A “tale of two crises” has unfolded in the last few days on the southern and northern shores of the English Channel. Both crises flow, in part, from the high rates of inflation caused by the Ukraine war and the retreat of the Covid pandemic.

In Britain, where inflation is just over 10%, a political crisis wrapped in a financial crisis has threatened to destroy the private pensions system on which millions depend. A chancellor was ejected after a few weeks in office; another prime minister has gone. Britain, though, has so far escaped civil unrest.

On Tuesday in France, however, (with inflation running at “only” 6%) there were around 200,000 people on the streets. A strike for higher pay by oil refinery workers has made petrol and diesel scarce and have spread to the railways, the Metro, schools and other public services.

Some have suggested this could be the start of a “new May 1968” or the “Popular Front” rebellion of the Thirties which gave French workers higher wages and paid holidays. It could mark the beginning of a generalised revolt, both in streets and in parliament, which could destroy President Emmanuel Macron’s second term. His Prime Minister, Élisabeth Borne, was obliged this week to resort to emergency powers to push her government’s 2023 budget through the National Assembly. Losing his parliamentary majority in the legislative elections in June (two months after winning presidential re-election) is coming back to haunt him.

But there’s a fundamental difference between the crises afflicting France and Britain. What has happened in the UK in the last few days is bizarre and unprecedented. What is happening in France is more or less normal — for France — after three years in which social unrest has been largely paused. Macron’s first term was littered with such protests, first by the Gilets Jaunes and then by union marches and strikes against pension reform.

The Gilets Jaunes rebellion of 2018-9 was very unusual — at first. It started in the apolitical, lower-middle and working classes of the countryside and outer suburbs. It was eventually hijacked by the metropolitan anti-state and anti-everything far-Left. “Fake” Gilets Jaunes and their anarchist allies dressed in black were active once again on the margins of the Paris marches this week, vandalising “capitalist” banks and burning “capitalist” litter bins.

The bulk of this week’s protests came from equally predicable sources: the militant trades union federation, the CGT (Confédération Générale du Travail ) and, before that, in a Paris march on Sunday, the hard-Left party, La France Insoumise (LFI). The CGT leader Philippe Martinez spoke of creating that perpetual fantasy of the French Left: une convergence des luttes — a merging of disparate protests and social conflicts into a single anti-government and anti-boss rebellion. He hoped that a decision by the Macron-Borne government to break, or bend, the oil strike by requisitioning key workers would produce a powerful reaction in defence of the right to strike.

The leader of the LFI and Macron’s one-time presidential rival, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, even predicted the beginning of a new “Popular Front” — a “conjunction” of Left-wing and environmental causes to create a “cycle” of revolt “never seen before in our country”. Both predictions fell flat on their faces. Mélenchon forecast 300,000 marchers on Sunday and claimed 140,000. An independent survey for the main French media organisations counted 29,500.

The day of strikes on Tuesday was somewhat more effective but not much. Only one in four rail workers stopped work. The great “convergence des luttes” was supported by 6% of teachers and 4% of public employees. The biggest French trades union federation (there are at least eight of them), the CFDT (Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail), refused to join in. The CGT oil strike, already fading, has since fallen apart. Only two out of seven refineries are still blocked and filling stations are slowly returning to normal, and the CFDT and other moderates had already signed pay deals with Total and Esso.

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It’s not all over yet. There is a dangerous challenge to Macron from CGT-affiliated workers in the nuclear industry. Just under half of France’s 56 nuclear reactors are already closed for emergency repairs and routine maintenance and the strike is delaying their re-opening. If it persists, there could be widespread black-outs this winter. In sum, the hard Left overplayed its hand this week but they will threaten Macron again later in the year.

Macron and his government acted earlier than any other country in the European Union to soften the impact of inflation. They spent €100 billion this year and plan to spend another €45 billion in 2023 to keep down the price of petrol, diesel, domestic gas and electricity. France has the lowest inflation rate in the EU — an annual rate of 5.6% in September, compared to 9.9% in the Eurozone as a whole. Unfortunately for Macron, the French do not shop or fill their petrol tanks “elsewhere”. They shop in France. Even a softened inflation rate has left many people on low to medium salaries struggling to get by.

Because of arcane government rules, those on the statutory minimum wage — Le Smic — have enjoyed a cumulative rise of 8% this year. This has squeezed margins with workers on slightly higher, but still low-to-medium wage levels, leaving them feeling devalued, financially and socially. Both Macron and Élisabeth Borne have been slow to grasp this problem. They were also slow to realise that the vast windfall profits of the oil industry would permit the well-paid refinery workers to become an unlikely symbol of social injustice (to some).

Macron had wanted to keep down wages to prevent an inflationary spiral which would damage France’s competitiveness. Instead, he subsidised energy prices and offered tax breaks for one-off bonuses, hoping that would blunt the demands for higher pay. In recent days, his Prime Minister and other ministers have been belatedly urging all employers to consider wage rises — on top of the bonuses and the splurge of state-spending to dampen inflation. In other words, long-term, economic policy has been jettisoned in an attempt to calm the social unrest.

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By a quirk of the political calendar, Macron and Borne also collided head-on this week with the scattered, but numerically greater, opposition in the National Assembly. Opponents of the Left, Right and far-Right had been picking apart the 2023 draft budget, trying to add billions in pet spending plans. Events in Britain might have warned them of the market dangers of messing with debt and deficits, and France’s overall national debt is much higher than Britain’s — 114.6% of GDP, compared to just under 100%.

The opposition was only playing games. They knew that the government would eventually blow its playground whistle and use its emergency constitutional power to impose something close to the original budget. Borne did so on Wednesday night, using a clause of the constitution inserted by Charles de Gaulle for exactly this purpose. Every previous president of the Fifth Republic has used 49.3 at some time — even those with friendly majorities in the Assembly.

Cue, nonetheless, fake indignation on the part of Left, Right and Centre-Right, accusing Macron of “riding roughshod over democracy”. In fact, the opposition, if it cared to work together, could overturn Article 49.3, the budget and the Borne government by passing a censure motion. An absolute majority of the 577 deputies is needed or 289 actual votes in favour. Macron and Borne have 250 centrists; “the rest” have 327.

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Two censure motions have been tabled. The Left refuses to vote for the far-Right motion and the far-Right refuses to vote for the Left motion. The centre-Right will not vote for either, fearing wipe-out in an early election. In other words, the government has called the opposition’s bluff, as everyone knew they would. Just like the day of inaction on Tuesday, Borne’s use of 49.3 is a faux crisis. Like the day of inaction, however, it presages a proper crisis later this winter or early in the New Year.

Emmanuel Macron insists that he will push ahead by March with his plans to increase France’s minimum retirement age from 62 to 64 by 2027. He warns that he will use 49.3 again, if necessary. He will call new elections, if he loses a vote of confidence (as, on this issue, he might). There are good arguments why France should work longer. Its minimum retirement age is the lowest in the EU. Politically, it is hazardous and even foolhardy to insist on it now. The government has no majority. The national mood, always fractious, has been darkened by two years of pandemic and the resurgence of inflation after years of low or no wage rises.

Macron has bound himself to the pensions mast. The deficit of 5% of GDP promised to Brussels and the markets next year depends on the enactment of pension reform by July. As Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng found out, it’s not a good idea to disappoint (or excite) the markets when you are already hugely indebted to them. On pensions, most French people, including the moderate unions, are united in fierce opposition to Macron. For now, the President remains determined to go ahead. The true “crisis”, both on the street and in parliament, did not happen this week. It is on its way.

Yet Annie Ernaux, who last Thursday became the first Frenchwoman to take the literature Nobel, moved to the new town of Cergy-Pontoise — 30 kilometres north-west of central Paris — in 1975. She has remained there, in her house on a bend in the Oise, ever since. She writes all her works in Cergy: a long-settled outsider among other incomers, “in the midst of lives started elsewhere” (as she reflects in her journal Exteriors) “in Vietnam, the Maghreb, Côte d’Ivoire, the French provinces or, as was mine, in Normandy”.

After the Swedish Academy announced its choice for 2022, the reporter from Le Figaro hurried up to Cergy, put in some sterling legwork, and found the retired neighbour who looks after the author’s cat. She who told him that Ernaux stood for “Auchan” (read Tesco, maybe Asda), “the provinces, the ordinary, women”. Over in Cergy’s monumental civic centre, the Axe Majeur, the kids hanging around in the sun hadn’t heard of their illustrious fellow-citizen. But they soon began pounding their mobiles to find out about her. “At last, people are going to say something good about Cergy,” one hoped.

There’s much that’s good — or at any rate rich, complicated and interesting — to be said about Cergy-Pontoise and the other planned communities that spread across Europe in the decades after the Second World War. For the most part, however, mainstream literature, film and even journalism is not where you will find it. For sure, Ernaux — born in Normandy in 1940 to peasant-born parents who became the proprietors of a small-town café-grocery — writes in pared-down, pin-sharp prose about intimate experiences shared across classes, cultures and continents.

Since the late Seventies, her creative memoirs have pierced the veils of shame, silence and taboo to dramatise the most intimate wounds: her father’s class-bound rage (in A Man’s Place), her mother’s thwarted life and descent into Alzheimer’s (A Woman’s Story), a convulsive affair (Simple Passion), a bruising sexual initiation (A Girl’s Story), an illegal abortion (Happening). She gave shape, grace, even beauty, to the mucky froth of memory. Then, in her 2008 book The Years, she turned the stray junk of consumer culture that accumulates in everybody’s brain into material for a masterly collective autobiography of France from the war’s end to the millennium. It was like building a literary Chartres Cathedral out of ring-pulls, bottle-tops, milk cartons and fag packets.

