[WSMDiscuss] France in movement… : Tear Gas and Water Cannons in Paris as Grass-Roots Protest Takes Aim at Macron / Macron Inspects Damage After ‘Yellow Vest’ Protests as France Weighs State of Emergency (New York Times)

[Jai Sen]

Monday, December 3, 2018

France in movement…

[A new and seemingly widespread and massive, popular, and ‘leaderless' irruption in the North, this time in France, and this time apparently crossing all kinds of borders :

November 24 :

Tear Gas and Water Cannons in Paris as Grass-Roots Protest Takes Aim at Macron

December 1 :

Macron Inspects Damage After ‘Yellow Vest’ Protests as France Weighs State of Emergency

New York Times

            JS


Macron Inspects Damage After ‘Yellow Vest’ Protests as France Weighs State of Emergency

Protesters wearing yellow vests near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris on Saturday.CreditYoan Valat/EPA, via Shutterstock
Image
Protesters wearing yellow vests near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris on Saturday.CreditCreditYoan Valat/EPA, via Shutterstock
By Alissa J. Rubin <https://www.nytimes.com/by/alissa-j-rubin>
Dec. 1, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/01/world/europe/france-yellow-vests-protests-macron.html?action=click&module=inline&pgtype=Article&region=Footer <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/01/world/europe/france-yellow-vests-protests-macron.html?action=click&module=inline&pgtype=Article&region=Footer>
PARIS — A third week of anti-government protests intensified in violence on Saturday, as demonstrators burned cars, smashed windows and confronted riot police firing tear gas in the heart of Paris in the most serious crisis of President Emmanuel Macron’s administration.

The ‘‘Yellow Vest’’ protests — spurred by an increase in the gasoline tax, and named for the roadside safety vests worn by the demonstrators — have emerged as a spontaneous outcry over declining living standards.

On Sunday, Mr. Macron returned to Paris from the Group of 20 summit meeting in Argentina and went to the Arc de Triomphe to assess the damage after rioters defaced the landmark.

A government spokesman, Benjamin Griveaux, also said France would consider imposing a state of emergency to prevent a recurrence of what is being described as some of the worst civil unrest in more than a decade by protesters.

Diffuse, seemingly leaderless and organized over the internet, they have drawn deepening and widespread support around the country, where other demonstrations were held on Saturday. Many were peaceful though others were violent, as in the town of Le Puy-en-Velay, where protesters briefly set fire to a local prefecture.

But it was in Paris that the protests took a more sinister turn as they were joined by extremists on the left and right, along with anarchists, all seeking to capitalize on the simmering discontent. The violence crossed a new threshold for the Macron administration, and raised alarm even in a country where organized protest is commonplace.

On Sunday, an official told reporters that one person had died in an accident at a roadblock near Arles.

Even if mostly perpetrated by vandals who have now latched on to the movement, the symbolism of Saturday’s violence was powerful. A modern-day peasants’ and workers’ revolt against a president increasingly disdained for his regal remove turned the country’s richest boulevards and most prominent landmarks into veritable war zones.

Confrontations between the police and demonstrators, alongside the professional vandals called “casseurs” by the French, spread to several of the city’s most famous sites including Concorde and Trocadero. Overturned cars, some in flames, burned in parts of the 1st arrondissement and the 8th arrondissement, even far from the Champs-Élysées.

Inside the Tuileries Gardens, a car burned in front of the Orangerie. On one side of the burning car was a mass of Yellow Vests and casseurs, and on the other a line of riot police, at the Place de la Concorde end of the Tuileries. The demonstrators moved forward and the police responded with a volley of tear gas, scattering the Yellow Vests and the vandals.


On the other side of the Rue de Rivoli from the Tuileries, several store windows had been smashed in, including at the high-end clothing store Zadig & Voltaire.

By nightfall, major thoroughfares were covered in broken glass and the smell of tear gas mixed with the smoke from the burning cars. Some 100 people had been injured, including one who was in a coma after being hit by a railing that was torn down by protesters near the Tuileries; 268 people had been arrested, according to the police.

