from Picardie, who’d turned seventy the day before, and a twenty-eight-year-old mechanic’s apprentice from a Parisian suburb. The woman, Marie-Claude de Druet, had worked for fifty years, mostly in factories, and was incensed over a new tax Macron had imposed on retirees. Additionally galling for de Druet was the life style of the political class, in contrast to her own. “They live like kings!” she said. “Macron acts like an almighty god. He has to come down to earth, and give back what he’s stolen.”

“Different social classes have different rights,” added the mechanic’s apprentice, Olivier Duault. “Today, the poor are losing their rights. It’s understandable that we’re angry.”

Duault said he hadn’t voted in the last election, in which Macron defeated the extreme right-wing candidate Marine Le Pen. “We had a choice between cholera and the plague,” de Druet explained. “And we chose the plague.” Despite this qualification, she’d not only voted for cholera, she also shared Le Pen’s hard-line stance on immigration (and Trump’s). Duault sympathized: “I’m not against immigration, but if we can’t help our own, we can’t help outsiders. I know homeless people who have been in the street for twenty years, and nobody helps them.”

Nearby I spotted a woman waving the regional flag of Brittany, a rural part of western France. A fifty-two-year-old social worker and single mother of three, Martine Attrait, occupied the opposite end of the political spectrum from de Druet (she supported a far-left candidate early in the election and abstained when it came down to Le Pen and Macron), but she was on the Champs-Élysées for the same reason. “There’s too much misery,” she said. “We don’t have enough money to feed ourselves.” With a net salary of thirteen hundred and fifty euros a month, Attrait was obliged to rely on subsidized housing. “I work. All I want is to be able to live without fearing for tomorrow. I want to be able to go to a restaurant from time to time. To buy stuff for my kids. Books. Shoes that aren’t used. I want the small things in life that we can’t do anymore.” The last time Attrait had been in Paris was several years ago, when she’d brought her son there on vacation. It had not been easy for her to come this time, in part because of the cost of fuel. (I met other protesters who said their family had decided to forgo Christmas presents in order to participate in the demonstration.) Moreover, Attrait was worried about tear gas, owing to a chronic respiratory problem. “But we have nothing left to lose,” she said.

Not long after this, the police began firing tear gas, as well as stun grenades and rubber bullets, at a part of the crowd that had pressed toward one of the barricades. The bullets injured several people, leaving large blue welts on arms and torsos. I later learned that de Druet, the retiree, had been hit. The show of force only provoked the gilets jaunes, who, changing tack, began chanting “Á la Santé!”—the name of a jail where hundreds of demonstrators arrested earlier that morning were thought to be detained—and advancing on a different barricade. When this effort ended similarly, the chants switched to “Á la Concorde!” and then “A l’Assemblée!”

The police responded with mounting belligerence; the protesters grew increasingly combative. I had the sense that, for many, the aggressive tactics exemplified the government’s contempt for them, and, as the morning wore on, more and more of their rage became focussed on the police. At checkpoints around the Champs-Élysées, officers had searched their bags, confiscating eyedrops and swimming goggles. Now, as tear gas continued to be generously deployed, a new demand could be heard: “Don’t the people have a right to protect themselves?”

By early afternoon, some of the bolder protesters had managed to tear down sheets of plywood nailed over the entrance to an office building and were attempting to set up a bulwark. A unit of plainclothes officers wearing motorcycle helmets and shin guards pushed them all the way back to the gendarmes surrounding the Arc de Triomphe. Although the air was opaque with gas, and the gendarmes were equipped with gas masks, they refused to let the gilets jaunes breach their line; gagging protesters pressed into their wall of shields.