Read some recent Anglophone tributes to Ernaux, however, and you might think that she writes the brand of abstract, disembodied auto-fiction that floats mistily above everyday existence until it comes to rest in its spiritual home: the university seminar-room. Au contraire. Just as she roots her writing in the frail, fleshly, vulnerable (female) body, so she grounds it in specific, closely-observed places. She tells stories about the events or feelings that give rise to scorn, embarrassment, even disgust. And she sets them in spaces that polite voices will (still) patronise as tacky, vulgar and soulless.

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“Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!” cursed John Betjeman — the bard of an older, more sedate variety of suburbia — in 1937 about a boom-town that prefigured many later developments. A dozen stops up the RER line from Charles de Gaulle-Etoile, Cergy has never quite attracted Slough levels of disdain. But Ernaux’s stubborn loyalty to it reveals much about her career as an author and the fault-lines that still splinter culture in France, Britain, or elsewhere in the West. Yes, we’re talking class — though not in the way that an older generation of socially-committed writers would have conceived it.

Ernaux does not eulogise a mythological proletariat, or a persecuted underclass in the tower-block banlieue, from a safe perch in a Left Bank café or a fine converted mas on some Provençal hillside. Rather, she lives in and writes from the kind of mixed community where people come to make, or remake themselves, amid the shopping centres, the flagstoned plazas, the geometric parks and boxy housing estates of the exurban dream. At first, this new-minted townscape disoriented her, as, in the Seventies, it rapidly sprang from blueprint to building-site. She felt marooned among “the windswept esplanades, the concrete façades, pink or blue, and the empty residential avenues”. Then the people came; the supermarkets opened; the commuter trains to Paris filled. In and around Cergy she found the right stage on which to mount her exploration of “the violence and shame inherent in society”, and her quest to discover the human essence of “anything that appears to be unimportant or meaningless simply because it is familiar or ordinary”.

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Cergy, like four other new towns ringed around Paris, came into being in the wake of the SDAURP (Schema d’Amenagement et d’Urbanisme de la Region Parisienne) plan of 1965: almost 20 years later than Britain’s first wave of New Towns, but roughly at the same time as Milton Keynes. In 2022, it marks 50 years of official existence after Paris master-planner Paul Delouvrier saw his cherished villes nouvelles begin to rise. They offered an alternative — more socially diverse, integrated and architecturally ambitious — to the housing projects of the banlieue that had fast descended into sink estates. Places like Cergy (in France or Britain) can boast neither a chic pedigree — though Pissarro and Cézanne painted on the still-wooded banks of the Oise — nor the pathos and heroism of deprivation. Taste-makers tend to treat them with sheer indifference, lofty pity, or mocking condescension. So Ernaux’s insistence that we find a key to unlock the secrets of modern social and emotional lives in the new-town grocery queue, the hairdresser’s salon, or the crowded Tube carriage, counts as a quietly revolutionary act. For her, “a supermarket can provide just as much meaning and truth as a concert hall”.

Britain’s new towns and cities still await their Ernaux. True, we have Mike Leigh-style social comedy aplenty: aspiration, embarrassment and humiliation in off-the-peg executive homes or kitsch bistros. You can argue until the (concrete) cows come home about whether this mode grows from a place of love or hate. But, even at its best, it soon runs into strict limits of tone and scope. Elsewhere, the strong British tradition of satirical urbanism — tart and witty in an architectural writer like Ian Nairn, florid and visionary in the exurban rambles of Iain Sinclair — does not exactly condescend to dwellers in new towns or in the residential sprawl that Nairn dubbed “subtopia”.

It inclines to treat them as victims, specimens or casualties. Worse, new towns became dystopian backdrops for tales of social anomie and breakdown: Stanley Kubrick filmed some of A Clockwork Orange on the brutalist Southmere Estate in Thamesmead. JG Ballard (in fiction) and Jean Baudrillard (in critical theory) have much to answer for in this prefab notion of the planned urban ensemble as an inevitable hell-hole of alienation. Invest properly in amenities and services, and the metaphysical anguish supposedly bred by new-town architecture mysteriously dissolves. True, Cergy for Ernaux — even in its more stylish, affluent corners — may figure as a microcosm of consumer capitalism, with all its anxieties and insecurities. But she never pretends that you’d escape it by moving to Menton or Montparnasse.

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In Ernaux’s work, we make the memories that matter out of anywhere and anything. And I should confess that my fondness for her work has a little to do with another, richly recollected, version of the suburban scene. Much of her 2016 book A Girl’s Story recounts, with her trademark candour, clarity and insight, a teenage sexual encounter at a summer camp in Normandy. Its final act, however, moves on to the young Annie’s stint in 1960 as an au pair in North Finchley, London N12. We lived a few hundred yards away from the shops at Tally Ho Corner where the young French help gleefully guzzles “lemon curds, shortbreads, trifles, Smarties and Milky Ways, bars of Caramac and Dairy Milk”. A couple of years later, I would have bought the same sweets at the same counters she evokes in some positively rhapsodic passages. Take that, Monsieur Proust with your tisane-dunked madeleine (Ernaux certainly knows, and loves, her A la recherche du temps perdu).

When, in 1989, she took a nostalgic trip up the Northern Line to revisit North Finchley, even the Gaumont cinema (where I spent many Saturday mornings) had gone and “only the Woolworth’s remained”. Alas, not for much longer. In London, as in Normandy, Annie suffers the traumas and terrors of adolescence. They unfold, though, in the midst of all the mundane actualities that anchor our memories in both place and time. One late-summer Sunday in 1960, she sits “alone on a bench in a park near Woodside Park Station. Children are playing. I have brought things to write with. I start a novel…” Thus the six decades of a Nobel laureate’s literary career launch from a park bench (almost) at the outer-suburban end of a Tube line. Ernaux still lives, and writes, from the end of the line. There are worse places to start from.

The unconventional, anti-elite mass movement which sprang up last October in peripheral or ‘drive through’ France has ceased to exist in its original form. It no longer represents a danger to the French establishment. It no longer has the support of the provincial masses.

The weekly demonstrations persist, or dribble on, reaching Act XXX, or a 30^th consecutive Saturday of protest, last weekend. Nationwide turn-out has fallen to 10,000 or less, according to government figures, compared to the 280,000 people who took part in Act I, the first “weekend putsch” on 17 November.

Seven months after it began, the movement is maintained on life support by a hard core of provincial obsessives and ideological mercenaries from the urban Left, some peaceful, others extremely violent.

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What remains of the rebellion is still locally disruptive, such as last weekend in Montpellier where 200 to 300 yellow vests and their anti-fa and anarcho-Left Black Bloc allies fought with police. Tempers were stoked up by a false rumour, spread by word of mouth and by social media, that two protesters, including an elderly woman, had been killed by police plastic bullets.

It is clear, however, that the original, broad-based, ill-defined, leaderless, small town and outer suburban gilets jaunes movement has collapsed – partly because it insisted on being leaderless and ill-defined.

The root causes of the rebellion remain. The fracture between a thriving, metropolitan France and a left-behind suburban and rural France persists. A widespread sense of dislocation from, or disgust with, political-as-usual endures. President Emmanuel Macron’s popularity percentage has recovered slightly but not beyond 40% (by the most generous estimate).

Arguably, the yellow vest movement has been a success: President Macron has made substantial concessions, including €17bn in tax cuts for the less well off, higher pensions and abandoned carbon taxes on petrol and diesel.

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But this wasn’t enough. The gilets jaunes saw themselves as a revolution, not a social protest. They believed that they could bring down representative democracy, not just petrol-pump prices. In truth they never had the numbers to overturn Macron, let alone the French state.

“For me, it’s over. We tried but we failed,” said José, a gilets jaunes activist in Normandy whom I first interviewed in November. “Our idea was to do things differently, to be non-political, non-ideological and let people control their own lives and their own taxes, with as much grass-roots decision making as possible. But politics and personalities got in the way.”

I should add that, according to other local yellow vests, José was one of the personalities who “got in the way”.

The profile of those taking part began to change three months ago, as I reported in UnHerd. The early protesters were a mixture of Right, Left and apolitical, working and lower-middle class, small businessmen and workers, young, middle-aged and the old, the rational and the conspiracy-obsessed. From March, the demographics of the Saturday protests became younger, more metropolitan and more overtly left-wing.

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There are other signs of the implosion of the gilets jaunes. In November and December four out of ten cars in provincial France displayed the fluorescent hi-vis waist-coasts that symbolise the movement. In recent journeys across Normandy and Brittany I counted one in 100 yellow-badged cars, at most.

In the European elections last month, two gilets jaunes lists of candidates attracted 0.5% and 0.05% of the vote. Many of their number opposed the lists as a “sell out” to electoral politics. Nonetheless, the voting figures mocked gilets jaunes claims to represent “the people”.

Other parties which supported them – Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s hard-Left La France Insoumise and various small anti-EU parties – received an electoral drubbing. Even Marine Le Pen’s 23.3%, just ahead of Macron’s party list on 22.4%, was a relatively poor performance after seven months of anti-government protests.