It did not help that Mr. Macron was 7,000 miles away in Buenos Aires for the Group of 20 economic summit meeting during the violence. Even there, the outburst could not be dismissed or ignored, as his government has mostly tried to do over the past few weeks.

‘‘What happened today in Paris has nothing to do with the peaceful expression of legitimate anger,” Mr. Macron said on Saturday. “Nothing justifies attacking the security forces, vandalizing businesses, either private or public ones, or that passers-by or journalists are threatened, or the Arc de Triomphe defaced.”

Protesters sprayed graffiti on the Arc de Triomphe that read, “Yellow Vests Will Triumph,” and were able to enter and reach the top, vandalizing the permanent exhibition housed inside.

Prime Minister Édouard Philippe made a point of distinguishing between those who had come prepared to fight the police and those with whom the government was willing to talk.

“We are attached to freedom of expression, but also to respect for the law,” said Mr. Philippe, who canceled a planned trip to a climate conference in Poland because of the violence. “I am shocked by the violence of such a symbol of France,” he said, referring to the clashes around the Arc de Triomphe.

Yet it was two weeks into the protests before the government, which had been giving the demonstrators a cold shoulder, agreed to meet with them. Earlier, government officials had offered to increase subsidies for buying fuel-efficient cars and installing less-polluting home heating systems, but the protesters indicated that was insufficient since many do not have enough money to buy even a subsidized car.

Mr. Philippe then called a meeting with Yellow Vest representatives for Nov. 30. However, since the movement has no leader or even really any representatives, it was unclear whom he invited. The result was that only two Yellow Vests showed up at Mr. Philippe’s official residence at Matignon, a grand house in Paris’ chic 7th arrondissement.

The meeting was “interesting, frank and respectful,” Mr. Philippe said, adding that his door remained open.

Crowds breached security cordons on the Champs-Élysées in Paris ahead of a third rally against high fuel prices.CreditLucas Barioulet/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
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Crowds breached security cordons on the Champs-Élysées in Paris ahead of a third rally against high fuel prices.CreditLucas Barioulet/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
But the open door was undercut by other ministers who publicly said there would be no backing down on the government’s new gas taxes or its overall program.

The good-cop, bad-cop approach did not go over well. A large group of Yellow Vests in Paris marched peacefully with a banner that said, “Macron, Stop Taking Us for Stupid People.”

Asked if this referred to the government’s mixed messages, one of the marchers who was holding the edge of the banner said: “Of course. Who does he think we are?”

A Yellow Vest representative from Indres, a department in the center of France, who was interviewed on BFM, a French television network, said that Mr. Macron had to take drastic steps to quell the unrest, “recognizing that this is a serious moment for our country.”

The problem the government faces is that different factions of the Yellow Vests have different demands. While they all want a better standard of living, some are furious at Mr. Macron for what they see as unjust tax policies that help the rich but do nothing for the poor, and they want him out of office. Others are more focused on raising the minimum wage and reducing the amount taken out of employee paychecks to cover social security and related services.

Added to that is the reality that many who say they are supportive have not yet come out to demonstrate. While it is possible that this reservoir of  supporters will not become activists, if they did the government would be hard put to cope.

Even on Saturday, the protesters managed to sustain a cat-and-mouse game with police, leaving the Arc de Triomphe when it was being sprayed with tear gas and water cannons, but popping up elsewhere in the city to spread havoc.

For now, however, Mr. Macron sees mainly disadvantages to trying to strike a deal with protesters.

“Emmanuel Macron regards the presidents of the republic who preceded him as having failed in their reform projects because they gave in to the  pressure of the street,” said Gérard Noiriel, a historian at the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences.

“He thinks that this movement, which effectively rallied fewer than 300,000 participants at its first protest and fewer than 80,000 today,” Mr. Noiriel said, “is going to weaken more and more and that the violence of the casseurs is going to discredit the Yellow Vests in public opinion.”

The problem, said Bernard Sananès, president of Elabe, a French polling organization, is that “there are two Frances.”

A car burning in Paris on Saturday during clashes near the Place de l’Etoile.CreditStephane Mahe/Reuters
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A car burning in Paris on Saturday during clashes near the Place de l’Etoile.CreditStephane Mahe/Reuters
“One is a France that feels left behind and moving down” the socioeconomic ladder, he said in an interview on Saturday on BFMTV.

