For thirteen minutes on Monday evening, the French President, Emmanuel Macron, addressed the nation in a calm, trance-like state, sitting alone in his office in the Presidential palace, a gold-plated tray poised on one corner of his desk. He was trying, perhaps, to project reassurance after a weekend in which groups of protestors, ten thousand in all, many dressed in neon-yellow safety vests, sauntered down the middle of vacated boulevards in one of the wealthiest square miles of France. Careful study had gone into the speech. Macron had read the demands of the gilets jaunes and put forth targeted responses: an increase in the minimum wage and tax cuts for the poorest pensioners. He expressed an understanding of the country’s “democratic malaise.” Macron had listened to the complaints about his behavior—during the first year of his Presidency, he has made one tone-deaf remark after another, saying, for example, that people could easily find work if they would only bother to cross the street—and offered contrition for his apparent lack of concern. “We are at a historic moment for our country,” he told twenty-one million viewers. “My only concern is you, my only fight is for you.” In response, one of the most-liked postings in a Facebook group called “Je Suis Gilet Jaune!” was a video clip from “Les Visiteurs,” a French comedy about a time-travelling twelfth-century knight. The clip showed the knight sitting down to a sumptuous dinner and tossing a fistful of boiled potatoes to his servant, who grovels next to him.

The gilets jaunes movement began in November, when thousands of people across France spontaneously organized to block roads and the roundabouts that lead into nearly every town in France, dressed in their yellow motorist’s vests, in order to protest a planned hike in taxes on diesel fuel. This gave way to a generalized cry of grievance against Macron, and, for the past four Saturdays, to turbulent protests in Paris, consisting almost entirely of people who’d travelled to the city from small towns and exurban parts of the country. Last Friday night, on the pedestrian streets that trickle off the Place de la République, workers affixed panels of plywood and steel to the windows of bank branches; on some blocks, there were two or three boarded-up banks. The symbolism was overly clumsy, almost medieval: the metropolis guarding its stores of wealth against ransackers coming from beyond the city gates.

The police, too, were abundantly prepared, with eight thousand officers deployed in the streets of Paris. When I arrived at the top of the Champs Elysees at 9 A.M. on Saturday, the winter sun slanted down on police vans encircling the Arc de Triomphe, which had been tagged with graffiti the previous weekend. To enter the area around the avenue you had to pass through ad-hoc checkpoints, where officers with machine guns searched bags and executed pat downs, pressing some of the gilets jaunes against the sides of buildings. In contrast to the police strategy the previous weekend, when people were arrested after they had perpetrated violence, this time the police took into custody people who were carrying any suggestive gear—hammers, masks, projectiles—in order to weed out the “casseurs,” anarchists who show up at demonstrations just to break things. Preventing people from demonstrating is an authoritarian tactic. It seemed to work.

On the Champs Elysees at 9:30 A.M., several hundred gilets jaunes were milling around. There were no planned events—no procession, no speeches. As the morning wore on, groups repeatedly gathered and tried to surge in one direction, at one point rushing down a side street that cut between the boarded-up storefronts of Cartier and Mont Blanc. The officers, who lined the intersection in multiple rows, masks down, shields poised, launched tear-gas grenades, sending fuming white globules streaking past the balconies that hug the avenue. The crowd started to run. “Gently, gently!” people shouted, encouraging everyone to move calmly, so as to avoid a stampede.

But the atmosphere, on the whole, didn’t feel acrimonious. At times, some of the gilets jaunes chatted with the “forces de l’ordre,” as the French call them. It felt like democracy. I met two twenty-nine-year-olds from Normandy, who worked in fibre optics and hadn’t been to Paris in fifteen years. One of them told me, “We’re not activists, we’re citizens.” A group of thirty-somethings travelled from Vichy “to fill out the ranks of the people,” one said. Another one told me that BFMTV, France’s main twenty-four-seven television-news station, “said that there would be only violence this weekend and we shouldn’t come. So we came precisely because BFMTV told us not to.” He added, “We wanted to show them that it’s not the case.” It was a question of unity. “We have the feeling of not being represented, that the laws that are voted in never go in the direction of the people, of the majority. They have all these lobbying groups that always get what they want. Well, we’re the lobby of the people.” His statement made a populist appropriation of the jargon of power, as though lobbies were the only legitimate form that power could take. Macron has presided over an interment of traditional institutions in France as parties and unions have been hobbled, and that seemed crucial to the gilets jaunes: in a civic space emptied of opposition, they were anointing themselves.

On Sunday, I met Samuel Hayat, a political scientist at the University of Lille, at a hotel café in the Grands Boulevards neighborhood of Paris, home to several glitzy departments stores that had been closed the previous day. He’d written a blog post in which he pointed out that uprisings in Paris’s past have always been local; this matter of people flocking in from the provinces to the city was entirely new. Hayat studies the history of social movements, with a focus on the nineteenth century, and he argued that, despite their political heterodoxy, the gilets jaunes are remarkably unified. Hayat suggested that the movement’s coherence comes from the deeper organizing principles of a “moral economy,” a concept developed by the historian E. P. Thompson to describe the logic of popular uprisings in the eighteenth century, based on common decency, a fundamental sense of what should and should not be done in the economic sphere, and that the government should guarantee that certain basic norms are respected. “You see in the protesters talk about the mentally ill, the handicapped, the homeless—these are appeals to very basic shared moral ideas, that the state should protect the weak,” Hayat said. “The president, with all his petites phrases, is staging himself as betraying the moral economy.” In this sense, the gilets jaunes movement indicates a kind of political regression from more sophisticated systems. In his blog post, Hayat wrote, “There’s nothing joyous about the fact that we’ve had to get to this point, to this deep of a fracture, in order for something to happen, and something that borrows from pre-modern forms of collective action.”

On Monday morning, I met a friend, Vincent Martigny, at Le Napoléon, a slightly grungy hangout in the neighborhood of Saint-Denis. Martigny, a professor of political science at the École Polytechnique, in Paris, grew up on the island of La Réunion, a former colony off the coast of Madagascar, and he usually has a decidedly non-Parisian take on current events. “Most media in France now are moderate, and they say, ‘Let’s be quiet, civilized, polite, sit down,’ ” he said. “But somebody who’s got nothing doesn’t want to sit down. He wants to punch you in the face. That’s what they’ve been starting to do. Because they say, ‘Well, violence is the only way for you to listen to me.’ ” He recounted visiting a wine shop that had its windows smashed in the weekend before. The owner of the shop essentially shrugged; the insurance would pay for it. “Violence has become legitimate,” Martigny said, “and that’s the difference between a protest and a revolt.”

The gilets jaunes belong to the same social stratum (lower-middle-class citizens of Western democracies who are having financial difficulties but are not destitute) as the supporters of the Five Star Movement, in Italy, and of Podemos, in Spain; they are Trump voters in the U.S. and Brexit voters in the U.K. Hayat suggested that the gilets jaunes movement is, at core, conservative—they don’t want to overthrow the current form of government but, rather, to restore a state that can actually address their problems. Last Saturday, there were some insurrectionary elements, including protesters who called for the movement to march to the Presidential palace and kick out Macron. But, to Hayat, the true insurrection would be if the gilets jaunes continued to control roadways in the provinces where social services had receded, and developed into some kind of self-governance. “When you have people organizing popular committees because the legitimate power of the state isn’t there any more,” he told me, “when people want to take the whole social pact and question it from the most basic level—this is the most revolutionary.”