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All the same, the election results provided a telling scan of the fracture between metropolitan and non-metropolitan France. In Paris and the 20 or so other thriving French cities, Macron’s “Renaissance” list topped the poll, whereas in middling and small towns, the far right scored around 26% and Macron’s list polled 21%.

Christophe Boutin, a politics professor at Caen University who has studied the movement, says that support has been eroded by Macron’s concessions; by violence on both sides; by the drift towards leftism; by boredom; by family pressure; and by shortage of money to attend protests.

Fundamentally, though, he says, the movement has been unable to provide a convincing explanation of how it could achieve its goals: the resignation of Macron; the clearing out of all career politicians; the creation of a system of direct democracy by decision-making on the internet.

Overwhelming electoral support or great violence would have been needed to achieve such aims. The movement commanded neither but never faced up to this fact.

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Many of the original peaceful gilets jaunes were driven out of the movement by the rise of low-level terrorism. There was a point last December when the gilets jaunes movement seemed to be teetering towards insurrection, even civil war. The violent protests in Paris on 1 December and 8 December were led mostly by an extremist fringe of provincial gilets jaunes. The piggy-back activities of the black bloc guerrillas came later.

There was also much yellow vest violence away from the Saturday protests – attacks on politicians’ homes and political headquarters, attacks on newspaper kiosks, the burning of a restaurant, arson at motorway toll booths, and the smashing of thousands of radar speed traps (leading to a sharp increase in road deaths early this year).

Some, no doubt, were discouraged from attending the Saturday protests by the fear of “police violence”. But I was in the middle of the crowds in Paris on three of the worst days of violence and on each occasion the violence was started by the protesters. If anything, on those days, the police were too passive and lost control.

There have been cases of police over-reaction and brutality. According to government figures, 2,448 protesters and 1,797 police have been injured since the rebellion began. More than a score of demonstrators have lost eyes or hands.

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But to speak of systematic repression, after 30 weeks of protest, is absurd. In my experience, no peaceful yellow vest march or demo has ever been suppressed.

Foreign commentators like to project their own obsessions onto the gilets jaunes. Some see them as a nationalist-populist rebellion against a liberal elite, comparable to the Brexit movement in the UK or the Maga and pro-Trump movement in the United States.

American Trump supporters and British Brexit supporters would have been startled to see large groups of Yellow Vests, even in the early days, marching along chanting the hard-left anthem “anti, anti-capitalisme. Ah, ooh.”

People on the Left in other countries, including Britain, like to see the gilets jaunes as a popular left-wing protest against the heartless liberalism of Macron. The movement always had its left-wing tendencies and has now become overtly leftist in approach. But non-French leftists would have found, especially in the early days, many gilets jaunes who were virulently anti-Left, anti-semitic, racist or misogynist.

Here is the great difference with Britain or the United States. The gilets jaunes surfed on many similar sources of anger but they had no Trump or Farage to focus attention on core issues, like migration or Brexit.

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Their most important mistakes – a refusal to accept leaders and spell out clear and answerable demands – are central to the ethos of the movement. Arguably, the yellow vests were defeated by themselves, not by Macron and certainly not by alleged police or state violence as some sympathisers, allege.

What now?

The movement will stutter on for a while. Some speak of a summer truce – this is France after all – and a new revolution in the autumn. Some speak darkly of a lurch towards “direct action” or violence. Other gilets jaunes spokespeople are focused on the local and municipal elections next year as a platform – finally – to allow the movement to enter and influence mainstream politics.

Something like the gilets jaunes may eventually be resurrected. They will probably take a different, less threatening, more traditional and possibly more effective form. Any attempt to impose realistic goals or choose leaders will inevitably be portrayed by the historic wing of the yellow jackets a “betrayal”.

The original ill-defined and undefinable, anti-ideological, anti-political citizens’ movement is not yet buried. But it is certifiably defunct.

To read more of John Lichfield’s reporting on the gilets jaunes, click here

If a play can indeed do such a thing, then other creative acts of writing – novels, say, and film scripts – might be said to do so as well. This presumption is why authors and playwrights are held to be on a slightly higher plane than hacks. Other than in America, of course, where hacks are regarded – by themselves at least – as the major moral legislators of their time.

For this reason it is always interesting when people who are writers veer into the business more commonly practised by hacks. When they start giving their views on the day’s news, or laying out the pros and cons of a particular administration, the writer rarely receives a reputational boost. Often, the opposite.

When Harold Pinter applied himself to politics, he tended to be reduced to four line rants composed of four letter words. Where his writing for stage relied on a mystery that drew you in, his interventions into politics were so crude that they could not help but push the reader away. And not only from that work, but from the work that had preceded it. The reader wondered: if something so simplistic could come from such a mind, perhaps we were wrong to credit that same mind with much profundity before?

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I recently experienced a wave of this when reading the latest work by the young French novelist Edouard Louis. I have written here before about this talented author’s first two novels (The End of Eddy and History of Violence). And I have also written in less flattering terms about his friend and supposed mentor Didier Eribon (who wrote Returning to Rheims).

A third work by Louis has now been published (in English as Who Killed my Father?), and the issue of novelistic versus journalistic imagination is at the fore.

If there is a reason for the critical acclaim that Louis has enjoyed both in and outside France, it comes from the same cause that has given Eribon and JD Vance (author of the novelistic memoir Hillbilly Elegy) their extraordinary international attention. That is, it comes from the belief that these writers have given the reading public an insight into a substrate of their country which most people – especially most literary people – do not see.

Just as Vance gave the world a sympathetic but stark depiction of the world of the American underclass, so Eribon and Louis are granted to have given France (and a wider Francophile audience) a view into parts of their country that most people would resile from.

But books of this kind work when they are impressionistic – when they paint a canvas which is at once grandly striking but also lacking in journalistic here-today, gone-tomorrow-ism. If we wish to know which specific under-secretary of state a particular person believes to have been better than another, then we tend not to reach for a hardback book.

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When we do reach for these books, it is in the hope of accessing some truth not just about the state of a nation but the state beneath the nation.

That, to a certain degree, is what Louis managed to depict in his memoir-istic first book – an account of a young, gay Frenchman from a working-class background, absorbing the indignities which came with each strand and layer of his identity.

In the subsequent History of Violence, he approached some of the same subject matter along with meditations on the nature of sex, violence, and prejudice. Both were successful on their own novelistic terms, which is why the content of Who killed my father? is both surprising and deflating. For it points not only to Louis’s personal failure but a failure of the era – the failure of literature to keep itself above the hyper-politicisation of absolutely everything, which has become the tone of our times.

This new book sets out to explore key scenes in the life of Louis’s father, a working-class man from one of the forgotten bits of France. His body is wrecked by the manual labour he has had to perform throughout his adult life, from the time he left school early to the moment when his body could take it no more.

In one way this gives Louis an excuse to re-examine some of the issues of class, race and sexuality which he explored in his previous books. But something else creeps into this work. It arrives on the opening page, where we are launched into an analysis of the meaning of racism, and its summary by the American scholar Ruth Gilmore (that racism is “the exposure of certain populations to premature death”).

The same claim is then made by the author about other forms of oppression (“male privilege”, “hatred of homosexuality or trans people” and “domination by class”). This is a seminar from a social sciences course, not a work of literature.

The trouble is, chunks of this now-dominant school of thinking and writing are inserted amid scenes which describe the author’s views of his father – and these have a true literary and observational quality. Take the author’s account of his father’s reaction upon hearing the news of his own father’s death: “This calls for a toast,” he says, over the noise of the TV.

But it is Louis’s reflection on this, rather than the recounting on its own, which makes it valuable:

“Looking back, I think you said it too loud, there was something artificial, as if it were a line you’d been working on for months.”

Given his father’s taciturnity, which the reader is by now familiar with, the suggestion that this line – that any line – would have been ‘worked on’ in advance by his father is the observation of a true novelist. As are some of the tiny interjections, and their careful clauses and qualification – such as the interjection, in the middle of a passage of other details, of the single line: “It often seems to me that I love you”

Being a French author, of course, Louis cannot ever allow a text – even a novel – to be unencumbered by those intellectual credentials that French writers still believe they need to flash in order to prove their seriousness. This explains why Louis, at one point, suddenly changes tack:  “In his book Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre probes the connection between one’s being and one’s actions. Are we defined by what we do? Are we defined by the projects we undertake? Are a woman and a man simply what they do? …. Are you still reading this?”

Ok that last question was mine. But these idiosyncratic flaws – the need to cite the approved texts – are flaws of the French literary world. (While journalese is the flaw of our own.)

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Louis’s text descends into little more than an attack on a succession of French governments and government officials. Seventy pages in, we are being told about the actions of Xavier Bertrand, a health minister in Jacques Chirac’s government.

Perhaps some readers will see such passages as bold and confrontational. After Louis’s father is unable to work, a set of governments – from Chirac, through Nicolas Sarkozy, François Hollande and right up to Emmanuel Macron – are blamed for various actions in trying to get people off the dole.

Certainly for family members of people who are unfit to work and who are put through the indignities of trying to prove this, such episodes are doubtless enraging and even politically radicalising. But should polemical hyperbole really be the realm of the novelist?

By the work’s end, Louis is explaining why he wants the names of various officials in the governments of every political stripe in France in recent years to be remembered as ‘murderers’. And that they be remembered everywhere in the world, from Laos to Siberia and the Congo, alongside the names of Richard III and Jack the Ripper.

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This is the stuff of an opinion piece – and a rather terrible opinion piece at that. Most editors would remove such a claim or demand as being not just histrionic, but embarrassingly reductive and simplistic.