A study released this past week by the Jean-Jaurès Institute, a public policy think tank, said: “In the past, these people could have given themselves some outings and entertainment; today those little ‘extras’ are out of reach.”

Multiple surveys of public opinion released in the past week suggest that 70 percent to 80 percent of French people sympathize with the Yellow Vests’ contention that President Emmanuel Macron and his government “talks about the end of the world while we are talking about the end of the month.”

The slogan refers to Mr. Macron’s focus on reducing climate change by promoting fuel efficiency and raising gas taxes in contrast to French working people who struggle to make it to the end of their month on their earnings.

The Yellow Vests draw their constituency from the majority of French who have watched their take-home pay increasingly fall behind their cost of  living. Still, the French are considerably better off than those in Eastern Europe, according to Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics arm.

The median disposable income for a person in a French household was 1,700 euros a month, about $1,923, in 2016, the most recent year for which statistics are available, according to Insee, the French government’s statistics agency.

Disposable income reflects the amount left for workers to spend on their daily needs — housing, food, schooling, clothes — after paying income taxes and payroll taxes and making adjustments for any government subsidies for which they might be eligible.

Often the only way to rein in costs has been to move to the exurbs of major cities, where real estate prices are much lower, but where workers generally must rely on a car to get to work and for errands. Cars need gas and so any gas tax increase hits them. Taxes have also risen on tobacco and other goods.

For rural workers and those who live in distant small villages in the heart of France, a car is even more clearly a necessity.

Centrist politicians, even some who support Mr. Macron, are beginning to push for a more engaged response from the government.

“You can’t govern against the people,” said François Bayrou, the leader of the Moderate Democrats, who are partners with Mr. Macron’s La Republique En Marche party in an interview on Europe 1.

Mr. Bayrou said he was not sure of the answer, but the government can’t keep “adding taxes on top of taxes.”



Adam Nossiter and Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting.


Tear Gas and Water Cannons in Paris as Grass-Roots Protest Takes Aim at Macron

Protesters on the Champs-Élysées on Saturday, wearing the yellow safety jackets French motorists are obliged to carry. It was the second weekend of loosely organized protests initially sparked by a proposed gas tax rise.CreditBenoit Tessier/Reuters
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Protesters on the Champs-Élysées on Saturday, wearing the yellow safety jackets French motorists are obliged to carry. It was the second weekend of loosely organized protests initially sparked by a proposed gas tax rise.CreditCreditBenoit Tessier/Reuters
By Adam Nossiter <https://www.nytimes.com/by/adam-nossiter>
Nov. 24, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/24/world/europe/france-yellow-vest-protest.html?action=click&module=RelatedCoverage&pgtype=Article&region=Footer <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/24/world/europe/france-yellow-vest-protest.html?action=click&module=RelatedCoverage&pgtype=Article&region=Footer>
PARIS — Shouts of “Macron resign!” and “Macron get lost!” punctuated the booms from tear gas and water cannons on the Champs-Élysées on Saturday, as the French police forced protesters from the “Yellow Jackets” movement away from the presidential offices in the Élysée Palace.

French protest movements come and go, but this one, organized on the internet, is different. Welling up rapidly from rural and forgotten France, this broad-based, citizen-driven movement is among the most serious challenges yet to President Emmanuel Macron’s pro-business government, say analysts, political opponents and even many of Mr. Macron’s supporters.

On Saturday, thousands of so-called Yellow Jackets, named for the fluorescent road-safety vests that all French drivers must carry in their vehicles, converged on Paris for a second weekend to protest a rise in fuel taxes and to express general discontent with the fiscal burden in one of the most highly taxed states in Europe, where taxes represent over 45 percent of G.D.P.

[Protests in France <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/17/world/europe/french-drivers-protest-fuel-taxes.html?action=click&module=inline&pgtype=Article> began last weekend, with hundreds of thousands demonstrating against fuel tax hikes.]

