Jacobin relies on your donations to publish. Contribute today. Three months since the start of the gilets jaunes movement , everyone can agree that France is going through a decisive moment in its history. Despite the tireless efforts to repress, slander, and belittle the movement β and we have been told that it is on the brink of collapse ever since November β the yellow-vested protesters are still with us.
Every Saturday for fourteen weeks they have taken to the streets of towns around France in their tens of thousands. They have continued to occupy roundabouts and parking lots and to blockade malls, toll stations, and logistics hubs. They have organized assemblies and flooded social media and the press from all sides.
Today, they have been forced to recognize that the gilets jaunes movement has proven much more complex β and surprising β than it had first appeared. Even three months since the first demonstrations, it is hard to tell exactly what trace this remarkable popular uprising will leave on French history. But the gilets jaunes have also achieved a great deal already.
They have built a popular movement based not on nationalism and a racist agenda on immigration, but new vision of democracy and solidarity. The least we can say is that the gilets jaunes have had no favors from Emmanuel Macron and his government. There have, of course, been formal concessions: in December, faced with the size of the movement, the government was forced to give up for the time being on its planned fuel tax hike, and indeed announce a clutch of measures designed to calm the storm.
And compared to what the numerous social movements in the last ten years of French history have managed to win β i. At the same time, the gilets jaunes movement has been confronted with a violence that has not been seen in France since at least And there have been official complaints to the IGPN police control board.