An author, let alone a novelist, ought to be embarrassed to attempt such a feat. For everything is more complicated than this. One doubts that Xavier Bertrand thinks of himself as a murderer, or of his actions as being so entirely without justification. What might those justifications be? The novelist will not tell us.

Changing the moral tenor of the times cannot be achieved by such hackery, and literature should at least aspire to escape from such simplistic narratives – to engage on a different plane. But the fact that a novelist would be attracted to such a register is telling in itself. For that tone – the lock-step sociological analysis, reductionist claims and ‘calling out’ of guilty parties – is very much the tenor of the times. It may be considered a triumph for journalism, but it is a dead-end for literature.

They were of neither the Left nor the Right. They came from drive-through parts of France – small towns and outer suburbs – which had previously shown little interest in national politics, let alone revolution.

They were anti taxation and pro public spending. They wanted better services and a higher standard of living. They had no leaders and rejected all career politicians.

They wanted to rip down representative democracy and replace it with popular government via the internet. They included artisans and small entrepreneurs as well as workers, pensioners and the unemployed.

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All this is now changing – not that you’d know it from reading even the French press. The gilets jaunes, approaching their 20th consecutive Saturday of protest, are mutating slowly into something like a traditional movement of the French Left.

Their core supporters are still angry men and women from peripheral France. Their new allies include the careerist hard Left of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the bourgeois anti-globalist Left of the Attac movement and the urban, violent, anti-capitalist anarcho-Left of the Black Blocs.

The shift explains, in part, the resurgence of violence in Paris on 16 March, when militant gilets jaunes and anarcho-leftists laid waste to shop and restaurant fronts and news kiosks on the Champs Elysées. Although that was an embarrassment for President Macron, this leftward drift  may ultimately be to his advantage.

Popular admiration for the gilets, once over 70%, depended on their ambiguity. Everyone could see what they chose to see in the movement. The further to the Left that the yellow jackets travel, the more they are likely to forfeit the still substantial sympathy of a wide section of the French people.

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The original rural/outer suburban movement is far from dead, but the movement has undoubtedly withered in its provincial heartlands. In rural Calvados, one of the seedbeds of the gilets jaunes, there are now only a scattering of high-viz vests displayed on car dash-boards. Public support has shrunk to 24%, though another 29% expresses “sympathy”.

As the movement retreats  – 282,000 turned out for the first Saturday putsch on 17 November; 40,500 last weekend – there is an evident change of social profile among the protesters in Paris and other large towns. Watching the faces and fashion of the 5,000 people who marched, mostly peacefully, through Paris last Saturday, it was plain that some of them were ‘authentic’ provincial gilets jaunes. There were also young, urban leftists and veteran, middle-class activists against globalism and capitalism. They were joined by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the hard-Left Socialist party breakaway, La France Insoumise, and by two well-known French Trotskyist leaders, Olivier Besancenot and Phillippe Poutou.

A section of the Paris crowd chanted “Anti, anti-capitalisme. Ah, ooh.” This is the war-cry of the French Trotskyist Left. It has become as common at yellow jacket protests as their own anthem: “Emmanuel Macron, oh tête de con…” (which I will not translate).

In Montpellier last Saturday, there were mock-violent cat-and-mouse battles with police until late in the evening. The TV footage suggested that most of those responsible were university students in their early 20s. Many did not bother to wear yellow jackets.

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The dramatis personae of the Saturday protests has also changed in a more alarming way. In the first truly violent demonstrations on 1 and 8 December, much of the mayhem came from a militant fringe, from struggling, hard-scrabble towns in Normandy and northern France.

They were joined by urban militia of the urban ultra-Left (the so-called Black Blocs) but also by urban guerrillas of the nationalist and racist ultra-Right. Anarchist and royalist flags flew within a few metres of one another on the day that the Arc de Triomphe was tagged and vandalised on 1 December.

The two urban guerrilla armies love to detest one another. During subsequent Saturday putsches, there were battles-within-battles between ultra-leftists and ultra-rightists. A piece of footage from Lyon in early February showed 100 or so leftists brawling with 100 or so rightists, both sides wearing black ski outfits and yellow jackets.

The ultra-Left ‘won’ on that occasion and seems to have triumphed overall. Judging from what I’ve seen, the ultra-Right guerrilla groups have vanished from the Saturday protests since late February.

The destruction wreaked in Paris on 16 March – I was on the Champs Elysées that day – was largely the work of the Black Bloc ultra-Left from France, with reinforcements from Germany, Italy, Belgium and Switzerland. They were enthusiastically joined by militant, ‘authentic’ gilets jaunes who had converged to mark the four month anniversary of the movement.

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Abel Mestre, the Le Monde journalist who reports on extremist movements in France, is one of the few people to have examined this leftward drift. He reported earlier this month that Black Blocs – a method and an attitude rather than an organised network – have infiltrated and trained the more violent groups of yellow jackets.

There is no formal “coordination”, he reported, but there are “exchanges on self-defence”, including advice on how to “manufacture reinforced banners” from pick handles and tough textiles to use as weapons and shields against police lines.

Another journalist who has commented on the mutation of the yellow jackets is Nicolas Lévine, of the unorthodox, conservative magazine Causeur. “The liberal-libertarian system is even stronger than you might have imagined,” he wrote earlier this month. “It is in the midst of swallowing up the gilets jaunes. Today it’s obvious. What began as a political insurrection is transforming into a banal social movement.”

Lévine suggests, implausibly, that this is part of an establishment plot. According to him, Emmanuel Macron and the Black Blocs have somehow allied to destroy or denature a movement that once genuinely represented an uprising of the “people” against the orthodoxy of a pro-European, anti-conservative elite.

“This brutality (of the Black Blocs) is tolerated by the powers that be,” he wrote. “These ultra-lefties, eternal useful idiots of the capitalist system, only truly scare the readers of Madame Figaro magazine.”

This is silly. It does, however, contain a grain of truth.

Others accuse the President of using excessive violence to “suppress” protest. This is also misleading. Some of the non-lethal weapons used by French riot police are dangerous and should be withdrawn, but I know of no example of the police using them against a peaceful protest.

If anything, it is the alleged violence of the riot police – exaggerated and mythified by yellow jackets sites on the internet – which has driven the remaining protestors towards the Left. A French internal security source told me: “The controversy over the use of rubber bullets and stun grenades is embarrassing to Marine Le Pen and the French far Right. They want to support and enlist the gilets jaunes but many of their members are strongly for law-and-order and pro-police.”

“The gilets jaunes movement is certainly losing active strength in provincial France and those who remain are disappointed with the lack of support they’ve received from Le Pen on the police violence issue. That partly explains their new tolerance for the Left, which has campaigned strongly against this alleged police brutality.”

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The politics of the yellow jackets were always difficult to pin down. Some of the original supporters of the movement that I interviewed in November said they had not voted in any election for years. Many others, according to opinion polls, voted for Madame Le Pen.

Several of the officially leaderless movement’s early “personalities” were conspiracy-obsessives with far-Right links or tendencies. There has been entryism by the ultra-nationalist Right as well as the anti-capitalist Left. There have been well-reported outbreaks of antisemitism. There has, however, been little sign of anti-Muslim or anti-immigrant sentiment.

In the early days it was made clear that “professional politicians” were unwelcome. “That is beginning to change,” the security source said. “The remaining gilets jaunes, whatever their original politics, are more willing to ally with the hard Left. And the Left is also more willing to ally with the gilet jaunes. At first many of the urban leftists dismissed the movement as a bunch of fascists and ploucs (yokels).”

One of Mélenchon’s allies, and potential rivals, the Left-wing politician, journalist and film-maker Francois Ruffin has been especially active in claiming the gilets as a popular movement of the Left. His new film J’veux du soleil (give me sunshine) will open in cinemas throughout France early next month. The film is a political road movie in which Ruffin visits and glorifies gilets jaunes groups across the country.

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How far this “gauchisation” will go is unclear. The group’s demands still vary from one collection to the next and still include a form of government-by-online-referendum. Other demands, such as large increases in the minimum wage, welfare, payments and pensions, have always been Left-leaning.

Much depends on Macron’s next move. He is under pressure from some of his own more Left-leaning allies and advisers to give new tax concessions or pension increases to the less well-off.

In the medium term, as the article in Causeur suggests, the leftward drift will probably help him. The French hard Left may want, like the original gilets jaunes, to “destroy the system” but they are a familiar and permanent part of the country’s political landscape. Unlike the “Mark 1” gilets, they do not pose an unfathomable, new existential threat to top-down politics-as-usual.

Alliance with the hard Left undermines the yellow jackets’ claim to be something different and uncategorisable. It signals, instead, their slow, violent retreat as a force in French politics.

To read more of John Lichfield’s reporting on the gilets jaunes, click here

The movement began two months ago as an apparently leaderless grassroots and social media rebellion in peripheral and struggling France. It continues to prosper online, where a thousand conspiracy theories thrive.

It still generates sizeable, but less than overwhelming, demonstrations in French cities every Saturday. The protests in some cities – Bordeaux, Toulouse, Caen – are often violent. Other protests, including those in Paris last weekend, show signs of becoming more disciplined and peaceful.

President Emmanuel Macron, stunned at first by the vehement hatred of the gilets jaunes, is fighting back. He is rising in the opinion polls for the first time in nine months (although his popularity remains at historically low levels). His performances at a series of marathon debates with small town mayors have been impressive. A man who glided serenely to the highest position in the nation before the age of 40 might yet survive, even learn from, his first great ordeal by public loathing.

