Like all movements endowed with the force of an event, the revolt of the Yellow Vests in France was both predicted and unexpected. Predicted not only by the eternal prophets of a coming insurrection, or the minatory rhetoric of a Le Pen, but at the summits of the political system. Macron himself didn’t hesitate to appropriate the title Révolution for the book that launched his 2017 presidential campaign. Two years earlier, the political-intellectual fixer Jacques Attali, now an intimate of Macron, had warned that the disintegrating political landscape under Hollande would leave France ‘lurching towards a pre-revolutionary situation’. Long anticipated, then, but nevertheless a surprise: not only the timing and the initial trigger of the revolt—Macron’s diesel tax—but its concrete social configurations were entirely unforeseen.

The Gilets Jaunes movement has seen the irruption of a new social actor, rising from the most ‘invisibilized’ layers of French society, hitherto stymied in political passivity: the blue- or white-collar working class of small or medium enterprises; fractions of the petty bourgeoisie without college education, close (spatially and socially) to the popular classes; pensioners from the same layers. Operating outside the established forms of political representation or trade-union organizing, the Gilets Jaunes movement has brought together waged workers and the self-employed on the only terrain its organic composition would permit: a protest against the state. Whence the second surprise: a protest largely composed of poorly paid wage-earners that has taken its stand on the slippery ground of taxation; for lower taxes, and especially against the diesel tax, but also against fiscal injustice and Macron’s abolition of the wealth tax. And yet—the third surprise—the discussions on the occupied roundabouts of the ‘impossible’ end-of-the-month, the evidence of millions of lives laid to waste by the daily constraints and humiliations of the exploited, served to shatter the image of the ‘start-up nation’ that Macron was trying to impose.

Finally, fourth surprise, the movement has managed to sustain a high level of popular support throughout its months-long confrontation with the state, even though it has faced escalating levels of police repression and has taken an occasionally riotous turn.footnote¹ It has succeeded, where so many other French protests of the past decades—the pension and labour-law struggles, banlieue riots, students’ strikes, Nuit Debout—have failed, in extracting concessions from the government, even if these have been largely symbolic. In nlr 115, Didier Fassin and Anne-Claire Defossez counterposed the narrative of the Yellow Vests’ rise to the Bourbon-esque arrogance and unprecedented police violence of the Macron presidency. This contribution will concentrate instead on the subjective politics of the Gilets Jaunes, which cannot be disassociated from their objective conditions. Politically speaking: of what is yellow the colour?

Breaking with the stock routines of the unions and the left, the Yellow Vests’ tactics—occupying roundabouts, confronting the police—fired the enthusiasm of the anarcho-autonomist sectors that played a highly visible role in the French protests of spring 2016 and 2018. Yet the discursive and symbolic repertoire that made the Yellow Vests so visible operated in a different range. An identification as ‘plebeian’, ‘of the people’, turning its back at once on the established workers’ movement and the ‘culture of knowledge’, combined with the omnipresence of the tricolore and renditions of the Marseillaise, spoke rather to Mélenchon’s ‘populism of the left’—or indeed, the populism of the far right. Others have read the growing predominance of private-sector employees among the ‘people of the roundabouts’ as premonition of an ‘anti-bourgeois bloc’, or placed the movement within the longue durée of French popular struggles, running from the early modern anti-tax or ‘fair price’ uprisings to the sans-culottes—the latter justified by the Yellow Vests’ striking recourse to the symbolism of the Great Revolution, from the model guillotine rolled out for Macron to a scattering of Phrygian bonnets. The important role of women has rightly been noted.footnote²

Each well founded, as far as they go, these interpretations express different facets of the movement. Their limitation flows from the same source as their (relative) pertinence: their unilateral character effectively excludes anything that doesn’t fit their analytical grid. Anachronisms apart, the longue durée of the historians is a purely national one; illuminating as this may be—there is an incontestably French dimension to the legitimacy of direct popular action that goes back to the foundational moment of the 1789 Revolution—it risks excluding the more recent past, as well as international comparisons with other trans-class anti-austerity protests. While the adherents of left populism may rejoice at a movement that presents itself as the incarnation of the French people, the Gilets Jaunes’ mode of action is the polar opposite of the ballot-box ‘citizens’ revolution’ as envisaged by Mélenchon and La France insoumise.

As for the far right, it has grounds for thinking that the Yellow Vest demand for the ‘renationalization’ of the social contract represents acceptance of Le Pen’s ‘national preference’. Sociological surveys confirm that a section of the movement at least fears an immigration ‘crisis’; in one, some 48 per cent of those questioned thought that a French citizen should have priority over an immigrant in matters of employment.footnote³ Nevertheless, it’s striking that anti-immigrant demands as such are barely audible within the movement, by comparison with the emphasis put on ‘justice’ and the redistribution of wealth. In fact, the Gilets Jaunes mark a break in the history of French social mobilizations. This is the first time that a movement ‘from below’ has seen the participation of both left and right. Yet the symmetry is deceptive: the ‘left of the left’ and the far right are pushing in opposite directions. At stake in the coming period is the decision between the two: a turn against the social forces responsible for inequalities and injustice, or against immigration. The rulers have already made their choice: Macron has pointedly included the question of immigration quotas in his ‘great debate’.

This unprecedented configuration can best be understood in the context of the intensification of the organic crisis that has been advancing through the French social order for some time. Arguably, its first signs appeared when the Socialist Party incumbent, Jospin, failed to make it into the second round of the presidential election in 2002, signalling the derailment of the process of bipartisan alternation. The concept of the organic crisis, formulated by Gramsci in the 1930s, has served to orient a number of analyses of the recent conjuncture. Here it will suffice to recall that Gramsci was referring to a radical rupture in the links between representatives and the represented. A collapse in support for the traditional parties may be the most visible symptom of an organic crisis, but it extends throughout the mediating organizations of civil society. Though its expressions will vary, it essentially involves a crisis of hegemony of the dominant class, the breakdown of its ability to maintain its leading role within the social formation—in other words, a generalized failure of consent.footnote⁴