The numbers had dropped sharply from the preceding week’s several hundred thousand protesters; the police estimated there were about 8,000 in Paris and more than 80,000 across the country on Saturday. But this time, more were concentrated on the protesters’ symbolic targets: the capital and Mr. Macron himself.

Protesters facing a police water cannon in Paris. The police battled hardened militants wielding paving stones who the protesters insisted were unconnected with their movementCreditBenoit Tessier/Reuters
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Protesters facing a police water cannon in Paris. The police battled hardened militants wielding paving stones who the protesters insisted were unconnected with their movementCreditBenoit Tessier/Reuters
Clouds of gas and smoke rolled up <https://twitter.com/AFP/status/1066364128959303682> the Champs-Élysées all afternoon as the police battled militant members of the crowd wielding paving stones; the grass-roots protesters insisted they were unconnected with their movement.

“We’re just fed up. It seems like to us that the government is only working to maintain its own privileges,” said Mathieu Styrna, one of the thousands marching down the Champs-Élysées. A contractor, he said he had been forced to drive hundreds of miles a week for work and could no longer afford his gas bills.

For the protesters, it was all about making ends meet.

“Why should we have to finance their projects?” Mr. Styrna said, referring to the government’s plan to discourage car use through gas taxes. Many in the crowd said that they did not disdain the government’s environmental goals, but that their own survival was more important.

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The movement appears to be without leaders, and the opposition parties in France have scrambled to keep up with it.

“This amateurism, it’s the sign of the crisis of the French political system,” said Dominique Reynié, a political scientist at Sciences Po, referring to the protesters’ loose organization.

“It’s really quite incredible. This is the most impressive event since Macron came to power,” Mr. Reynié added. “It’s a profound crisis.”

Police officers firing tear gas during the protest in Paris.CreditBenoit Tessier/Reuters
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Police officers firing tear gas during the protest in Paris.CreditBenoit Tessier/Reuters
The movement has forced itself on the government’s unwilling attention with a message analysts say is not going away soon: We are in trouble.

Like many at the protest, Mr. Styrna, a father of three, said he had trouble paying his bills. “It’s not even by the end of the month; it’s by the middle,” he said, referring to point when the funds run dry. “We don’t even go out any more — no cinema.”

Julien Viguerard, 31, who works in a biscuit factory in Toulouse, said: “The end of the month? Ha! It’s the 15th for me.”

He has seven children, earns 1,500 euros a month, about $1,700, and is “sick of being taxed on everything.” The problem “is low salaries,” he said. “I’ve got children to feed. We’re not just imbeciles. They treat us like cattle. We can’t accept it.”

Saturday’s protesters came from all over France. Many said they had been recruited on the internet, followed no political movement and emphasized that they simply didn’t have enough to live on.

“I don’t have the means to live or to die,” read the sign held up by Jennifer Hurau, who works as an online saleswoman in the Paris suburbs on a temporary contract that is soon to end. For now, she makes €1600 a month and pays €550 in rent. “I don’t know what I will do,” she said.

President Emmanuel Macron addressed the protests only obliquely in a speech to French mayors at the Élysée Palace this week.CreditThibault Camus/Associated Press
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President Emmanuel Macron addressed the protests only obliquely in a speech to French mayors at the Élysée Palace this week.CreditThibault Camus/Associated Press
It is the movement’s amorphousness that makes it new, powerful and potentially dangerous for Mr. Macron, analysts say.

“The government parties didn’t understand that their tax policies would wind up producing this,” said Mr. Reynié, the political scientist. “This is a movement that thinks the political parties are incapable of producing a solution. It is part of the chemistry of populism,” he added, pointing out that the tax burden had grown by about €25 billion every year between 2002 and 2017.

“This is the first time we’re seeing a mobilization that’s coming from the social networks, and not led by the political parties or the unions,” said Jean-Yves Camus, a political scientist who heads the Observatory on Political Radicalism.

“This is really a populist-type movement, and it’s an extremely strong protest against elite France,” he added. “It’s a protest against tax policy that’s considered confiscatory. And there’s been an undeniable drop in the buying power not just of the workers, but of the middle class.”

The government’s response to the protest movement so far has been halting, “a sort of condescension,” Mr. Camus said.

