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YELLOW VESTS

‘Where do our taxes go?’: Yellow vests in Bourges explain why they won’t give up their fight

Around 5,000 'yellow vests' descended on the central French city of Bourges on Saturday for the 9th weekend of anti-government protests. The Local joined them to find out exactly why these French people were determined not to give up their fight.

Published: 12 January 2019 15:48 CET
'Where do our taxes go?': Yellow vests in Bourges explain why they won't give up their fight
Photo: The Local

Bourges in the Cher department became an unlikely epicentre for the 'yellow vest' (gilets jaunes) protests on Saturday as thousands of demonstrators arrived in the central city to demonstrate for Act 9 of the movement. 

A total of 4,700 protesters gathered in the city, with around 500 gathering at Place Seraucourt in the historic part of the city despite the head of the local authority in Bourges Catherine Ferrier banning protests in the area.

Police stood in groups several metres away from where the gilets jaunes had gathered while several shops were boarded up on the first weekend of the winter sales.

 

While the morning saw protesters marching peacefully, in the afternoon clashes began to began to break out between police and a small minority or rioters.

“Our spending power is the most important issue,” Josiane Joliy, 62, told The Local. “I live on 480 euros a month and I can't afford to go out and socialise. I'm lonely but luckily I have the internet which sometimes feels like my only friend.

Joliy said she was still protesting because the concessions recently made by Macron, which included boosting the minimum wage and cutting taxes for pensioners “weren't good enough”.

“The increase in the SMIC (minimum wage) that Macron introduced recently won't change anything and not everyone will benefit from it,” she said. 

Joliy, who is retired went on to say that Macron needs to get out as quickly as possible, adding that she thinks far-right politician Marine Le Pen would be better because “she understands how people have to live”.

Another 'yellow vest' Frederique Solivo, 39, said that the reason he was protesting was he was fed up with the high taxes in France and “not knowing where they go”.

“Where is the money going?” he said. “We need to know because at the moment in France it feels like we're paying through the nose and creating debt for our children.”

Solivo added that he thought the problems in France at the moment were similar to those that caused Brexit, and he believed it was time for Macron to step aside.

Meanwhile Bernard Rousse, 62 from Bourges, who was protesting for the first time joined the demonstrations on Saturday because of the lack of equality in France and the attitude of the country's politicians. 

“We are a rich country and yet there are people who work hard and have to sleep on the streets,” he said. 

“Politicians talk about things they don't understand,” said the retired nuclear power station worker. 

“I wasn't totally against Macron but he needs to start listening to us, after all, he was elected by the people. He works for us!”

Dominique Martin, 60, who described herself as a gilet jaune “to the core” said that she has been protesting every Saturday since November. 

“I want better spending power for everyone, particularly for the vulnerable — single women, the old, widows. 

“The situation we have at the moment isn't fair and it can't go on.”

Martin went on to say that she was in favour of introducing citizens' referenda on all government decisions and a “peoples' government” to replace the current one. 

Others we spoke to echoed the need for better spending power, in other words more money in their pockets at the end of the month, with one pensioner Michelle Auclair, 70, highlighting the difficulty the country's retirees are having due to government measures introduced since Macron came into power. 

Another protester, Laetitia Diat, 39, said that her primary concern was Macron and his “cronies” filling their pockets which she considered “an insult to the French people.”

Many shop owners in Bourges had taken the precaution of boarding up their shops on Saturday however others took the opposite approach, hanging yellow vests in their windows to demonstrate their support. 

However the streets in the historic centre were largely empty aside from the 'yellow vest' presence. 

It was prominent 'yellow vest' Priscillia Ludosky who called on gilets jaunes to make Bourges the epicentre of the mobilisation. 

Ludosky explained that the city in the centre of France was “a little less known to the police” which would lower the chances of the protesters being circled by the police force. 
 
By late afternoon clashes broke out between riot police and protesters that have been common at most yellow vest protests in recent weeks.
 
 
Bourges is a historical city and home to the Gothic Cathedral of Saint Etienne which ranks as a World Heritage Site. It is also where Charles VII sought refuge in the 1420s during the Hundred Years' War before he became king of France.
 
The city has been chosen “to confirm our unity and to allow everyone to be at equal distance leaving the big cities”, according to the Facebook group for the event. 

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Is France’s ‘yellow vest’ movement really on its way back?

Nearly two years since 'yellow-vest' protesters flooded the streets, the signature gilets jaunes have become a rare sight in France. With a comeback announced on September 12th, what is left of the movement that shook France?