Faced with competition from Macron’s Great National Debate, the yellow vests are dividing. Part of the movement is tempted to enter traditional politics. Another part talks of “intensifying” or “hardening” its tactics. There are plans for a series of night-time protests. There is talk of a general strike from early next month.

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What is evident, driving around France in recent days, is that the movement has wilted in its rural and outer-suburban heartlands. In mid-November, 40% of the cars in my part of Normandy displayed yellow high-vis vests on their dashboards. My own unscientific poll of the yellow splodges in car windscreens in rural Calvados now averages 14 per cent.

I have also talked to local people who support the gilets jaunes and some who do not. There remains great sympathy for the yellow vests but also growing exasperation.

Henriette, a retired cleaner in her early seventies, said:

“Yes, they had a good point about high fuel taxes and about pensions and about the cost of living. It’s true that our taxes go up and the local services don’t get better. And like them, I can’t stand Macron. He is arrogant and he is cold.

“But the protests have been going on too long. I don’t like the violence. I don’t like the violent language. Macron has made some concessions. Fuel prices are down. It’s time for them to stop. They are damaging the country. Who will benefit from that?”

In November, my “local” gilets jaunes, 80-strong, joyously annexed the roundabout at the edge of Thury-Harcourt (Pop 2,000). Their self-proclaimed leader, José, 61, gave me a passionate explanation of the yellow vest movement, which was then just beginning.

“We’ve been betrayed by every President and Prime Minister for 40 years, he said at that time. “Everything has been for big finance, for the banks, for the wealthy, and nothing for the people in the middle or at the bottom…”

“Every local source of wealth in France, every local economy has been drained. People can no longer live on what they earn…”

I have been back a couple of times in the past few days. A dozen remain, determined but more subdued. They no longer block the roundabout. They stand beside it with a brazier and a small tent.

“José? He is no longer here. We have split in two,” one of the remaining yellow vests told me. “He and the others went off with our money, €500 that we collected from motorists.”

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The others chorused unflattering comments about their former, self-appointed leader. They are gentle, reasonable people – a home-carer, a warehouse worker, an unemployed father of two, a grandmother who says that she is “comfortably off” but worried about the prospects for her grandchildren. They have food and drink on a trestle table. The gathering resembles a social club more than a social movement.

They are first-time, rural revolutionaries. They have no ideology. Some would say that they have no clearly formed political ideas. “We’re against all politicians and we are anti-politics,” said Annie, a home carer in her fifties. “We want a new system in which decisions are made at the base and for the base.”

On the past two weekends of protest in French cities, fellow journalists were disgracefully assaulted by a violent fringe of gilets jaunes as “collaborationists”. My locals offer me a coffee. They are happy to chat.

They insist that they are peaceful but they refuse to condemn the violence at the weekend protests in Paris and other cities. Like the more militant yellow vests, they see the movement not as a protest but as an uprising that will end when they have overturned existing democratic institutions.

The political class, starting with Macron, should be swept away. All decisions should be taken by popular vote or Référenda d’Initiative Citoyenne (citizens’ initiative referenda). There must be higher pensions, lower taxes, better services and better welfare payments. All should be financed from the billions saved when the glittering salaries and expenses of politicians are abolished.

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I point out that only a small percentage of French state spending goes into the pocket of politicians. The great bulk of taxpayers’ money already goes to healthcare, education, defence and welfare. It may be true that local services have declined, and wages, pensions and welfare payments have not kept pace with inflation. It is not true – as their social media presence proclaims – that the poor in France subsidise the rich or that the struggling periphery underwrites the success of booming cities.

We discuss these things, without reaching any common ground. The name of Brigitte Macron comes up often. She has become an object of lurid and malign fantasy, a Queen Marie-Antoinette de nos jours. They tell me that they read on Facebook that the Premiere Dame’s “salary” and expenses have been raised to €550,000 a year. How can that be justified?

It doesn’t need to be justified, I say. Because it’s not true. France has no official First Lady. Madame Macron’s earnings and personal expenses from the state are zero. They refuse to accept this. We part amicably.

There is gulf in attitude between such grassroots gilets and the militant crowds – mobs in some cases – who invade French cities on Saturday. Many of the weekend protesters are peaceful but there is a large minority that seeks confrontation with the police, and smashes and burns when it has the chance. Some of this violent fringe are “genuine”, rural protesters. Others are young, urban political extremists.

A French police source told Le Figaro: “This is no longer an amateur movement. Its apparent disorganisation is deliberate, intended to defy the rules, destabilise the Republic and create the conditions for an insurrection.”

Is the gilets jaunes movement still leaderless and non-ideological? Some French commentators insist that it never was.

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There is an undoubted influence from the far-Right: several prominent gilets jaunes “spokespeople” have connections or sympathies. Absurd anti-semitic and alt-right conspiracy theories proliferate on gilets jaunes social media. France has been “sold” to the United Nations. Alsace and Lorraine have been ceded to Germany. The Russian economy boomed after Vladimir Putin threw out the Rothschild banks.

There is also an attempted hijacking by the ultra-Left. Some gilets jaunes leaders speak of the movement as a “class war”. The most violent of the “weekends only” protesters are bourgeois, metropolitan youths who belong to antifascist, anticapitalist militias.

And yet there are also signs that the movement is becoming more structured in traditional ways. One tribe of “yellow vests” has announced plans  to run candidates in the European elections in May. Another tribe, under one of the founders of the movement, Jaclin Mouraud, has started a political party under the name “Les Emergents”.

But there are also the first signs of a public backlash. This weekend a coalition of three anti-gilets jaunes movements will hold a rally for “Republican liberties” in Paris. They hope that at least 10,000 people will join the march. One of the organisers, Laurent Segnis, a 36-year-old lawyer from the outer Paris suburbs, told me:

“The gilets jaunes have legitimate grievances. This is not a pro-Macron march. It is a cry of anger at the gilets jaunes pretence that they are ‘the people’. It is a rejection of their increasingly fascistic demands to pull down the democratic institutions of the Republic.”

Where is it all going? The gilets jaunes movement is like no other protest that I have seen in 22 years of covering France. After two months, it defies all categorisation.

You can portray it as a legitimate cry of anger against the neglect of peripheral France – wealthy cities pushing young families into the suburbs, poor public transport, reduced public services, high taxes, low wages and pensions. A report on BBC Radio Four this week on the yellow vest protests in Bordeaux made these points well.

It failed to report that the city has suffered violent rioting and arson on successive Saturdays by a fringe of militant gilets jaunes and ultra-Left or anarchist allies. It failed to point out that, for many of the remaining gilets jaunes, this is no longer a social protest with specific demands. It is an insurrection, a Saturdays-only putsch.

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Alternatively, you can, like some commentators, dismiss the movement as a disguised manifestation of the far Right, manipulated by the American alt-right or Russian websites. There would be some truth in that also. It would not explain the distress and first-time militancy of the well-meaning people on the roundabout at Thury-Harcourt.

President Macron has already made substantial concessions on the de facto minimum wage, fuel prices and taxes on overtime. He has launched a nationwide debate that will, among other things, look at the byzantine French tax system and ways of introducing a dose of direct democracy into the centralised, top-down tradition of the Fifth Republic.

He cannot “answer” all the demands of the remaining gilets jaunes because their demands – his resignation 20 months after his election and the abolition of representative democracy – are ill-conceived and anti-democratic. The protesters, for all their pretension to be “the people”, are too weak to impose their vision of an egalitarian France governed by popular vote. Result: deadlock.

The protests are likely to continue for many weeks, even months. Macron’s great hope – not far-fetched – is that the bulk of the French people, tolerant and even sympathetic until now, will grow angry with the protesters’ absolutism and “jusqu’au-boutisme” (bitter-endism).

France dislikes politicians on principle, and especially those it has just elected. If it must have politicians, it likes them to be marinated in failure and proven in adversity. Macron has a chance to emerge as a wiser and less self-regarding Macron II.

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The latest polls show his party jumping ahead by five points to recapture the lead in the European elections in May from Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National. If part of the gilets movement does run candidates of its own, they will take votes away from the far Right and the far Left. The great beneficiary would, paradoxically, be Emmanuel Macron. In other words, the French part of the EU-wide poll in May will be the most interesting European elections in European history.

There is, however, another, darker possible outcome. After 10 successive weekends of protest, French police are exhausted. Allegations of systematic police brutality carried on social media and magnified by Russian-controlled news sites are, by my own observation, mendacious. Most of the violence has been initiated by a fringe of gilets jaunes and their allies.

But there have been worrying of incidents of police violence, including the aggressive rather than defensive use of rubber bullets and stun grenades. The longer the protests continue, the greater the chance of a truly nasty incident – or series of incidents, which could tip the yellow rebellion into a calamitous new phase.

To read more of John Lichfield’s reporting on the gilets jaunes, click here

The author, Edouard Louis, is 26 years old. His first successful book, The End of Eddy, published in 2014, was translated into 20 languages. Although classified as a “novel”, it was not truly a work of fiction.

The book was a laconic, bleak, sometimes lyrical description of the life of a young, gay man growing up in a violent, drunken, racist and gay-hating, working class family in post-industrial northern France. The young man, the Eddy Bellegueule (‘Eddy beautifulface’) of the original French title, was Edouard Louis himself.