No high-ranking official has met with any of the self-designated spokespeople for the movement who have been appearing on French television all week. There have been a few small fiscal gestures — promises of checks and rebates — but these were dismissed by Saturday’s protesters as irrelevant to their daily struggle.

French mayors waiting to hear Mr. Macron speak. Many mayors expressed disappointment and bewilderment at the official response to the protests.CreditThibault Camus/Associated Press
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French mayors waiting to hear Mr. Macron speak. Many mayors expressed disappointment and bewilderment at the official response to the protests.CreditThibault Camus/Associated Press
Mr. Macron, in a speech to some of the country’s thousands of mayors this past week, did not mention the Yellow Jacket protests directly, but instead spoke in his usual finely sculpted abstractions.

“The challenge that is ours is to invent a new grammar,” the president said.

Later, in a question-and-answer session with the mayors, the president did address the protests, obliquely, and largely to complain about them.

“It’s a little bit unfair,” he said. “They see my face when they fill up at the gas pump.”

Mr. Macron added: “There is a moral crisis in society. The risk is in the ambient demagogy. I’m hearing the anger. But I don’t want to hear it in a demagogic fashion.”

Even some of the president’s own supporters in Parliament have expressed concern that the anger of the protesters is not being heard. Their own insurgent political movement was partly born of this anger, they said.

“They’re expressing a seething anger, which we know about,” said Thomas Mesnier, a parliamentary deputy in Mr. Macron’s party. “People are waiting for results, and they are waiting for their daily lives to improve.”

“This is a movement without precedent, and we don’t have a good diagnosis of it,” said Nicolas Démoulin, another Macronist deputy in Parliament. “We’ve got to go to these citizens who feel they are completely shut out of politics.”

Clouds of gas and smoke rolled up the Champs-Élysées all afternoon.CreditKamil Zihnioglu/Associated Press
Image

Clouds of gas and smoke rolled up the Champs-Élysées all afternoon.CreditKamil Zihnioglu/Associated Press
The government declined to make its spokesman available for a response to the Yellow Jackets protest. On Friday, the spokesman, Benjamin Griveaux, told French television that “the crisis is deeper than just over the price of gas,” but “one must never set the environmental fight up against social justice.”

There was disappointment and bewilderment at Mr. Macron’s response to the protests at the giant annual French mayor’s convention in Paris this past week.

“The response has been out of step, disconnected,” said Sony Clinquart, the mayor of a small town near Dunkirk in the north.

“There is a lack of intermediary between him and the population,” said Isabelle Henniquau, the mayor of a town near the Swiss border. “He should explain what he is going to do.”

By Saturday afternoon, the Champs-Élysées was a battleground of overturned barricades, billowing smoke, bonfires and pushing between Yellow Jackets protesters and the police.

“We’re hungry and we’re fed up,” said Jessica Monnier, 28, who works in a watch factory in the French Alps. She earns €970 a month, and said:  “Once I pay my bills, I don’t have enough to eat. We’re just hungry, that’s all.”



______________________________

Jai Sen

jai.sen at cacim.net <mailto:jai.sen at cacim.net>
www.cacim.net <http://www.cacim.net/> / http://www.openword.net.in

Now based in New Delhi, India (+91-98189 11325) and in Ottawa, Canada, on unceded Anishinaabe territory (+1-613-282 2900) 

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Jai Sen, ed, 2017 – The Movements of Movements, Part 1 : What Makes Us Move ?.  New Delhi : OpenWord and Oakland, CA : PM Press.  Ebook and hard copy available at PM Press <http://www.pmpress.org/> and in Canada at www.leftwingbooks <http://www.leftwingbooks/>
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Jai Sen, ed, 2016a  – The Movements of Movements, Part 1 : What Makes Us Move ?  and Jai Sen, ed, 2016b – The Movements of Movements, Part 2 : Rethinking Our Dance (both forthcoming in 2017 from New Delhi : OpenWord and Oakland, CA : PM Press), ADVANCE PREFINAL ONLINE MOVEMENT EDITIONS of all the material @ www.cacim.net <http://www.cacim.net/>
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