When French President Emmanuel Macron addressed his country on television Monday night, there was one “Gilet Jaune” in the BMFTV studio, a middle-aged man in a yellow vest surrounded by a half dozen regular center-left and center-right talking heads. He took notes during the 13-minute speech, before being called upon to comment. Macron had decried the violence of the past weeks, praised the police, expressed some contrition for his government’s failings, and announced four specific measures to aid France’s working poor and pensioners. “Finally”—was the man’s emphatic initial reaction, while noting that Macron’s concessions alone wouldn’t go far enough. But he also acknowledged that Macron had finally heard the countrywide grievances of the forgotten middle and welcomed the prospect of a renewed social pact to reduce the gaps between France’s périphérique and its more prosperous cities.
...Levy touched impressionistically on the evolution in the movement. The crowds she saw in Paris last Saturday morning “were mostly made up of men and [based on her interviews] more Mélenchonist [supporters of La France Insoumise, the far left party] than at the beginning of the mobilization.” Levy added that this view had been confirmed by Benjamin Cauchy, one of the moderates of the movement who signed an appeal to the group to not demonstrate in Paris last Saturday.
According to Cauchy, at the traffic circle gatherings of the Gilet Jaunes, many of the workers and small businessmen had gone back to work, their places taken by left-wing militants. If three weeks ago, one could expect road closures and economic disruption from a Gilet Jaunes protest, one should now anticipate violence. Casseurs (“smashers” in French; Antifa in American idiom) have joined the demonstrations, taking advantage of the crowds and general police exhaustion to smash stores and bank windows. So too have the “youth” from the suburbs begun to join in, looting when the opportunity arises.
A movement that three weeks ago seemed somewhat attractively apolitical (many Gilets Jaunes proclaimed this was the first political protest they had ever engaged in) has begun to assume a different coloring. Center-right intellectuals such Pascal Bruckner and Alain Finkielkraut, critics of globalism and neoliberalism, were initially well disposed; now they lament the violence that trails in its wake. If a movement is seen to be both extremely popular and unstructured, requiring no more than a yellow vest to join, it will inevitably become a target for entryism, a tried and true radical left tactic.