His latest book, Qui a tué mon père, can be read as an apology for the first. It describes the struggles for survival and self-respect of his father – a factory worker forced to work as a cleaner after an industrial accident.

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This short book – 76 pages in the original French – describes the love-hate relationship between a drunken, gay-baiting, blue collar father and an effeminate son. It also accuses by name a series of French politicians, from Jacques Chirac to Emmanuel Macron, of making brutal decisions which devastated the life of the father and, by extension, all people who live on the periphery of thriving metropolitan France.

In both books, Louis makes it clear that, as a child and as young man before he escaped to the gay and literary scene in Paris, he feared and detested his papa. “As a child I used to pray as I came home from school, let him not be there, let him not be there, let him not be there.”

As the short book progresses, it becomes a Zola-like catalogue of accusation against a supposedly heartless French state and cuts in its welfare system. Louis’s father suffered a serious back injury at work but was forced to take a job as a cleaner on Euros 700 a month by welfare reforms imposed by Nicolas Sarkozy. “Nicolas Sarkozy broke my father’s back,” Louis writes.

Emmanuel Macron introduced a five euros a month cut in benefits last year which was tiny but important to his father. “Macron thinks that the poor are too rich and the rich are not rich enough,” Louis writes. “Macron took the food out of your mouth.”

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Some of this is absurd. The French welfare system remains one of the most generous in the world. Louis’s success as a writer means that he is now part of the thriving metropolitan world which the yellow vest rebels despise. The book reads, in part, as a cry of guilt by a man who escaped a life of brutal poverty but does not want to be accused of despising the people that he left behind.

The book is compelling all the same. It powerfully conveys the rancour and sense of injustice of the peripheral, struggling France which spawned the gilets jaunes movement. It also explains the extreme violence of some of the protests.

In all his works Louis describes the everyday brutality of the village in the northern Somme department where he grew up. Of his mother, he says: “You never called violence violence. You called it life.”

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But the best book published in France last year is by Philippe Lançon, and would not have been published in Britain or the United States. It defies all publishers’ categories and expectations. Hence, its brilliance.

Philippe Lançon, a journalist and writer, was one of the few people to survive the jihadist attack on the satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo in January 2015. His jaw and lower face were smashed by bullets. He spent 10 months in hospital and endured 17 operations to reconstruct his face.

His book, Le Lambeau, ‘the rag’, is also a reconstruction. It describes in a controlled jumble of lengthy digressions the author’s life and career up to the attack; his visit to the theatre the night before; life at Charlie Hebdo; the attack itself and his long months in hospital.

The effect is to wire the reader into the stream of consciousness of a man lying in a hospital bed. Extraordinary.

To read more of John Lichfield’s reporting on the gilets jaunes, click here

But what exactly do the gilets jaunes want? The rebellion began last month as a protest against high fuel taxes and petrol pump prices. Pump prices have since plunged with the global oil price. President Emmanuel Macron has promised to moderate fuel taxes if oil prices surge again.

End of the rebellion? Not at all, say the yellow vests. This is about much more than fuel prices. It’s about the cost of living. It’s about the collapse of rural economies. It’s about high taxation. It’s about the failure of successive French leaders to connect the booming economy of French cities to the large spaces between them and the new bungalow estates on their fringes.

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But don’t listen to me, listen to Monsieur Edouard, who is standing with 30 other people blocking traffic (briefly) at the edge of his home town. He is 61 years old. He is a retired building contractor, and he has never been involved in any political movement before. He describes himself as a “humanist”. He lives in Thury Harcourt, a town of 2,000 people 20 miles south of Caen in the beautiful Calvados hills.

“We want Macron to go because he is an illegitimate President, elected by default. But it’s not just about him. We’ve been betrayed by every President and Prime Minister for 40 years. Everything has been for big finance, for the banks, for the wealthy and nothing for the people in the middle or at the bottom.”

“Every local source of wealth in France, every local economy (bassin d’emploi) has been drained. People can no longer live on what they earn. After the tenth month, they rely on loans to get them through the eleventh month and the twelfth. A young man entering the building industry today gets 1,000 euros a month – the same as 30 years ago. Do you know how much everything has gone up in 30 years, not just pump prices, but food, heating, rent, clothes? People just can’t live any more. They are crushed.”

“At the same time you see that the rich are getting away with lower taxes or not paying tax at all. Look at [Carlos] Gohn, [head of Renault and Nissan] with his multi-million euro houses bought for him by Nissan. Public services are being massacred because of people like him. There is now a ‘medical desert’ in many country places. Post offices are closing. Public transport is being ripped apart. But we could afford those things if everyone paid their fair shares into the state.”

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I point at the illuminated sign just beside him advertising diesel at the Super U supermarket for 1.39 euros a litre. When the protests began it was 1.51 euros a litre. The number of people who are blocking roads all over France is shrinking day by day. The violence in Paris last weekend, mostly the work of fringe extremists, has alienated some supporters.

Is the yellow vest movement not bound to fade away as petrol prices fall; as the government offers a series of regional conferences on local grievances; and as the weather grows colder?

“That’s what the media says and that’s what the government may hope. But it’s not going to happen,” Mr Edouard replied. “This is a revolution not a protest. It’s a peaceful revolution and will remain peaceful for a while. But not peaceful forever if we don’t get what we want. This is not just about pump prices. This is about people having a decent life in return for a day’s work. It’s about respect. It’s about justice. It’s about democracy.”

“We demand a referendum so that we can get rid of Macron but we don’t want just to replace him with another Macron. Hollande was just as bad. And Sarkozy. And Chirac. We don’t have any trust in any of the mainstream political parties. And we have no time for Le Pen or Mélenchon either. I cannot abide Le Pen’s values. I am a humanist.”

“What we want is to sweep away all the political structures of the Fifth Republic. We want direct democracy. We want politicians who come from the people. We want political institutions which are controlled directly by the people. We want people to be able to say directly whether they accept a law or not.”

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I know Thury Harcourt well. I live mostly in a hamlet 10 kilometres away. I have no doubt about José Edouard’s sincerity or his genuine anger or his claim that he has never been involved in politics before.

But the depth of the anger can be difficult to understand for an outsider – even an outsider who has lived in the area for two decades like me. Thury Harcourt is a sad little town in some ways. It was partly destroyed by the RAF in June 1944 and the remains burned down by the SS two months later. It has never fully recovered.

But, compared to many similar small towns in Britain or the United States, it is thriving. It has a full array of local shops. It has a brand-new medical centre, with three resident doctors, four nurses and other medical practitioners.

There is a cheap, though infrequent, bus service to Caen. A new 30-mile cycle and foot path on the trackbed of an abandoned railway line has brought in hundreds of new visitors. Wages in France stagnated in the early 2000s but they are now rising again, on average. Why all the anger?

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Europe 2025: the beginning of the end

By James Bloodworth

There are genuine grievances, locally and nationally. In Thury Harcourt, an electronics factory with 52 jobs is about to close. Many of the town’s residents live in small bungalow estates. They have emigrated from Caen for cheaper homes and now resent the cost of petrol and diesel for their commute to work. They are also furious that the speed limit on two-lane roads in France was reduced from 90kph to 80kph in July. They are convinced this is just another trick to siphon cash, in the form of speeding fines, from rural areas to subsidise the booming cities.

But there is also something existential about the rural and outer suburban anguish which feeds the yellow vest movement. Thury Harcourt, like many small towns, used to have its own local seams of prosperity – iron ore, small-scale farming, linen. All are gone. Light industry now comes and goes.

Similar problems exist in Britain or other countries but it is important to remember the relative vastness and emptiness of rural France. Hundreds of small towns, like Thury Harcourt, stand far outside the glow of prosperity from big metropolitan areas like Paris, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Lyon or Grenoble. It is difficult to imagine any government programme which could replace the local sources of energy, pride and prosperity that have vanished and will not come back.

Further reading

The brutal apartheid of the French banlieues

By Peter Franklin

The movement is also fed by outer-suburban anger at high pump prices, low-paid jobs and relatively poor public transport. For decades people in these areas have felt powerless or frustrated. A series of governments of centre-Left and centre-Right have come and gone without addressing their problems. The traditional structures of Left-Right politics in France collapsed at last year’s election. President Emmanuel Macron, not yet 40 years old, surfed to the Elysée Palace partly on a series of strokes of good luck, partly because people already wanted a ‘new politics’.

In rural and suburban France, Macron was never popular. He is now regarded – partly fairly, partly unfairly – as a President who cares only for the cities and the rich.

Most French political commentators have been taken by surprise by the yellow vest movement. They patronise or mock it: “The country is demanding more services and lower taxes…We elected a president but we need a magician.”

Others, more wisely, point out that this is a rebellion by people who have never rebelled before. It should not be dismissed as a plot by the far-Right or far-Left (although both have infiltrated the movement at its fringes).

Further reading

What does Flyover France see in Le Front National?

By Nabila Ramdani

In recent days, I have made several journeys across one of the the heartlands of yellow vest protests in western France. It is clear that the gilets jaunes are enjoying themselves. After years of feeling powerless, their yellow vests (which French motorists have to carry by law) have given them a uniform to be proud of. To stand beside a local roundabout blocking cars gives them a sense of power – a sense of striking back at the amorphous forces of official and metropolitan France.

The fact that you only have to walk or drive a short distance to be part of a nationwide rebellion is also a source of joy and pride. The movement reminds me of that great French institution, the Tour de France. The two week cycle race is popular because it is national and global but also comes ‘down your way’.

