SENLIS, France — After more than a month of furious, antigovernment demonstrations across France, it is easy to forget that a gasoline tax set all this off.

A few cents per liter at the pump. A pebble in the sea of the French economy. A step to address climate change, according to President Emmanuel Macron.

Of course, that’s not how millions of workers who depend on their cars saw it.

Mobility is the story of globalization and its inequities. Mobility means more than trains, planes and automobiles, after all. It also includes social and economic mobility — being too poor to afford a car, being rich enough to transfer money out of the country. These are all inextricably linked. Weeks of protests by the Yellow Vests have made that clear.

Many of these protesters, predominantly white working poor and middle-class people who scrape by on their paychecks and pensions, live in what the author Christophe Guilluy has called “peripheral France.” The term is meant to imply both a state of being and the thousands of small, struggling cities, towns and rural districts beyond the inner-ring suburbs of places like Paris, Bordeaux, Lyon or Lille.