Published: 3 September 2020 11:53 CEST
Updated: 12 September 2020 08:58 CEST
Is France's 'yellow vest' movement really on its way back?
Yellow vest protests in Paris in 2019. Photo: AFP

When Priscillia Ludosky put on a yellow vest for the first time and headed out to the Champs Elysées to protest, she had no idea that nearly 300,000 people would do the same.

It was November 17th, 2018, the first 'yellow vest' protest in the capital and the birth of a mass-movement so large that its vows to overthrow French President Emmanuel Macron’s government seemed, for a moment, credible. 

Nearly two years later, Macron is still president – and aiming for reelection – while the ‘yellow vest’ movement has all but disappeared from the public eye.

“It’s been a long time since I wore the yellow vest,” Priscillia Ludosky, founder and leading figure of the movement, told The Local.

She had not left the movement, but said she was less active than she had been.

“I'm less on-the-ground than I used to. The pandemic put the brakes on most things,” she said.

Despite France's rising coronavirus rates, the 'yellow vests' have declared a comeback protest on September 12th, promising to “never give up”.

 

But with the protests before lockdown gathering only a fraction of the numbers they once rallied, how much is there really left of the 'yellow vests'?

“The movement is much smaller, much less active, and much more divided than it was at the outset,” historian Sylvain Boulouque told The Local.

Boulouque has followed the movement from the beginning and has written the book Mensonges en gilet jaune (Lies in yellow vests), about the role social media and fake news played in fuelling the 'yellow vests' anger.

When the ‘yellow vests’ first spiralled into a national mass-movement, their rallying cry “Macron demission !” (Macron resign) was the one ringing the loudest, and it was also one of the few demands that all of the ‘yellow vests’ could unite behind.

“The movement spans all the way from the extreme-left to the extreme-right. There is no unity on the fundamental political questions,” Boulouque said.

The more time passed, the more the movement's internal divisions became clear. Today, Boulouque said, there was “a little bit of everything” left, and just keeping track of the movement had become a challenge.

“It’s so local that the demographic changes from town to town and week to week,” he said.

Among the extreme right-wing were a number of conspiracy theory believers, he said, including anti-mask activists who opposed the French government's new rules on masks.

Pro- and anti-masks was just the newest fault line dividing the 'yellow vests', Boulouque said.

“The pandemic will split them rather than reunite them,” he said.

‘Covid proved our points’

Seizing on the pandemic to re-mobilise the masses is what the still-active 'yellow vests' hope to do on September 12th.

Leading 'yellow vest' figure Jérôme Rodrigues. Photo: AFP

Jérôme Rodrigues, another ‘yellow vest’ leading figure, told Slate that the pandemic was their “best ally”.

“Covid proved our points about the degrading of the health system and the limits of the capitalist system,” Rodrigues said.

When the French government imposed a nationwide, strict lockdown in March, it was to save the hospitals in hard-hit areas such as Paris from the mounting pressure of a rapidly increasing patient flow. 

The lockdown, which lasted over two months, had a crippling impact on the economy and saw the government spend billions on emergency help schemes to prevent chain bankruptcies and mass layoffs. 

Despite the government's efforts to kickstart the economy, France’s unemployment rate is set to increase by 10 percent by the end of the year. Young people will be the worst affected, according to France’s national institute for statistics, Insee. Rodrigues predicted that the looming downturn would reaffirm people's faith in the 'yellow vest' movement.

“With the coming crisis, people who were doing well financially and who have never had a hard time are going to fall flat on their faces,” Rodrigues said.

'Yellow vest' leading figure Priscillia Ludosky has been participating in protests against police violence and in support of France's hospital sector the past months. Photo: AFP

'Sensationalist media'

Rodrigues became a symbol of the ‘yellow vests’ after he was hit in the eye by what he claimed to be an LBD rubber bullet fired by police (the police refute his accusation, but the authority overseeing the police has launched an investigation into the matter). 

Blinded in one eye, Rodrigues incorporated one of the most jarring features of the protests: their increasingly violent character. The recurring scenes of violence that dominated the protests contributed to the ‘yellow vests’ hogging headlines for months – not just in France, but across the world. 

Images of burning cars, police armed with rubber-bullet guns, violent fist-fights and black-clad protesters smashing ATMs with baseball bats shocked the world. 

But the violence also dominated the media coverage of the protests, which meant what the protesters were saying got less attention.

READ ALSO How the 'yellow vests' made France have a national conversation about police violence

To Ludosky, this was a big problem.

“The media won’t cover anything unless it’s sensationalist,” she said. 

Ludosky authored the online petition that became the catalyst for the ‘yellow vest’ protests. In it, she wrote that the government’s proposed carbon tax was both falsely branded a green policy and was harmful to the many people who depended on their cars to get around every day.