And yet, the gilets jaunes movement worries me. The demands range from the sensible to the demagogic and dangerous. No two groups of yellow vests seem to say the same thing. They ‘elected’ eight national spokespeople this week, but their legitimacy was immediately challenged by other gilets jaunes.

I put my worries to José Edouard on Thury Harcourt’s only roundabout. Is it not dangerous to demand the overturn of all  democratic institutions? Is ‘people’s democracy’ not an invitation to chaos?

“Why? Do you think the people are stupid?” he replied. “No. There are many very able and honest people who have never been politicians and never been active in any party. That’s who we need to turn to now, people who understand the lives of ordinary people in places like this.”

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Jean-Luc Mélenchon: a smarter Jeremy Corbyn

By John Lichfield

Idealism; rejection of all politics and the institutions of the state; no clear programme. The gilets jaunes may be destroyed by its own contradictions. It may morph into a permanent and healthy new force in French politics.

Or, it could degenerate into a kind of nihilism. Lets smash everything down and rebuild it. The great bulk of the movement is sincere and well-intentioned and angry. But the danger is that it will tip into something disorderly and finally anti-democratic.

Politics is unsatisfactory precisely because the people’s demands are complicated and contradictory. Representative democracy, cumbersome though it is, tries to balance competing demands. ‘Popular democracy’ is an easy phrase but a naïve one.

I have much sympathy for the gilets jaunes. But a movement presented as People v the Elites could easily transform into people against democracy.

To read more of John Lichfield’s reporting on the gilets jaunes, click here

And yet almost one in three people in my commune (population 354) voted for Marine Le Pen in the first round of the Presidential election last year. More than half of the vote went to anti-establishment candidates of the far Right or the hard Left. If there was to be an election tomorrow, after 14 months of the confident, go-ahead “New France” proclaimed by Emmanuel Macron, the Le Pen vote would be unchanged. It might even be higher, despite the fact that Madame Le Pen’s rebranded Rassemblement National is floundering in national polls and facing bankruptcy.

Why should my peaceful commune in the Calvados hills be so alienated from mainstream, metropolitan or suburban France?  Rural Normandy used to be immune to the appeal of the far Right, but in every similar small commune in Calvados around 30% voted for Marine Le Pen in the first round of the presidential election last year. In parts of eastern and southern France, there are villages which voted between 60% and 70% for the then Front National.

Of all the fault-lines in Emmanuel Macron’s France – thriving white cities versus energetic, frustrated, multi-racial suburbs; secular fundamentalists versus dogmatic Catholics or Muslims – the rural-urban divide is the least discussed. Few of the overdue reforms introduced or planned by the young President will do much for rural France. In Paris, Macron is reviled (unfairly) by the hard Left as a “President for the Rich”.  In La France Profonde, which has long regarded itself as profoundly ignored, he is dismissed as a “President for Cities”.

One year into the Macron Era, I decided to talk to some of my Norman neighbours about politics – not necessarily an easy task. There are two elderly women called Madeleine in my hamlet (population 8) They live 100 metres apart. They have not spoken for 30 years. They have not quarrelled. They just have nothing to say to one another.

The commune’s mayor, Marie-Christine, 67, says: “This is, to be honest, not a very open place. People, many people, not all,  are very enclosed, wrapped in their own lives. They have little curiosity about the outside world. Caen is about as far as their knowledge or imagination stretches. The depressing fact is that this is as true of some of the younger people as it is of the older ones.”

Let me describe, without naming it, the commune to which my hamlet belongs. It typifies, I think, the difficulties facing rural France as small-scale farming retreats, local businesses vanish and the 21^st century – in the form of high-speed internet or reliable mobile telephone coverage – fails to arrive.

It is a commune of 354 people and 260 voters – a string of hamlets and villages in the hills 30 kilometres south of Caen. According to local legend, it was a favourite hunting ground for William the Conqueror when he retired to Normandy in the final years of his reign. The area was mistitled La Suisse Normande – Norman Switzerland – by a British journalist a century ago. Gentle hills loop around one another in shifting tones of grey and green. Forests lap over the ridge-tops. This might be Shropshire Normande or Herefordshire Normande but not Suisse Normande.

When I first came here 20 years ago, there were still a dozen farms, including two small, scarcely mechanised dairy farms in my hamlet. There are now seven farms in the commune and none in my hamlet. Year by year, we have watched as the Caen suburbs seep southwards along the main roads and soak up the hillsides. Our main village – “le bourg” – has its own small estate of pale-peach coloured bungalows, inhabited by people who work in Caen. There is no tension with the long-time locals; there is no contact at all.

Further reading

Flyover France – the forgotten frontier

By Peter Franklin

The big issue locally this summer– one that sums up for many the arrogance of Metropolitan France – is President Macron’s decision to reduce the speed limit on two-lane roads from 90kph to 80kph (50mph). Frankly, I think the decision was justified. French country people drive too fast. The death rate on French roads fell by 5% in July, the first month of the new limit.

Local people do not see things that way. They think that the 80kph limit is designed to harvest more fines from rural pockets to spend on urban France.

But that’s enough from me. Let me allow a few of my neighbours – those who were willing to express an opinion – to speak for themselves.

Catherine, 54, has lived in the commune all her life. She works as an administrator for a painting/building company in Caen 20 miles away. She is about to leave the village and buy a flat in town. “There is no one much here that I can talk to,” she said. “In Caen I have friends. There is night-life. A social buzz. And I won’t have to drive 60 kilometres every day…”

Further reading

What does Flyover France see in Le Front National?

By Nabila Ramdani

Catherine has always voted centre-Right. Faced with a choice between Le Pen and Macron in the presidential run-off last year, she spoiled her ballot.

“No one here ever admits to voting for Marine but the far Right goes up at every election. Why?  This place is not racist or xenophobic. There is no crime, no sense of being insecure. Lots of people, like me, go out for a few minutes and leave their door unlocked.”

“If a black or brown person visited the village, or even came to live here, they would be treated like anyone else. And yet I think that there is a kind of submerged racism all the same. People see brown and black faces on the TV news or in the French football team. Some don’t mind. Others feel uncomfortable. It’s not the France they know. They see riots. They see the terrorist attacks in Paris and Nice. They see the young black men on Ouistreham (the Channel ferry port near Caen) trying to reach England. They feel threatened, even though there is no direct threat to them. They vote Le Pen as a kind of protest or gesture….”

Would she say that there is a cultural divide between urban and rural France, similar to the cultural gulf which appears to exist between urban and rural parts of the US or Britain?

“No, I don’t think that’s an issue in France. People are conservative, yes, but the issues that drive rural people in, say, America – gay rights, guns, religion – they’re not so important here. People’s concerns are more practical. The 80kph speed limit. Macron’s new taxes on pensioners’ incomes.”

Michel, 82, is a retired postman who lives in a mobile home on the edge of my hamlet. He voted for Marine Le Pen in both rounds of last year’s election.

“It’s not just about immigration or Islam. People here are fed up. More and more fed up. We’ve been betrayed by every generation of politicians for 60 years, starting with De Gaulle. And it’s not Macron who’s going to change that. Just look at him. Does he look as though he would care about a place like this? All they want is our money. More and more money. Look at the 80kph speed limit – another thing people in cities have concocted to impose on a countryside which they don’t understand. There’s anger already but nothing compared to what there will be when the first wave of fine notices starts to arrive.”

“People have the impression that they are paying and paying and paying and getting nothing back. And the debt is still out of control. Where does the money go? It must go to the immigrants because it’s not coming back here. We will end up like Italy or Greece with a debt we can’t pay. It’s time to try something else, to put France first, to think of the real French first…”

“I was lucky I got out of farming when I did”, Denis, a 67 year old retired farmer tells me. “It was already no fun with the falling milk price and constant new rules from Paris and Brussels. Now, from what I hear, you have to have a bathroom for each cow. And even the bigger, mechanised  farms can’t make money. They have to invest and grow to survive and they can’t afford to repay their loans. There used to be 20 or 30 farms in this commune. Now its’s what, six or seven, and it won’t end there. Normandy – the whole of France – we are heading for big ranches like they have in America or Australia.”

“I don’t know who votes for Le Pen. It’s not me but I understand the people who do. There is a feeling of betrayal, of having been fed with constant lies. Every year at the big farm show in Paris, the politicians talk about France’s love of farmers and farming. What they mean is that they love the big food companies which pour money into political parties and even control the farming unions…

“Farming, the land, used to be our identity here.  Everyone was connected with farming one way or another. Now, most people in the commune have nothing to do with farming. Their parents or their grandparents may have farmed, but it means little to them. Farmers are a small minority in their own community. People – and not just the incomers either – are furious when they have to wait for a tractor blocking the road.”

Marie-Christine, a retired special needs teacher, is the first female mayor of the commune.

“The older people, I have the impression, remain faithful to the centre-Right or traditional Right. This Le Pen vote – and also the hard-Left vote – is coming from younger people in their 40s or 50s or even their 30s. Partly it is ignorance – a readiness to believe any rubbish that they see on the internet or social media. But it’s not just that. There is also a fear of the future… a sense that everything is changing out there and that it’s leaving places like this behind or threatens us in some undefined way. That’s the way I read the vote for Le Pen – an attempt to slow down a future that people fear.”

Further reading

The brutal truth about forgotten France

By Douglas Murray

Is there a cultural rift, a rejection of Metropolitan values?