The document went viral and gathered more than one million signatures, and the fluorescent yellow vest that all vehicles in France must be equipped with became the symbol of the masses revolting against the elites.

Ludosky said her main point was lost in the coverage. She was not an angry car-enthusiast defending her right to drive, she was saying that the tax was unfair and would impact the most on the poorest.

“The longer we protested, the more they tried to tell everyone that we don't know what we want. That we were only out there to break things,” she said.

The early days of the movement saw hundreds of 'roundabout protests' in the French provinces. Photo: AFP

'They are there'

The violence also discouraged many of the 'yellow vests' who had little experience with protesting and were shocked by the use of force on both sides.

Danielle Tartakowsky, a professor at the Paris 8 University who specialises in social movements in contemporary France, said it was important to distinguish between the ‘yellow vest’ who still turned up to protests in Paris – often young, keen and ready to go head to head with police – and the ‘yellow vests’ mobilising in less urban areas.

“In the countryside the ‘yellow vest’ movement is the same as it was at the outset,” she said.

In her new book, On est là ! (We’re here), a main ‘yellow vest’ rallying cry, she concludes just that; the movement had changed, but the ‘yellow vests’ were still present.

“That does not mean that they are ready to rally in the same ways, but it would be dangerous and delusional to say that they have disappeared,” she said.

Tartakowsky said that, while the 'yellow vests' successes could seem limited from the outside, they had pushed through important change indirectly by showing that it was possible to force through change.

“Even if they did not win on all points they showed that it was possible to win something, to make the government backpedal,” she said, referring to the carbon tax.

The camp

When the protests started, the roundabout became the main stage for the protesters who did not travel to Paris to make their discontent heard and seen in the capital. 

From June 2019 until March 2020, just before the pandemic hit with full force, Séverine spent most of her free time on a local roundabout where she and some 30 other ‘yellow vests’ had set up a camp.

A teacher in Amiens, a city a couple of hours north of Paris, Séverine was an early believer that the ‘yellow vests’ would be the movement that finally could radically change a system she saw as unjust, undemocratic and unsustainable.

“I passed all my evenings, all my weekends at the camp,” she said.

The camp was a microcosm of the world they hoped to create.

“We cooked together, discussed, we really had some great moments there together,” she said.

They were all kinds of people at the camp; a waiter, a metro driver, a nursery teacher, a few retirees. An Indian student who just needed somewhere to crash for free. 

“It was a very open environment,” Séverine said.

But the problems soon surfaced. The camp, like the movement, swore to a leaderless management style where no one had a final say.

“It was a mess. Obviously, we didn’t manage to make any decisions,” Séverine said.

Violence at protests became a major problem. Photo: AFP

'People are exhausted'

They split themselves into two groups. Oddly enough, the division had little to do with politics.

“It was not about left or right. We actually agreed on the fundamental issues. It was more about strong personalities and people simply not getting along,” she said.

The atmosphere soured. They argued more, discussed less. They went from 30, to 20, to about 10. Then, after the local election in March, just before the pandemic made social distancing the norm, the mayor told them to clear the camp. 

Critics have long said the ‘yellow vests’ lack of leadership was their major, perhaps the decisive, default. How could they push for change when they had no idea what they wanted?

Despite having become so disillusioned with the movement that she no longer knew if she wanted to call herself a ‘yellow vest’ at all, Séverine was not sure this was their main problem. 

“Demonstrating every weekend is tiring. It requires a significant commitment. I think people are exhausted,” she said.

'I was fed up'

In the months that followed the movement’s heyday in early 2019, the protests followed the same pattern as Séverine's camp.

They were increasingly sparse in numbers and the atmosphere increasingly tense and bitter.

“You're walking in a state of complete stress, afraid that someone is aiming at you. You don't hear the messages anymore,” Séverine said.

Five people have lost a hand in the protests. Twenty-five were blinded in an eye. According to government numbers, 2,500 protesters were hurt in the protests by the end of 2019, along with 1,800 police officers.

“No one could imagine that a movement could last this long without losing momentum,” Ludosky said.

“Keeping on going cost a lot to the people who got involved. It's money, time, people lost limbs, couples separated.”

READ ALSO ANALYSIS: French police are not all thugs – they are being placed in an impossible situation

Like many others, she was put off by the violence. In the end, she left her yellow vest in her car.

“I was fed up,” she said. “Every time I wore it I worried about the police controlling me.”

She was not sure if she still believed in the movement.

“It’s complicated. The presidential elections are coming up soon, crying out for Macron’s resignation doesn’t make sense anymore.”

“But the 12th will be the moment to go out on the streets. Not necessarily in Paris, but we need to show something.”

 

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