“Yes, but not quite like what I read about in the US or in Poland, say. Homosexuality or abortion or transgender rights, they don’t much drive opinion here either way. What you do have is an undefined refusal to accept the new or the modern. Me, for instance, I’m the first woman mayor that the commune has had. I can tell you that it doesn’t go down well with some people – including with other members of the council. There is a feeling that women shouldn’t lead or manage.

“I fear that the extreme vote will continue to grow here. Just look at what has happened in Italy, or Poland or Austria or Germany. The same thing could happen here. It would only take someone with a message a little more subtle than Marine Le Pen.”

In rural France, then, rejection of modern, urban values hardly figures. Guns and hunting and Europe are marginal issues. The main source of anger is a feeling of being ignored or exploited or left behind.

Don’t underestimate the extent and the emptiness of La France Profonde and the problem that causes. France (64 million) has a somewhat larger population than England (55 million) in four times the space. If you climb to the ridge above our commune and look to the south, a town-free landscape of scores and scores of similar villages stretches to the horizon. A similar landscape, rarely interrupted by towns, continues for 800 kilometres to the Pyrenees.

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By John Lichfield

When farming was king, each of these villages generated its own identity and its own raison d’etre. Energy and life blood has now drained to the cities and suburbs. For all the lip-service paid by successive French governments to small, traditional farms, Paris has almost always favoured large-scale, intensive farming.

Faced with so many economically and socially becalmed rural communities, no government can be expected to devise ways of imposing new energy or confidence from the outside. High speed internet offers remote forms of rural employment but our commune, like many others in France, has poor mobile phone coverage and no high-speed internet. The cables are supposed to arrive in 2020.  Even then, a new influx of net-friendly “horsins” (outsiders, like me) is unlikely to repair the commune’s sense of fractured identity.

Multiply my commune by 30,000 – the number of rural communes in France – and you grasp the scale of the problem. Marine Le Pen may not survive her present difficulties, but rural France offers wide open spaces, literally, to a would-be successor.

Or not, as it turned out.

Four years after the win, in 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s appeals to the racial fears of white voters carried him into the second round of the French presidential election. In October 2005, the country was convulsed by three weeks of anti-police riots in the multi-racial ‘banlieues’ – suburbs – of every city and large town in the country.

These ‘banlieues’, long a source of cosmic dread to white France, have since become associated with Charlie Hebdo, the Bataclan, Nice and the 1,000 or more young French people who volunteered to serve Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

The pattern of the last two decades – hopes of racial harmony raised by sport and contradicted by stubborn reality – threatens to repeat itself this summer as another wonderful, brown, white and black French football team graces the World Cup in Russia. Eight members of this French squad, which has briefly united a racially and socially divided nation were brought up in the Paris suburbs where the 2005 riots began.

On Friday, just like in 1998, multi-racial crowds from those suburbs invaded the boulevards and avenues of Paris to celebrate the team’s progress to the semi-finals. And yet last week there were also four nights of anti-police riots in the multi-racial suburbs of Nantes, birthplace of Jules Verne and one of the most quietly attractive of French cities.

These explosions of car-burning and attacks on public buildings in retaliation for alleged police brutality remain commonplace. The Islamist threat also persists. French security services revealed last month that they had thwarted half a dozen plans by Isis old boys or their sympathisers to commit fresh atrocities on French soil.

The ‘banlieue problem’, a synonym for France’s race problem, has been one that all French presidents since 2005 have promised to solve. Jacques Chirac and François  Hollande tried to do it with modest amounts of money, Nicolas Sarkozy with a “Karcher” or high-powered hose. None succeeded.

Further reading

Flyover France – the forgotten frontier

By Peter Franklin

The crime and drug problems are getting worse; unemployment, over 20 per cent among the young in the Paris banlieues, has hardly moved; the spread of militant Islamic teaching, not yet a serious issue in 2005, has undermined parents and community leaders and eroded the always limited sympathy of urban and posh-suburban France for the scary world beyond the “Boulevard Périphérique”.

The banlieues are an archipelago of mostly high-rise housing estates thrown up around all French cities in the 1960s and 1970s to provide homes for migrants from North Africa, from the French overseas departments, from former French colonies in sub-Saharan Africa but also from southern and eastern Europe and from rural France. They are almost always outside the city boundaries, with Marseille a notable exception.  The ‘inner city’ problems of other countries are ‘suburban problems’ in France and were, for many years, all the more easily ignored.

They were not, however, mono-racial ghettoes in the US or even the British sense. I met gangs of youths in the 1990s and 2000’s whose parents or grandparents were Algerians, Yugoslavs, Portuguese, Ivoirians and working class white French. This was, essentially, the racial profile of the mobs which burned cars and schools in the autumn of 2005.

This was also the racial profile of the France team that won the 1998 World Cup. The brightest star of this year’s team, Kylian Mbappé, from Bondy just north of the Paris city boundary, is also a product of this once racially integrated character of the “banlieues”. He was born, in December 1998, to an Algerian mother and a Cameroonian father.

But much has changed in the banlieues since the 2005 riots – arguably for the worse.

Over the past decade, radical Islam has been offering an alternative ‘identity’ to disenchanted youths with muslim backgrounds. This has created new barriers and animosities between races and religions in the banlieues. Life for women has become more oppressive. Many cités (tower-block estates) have become mono-ethnic. White French or eastern or southern Europeans have become segregated from people of north African and African origin.

France would officially deny the existence of racial or religious ‘communities’ or even different races. For years French politicians dismissed Britain’s more relaxed, ‘multi-cultural’ policy as dangerous. In truth, neither approach has prevented the spread of extremist Islam.  Nor has it been much help to those trying to escape the suburbs.

The indivisible, we-are-all-French approach, conceals tenacious prejudices and barriers. In France, a recent study found, a young person with an Arab or African name is four times less likely to be interviewed for a job. Brown or black faces are finally beginning to be seen in presenting roles on French TV but much less so than in Britain. There have been several leading ministers in recent years from Arab or French west Indian backgrounds but there are none in senior positions under Macron.

This is not just to France’s discredit but also to its loss. The banlieues, in my experience, can be terrible, violent, destructive places. But they are also an immense reservoir of creativity, talent, energy, hard-work and tenacity – and not just in the visible fields of football and French rap music.

Further reading

Is there still room for the Republicans in France?

By Marie Le Conte

Might the new President make a difference? During and after his successful election campaign last year, Emmanuel Macron promised a “new approach”. He said that the solution to the banlieue problem is indistinguishable from his solution to the wider “French problem”: the breaking down of the corporatist barriers which make France a comfortable country for “insiders” but a miserable place for “outsiders” and especially racial minorities and the young. He may be right about that.

In May, the former centre-right economics minister, Jean-Louis Borloo presented a much-delayed plan for a 50bn euro project to rescue the banlieues. He made 19 proposals, including short-circuiting bureaucratic delays to speed new transport projects and to replace the worst of the old schools and tower blocks.

He suggested the creation of a new “corps” of French senior civil servants to supervise the resurgence of the suburbs, recruited from the cleverest kids in the banlieues themselves. He proposed the creation of tens of thousands of new jobs, ranging from sports coaches to care workers.

Macron cherry-picked a few of the ideas but dismissed the approach as “old thinking”. The plan, he said, was just another top-down, bureaucratic exercise in which well-meaning “white males” imposed solutions on a disenchanted, young and racially heterogeneous population. He may have had a point.

His critics say that he did not want to spend the money or annoy the right-wing section of his electoral coalition or anger rural France, which would rather like a 50bn euro Marshall Plan of its own. They probably also had a point.

The President’s decision was, though, heavily influenced by his controversial special adviser on racial and banlieues issues, a comedian turned political polemicist called Yassine Belattar.

Mr Belattar has been attacked in the French press for suggesting that there is no real problem with radical Islam in France. His argument is in fact more subtle. He says that militant islam exploits a vacuum of identity and purpose among the poor-suburban second and third generation migrants. Such kids are, he says, more French than they realise and more French than urban and rural France is willing to acknowledge. Enforcing a narrow, traditional sense of French identity pushes them towards the extremists and criminal gangs. Instead, Mr Belattar says, the banlieue kids should be encouraged to channel their energies into creativity and entrepreneurship.

This may sound hopelessly vague and optimistic when one considers how much a 17-year-old youth can make from selling cocaine. However, Macron’s drive to make it easier to hire and fire in France – against the will of some of the big trades union federations – is already spawning new opportunities for young people in the banlieues. (Sunday opening of shops; new inter-city bus-routes; more taxi drivers and chauffeurs.)

But there can be no quick fix for a problem which has been 60 years in the making. Some of Mr Borloo’s 50 billion euros would doubtless be handy. But Mr Belattar is right. The solution, if any, is spiritual and psychological as much as political or economic.

The dreaded banlieues have much to offer France so long as they can be persuaded – along with the rest of the country – that they are part of France. There is no reason that they should be solely a breeding ground for footballing talent, terrorists and drugs-traffickers.

The fact that banlieue youths identify with a France football team and wave the tricolour on the Grands Boulevard or the Champs Elysées is significant. It remains to be seen whether the Mbappé generation will be more successful than the Zidane generation in finally bridging the moat of suspicion and ignorance which separates France’s lovely old cities from their ugly, violent, dynamic inner suburbs.

Further reading

Why citizens of nowhere will never get the World Cup

By Giles Fraser