Across the Channel, a similar narrative has played out. As ever, the French farmers played at a higher tempo than the British, with cities placed “under siege” by the farmers’ tractor convoys. In scenes reminiscent of Houellebecq’s Serotonin, things turned violent, with one death and two severe injuries on one blockade in Ariege. The media in France has also emphasised the conservative character of the protests, which Rassemblement National’s Jordan Bardella has exploited in a charm offensive the Liberation newspaper dubbed “the politics of the selfie”. The Macron government was equally selective in its response, reacting to the perceived anti-ecologism of the protesters by suspending the Ecophyto Plan which aimed to halve pesticide use by 2030 (no move was made on the question of fair remuneration). But the general portrait painted was that the farmers were homogenous, all angry about the same things in the same way, with perfectly aligned interests.

The reality is far more complicated and politically obscure. Rather than part of a specific political movement, the protests are evidence of the fragmentation of French politics and the democratic crisis of a country where vast swathes of the population feel unrepresented, and yet no stable and unified alternative can emerge. And this situation captures something broader about the confused nature of French and European populism in this present moment, in which all factions and fringes on Left and Right have something to play for.

In France, the initial explosion was spontaneous and not coordinated by the major farmers unions, erupting out of the south-west. And given the stark divergences in their demands, it would be much more accurate to speak of “des agriculteurs” as opposed to “les agriculteurs”. It’s true that there is an organised Right-wing faction: the people beaming in Bardella’s selfies, often organised through the Coordination Rurale union. In the centre there are those represented by the FNSEA, the main agricultural union whose interests are quite close to the state and whose members aren’t always ideological, articulating a mixed-bag of interests-based demands. But on the Left, largely overlooked in the coverage, is the Confederation Paysanne: the union of smallholding peasant farmers which represents about 20% of the total.

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Laurence Marandola is spokesman for the group, a small farmer who grows apples and herbs, and raises llamas for wool. She tells me that “there are plenty of farmers who have been completely forgotten by the political class. This has never been taken seriously because in France there is a massive diversity and inequality between farms as in the rest of society… There are 18-20% of French farmers who live below the poverty line and half of farmers are on below the minimum wage.” The Confederation Paysanne doesn’t have a monopoly on these small farmers, the ones most at risk from the suicide epidemic plaguing French agriculture, but they make up the bulk of its membership.

While still part of the same farmers’ movement, the Confederation Paysanne has political disagreements with the other unions. As far as Marandola is concerned, the bigger unions have engaged in a form of “recuperation” of the campaign, resulting in a focus on the usual suspects of Europe and environmentalism. Confederation Paysanne instead find French farming’s “deep malaise” in the numbers of farmers going bankrupt and struggling beneath a brutal workload. The blanket opposition to ecological policies is also something of a caricature. A study by Collectif Nourrir found that only 15% of French farmers rejected the idea of ecological transition, while 62% deemed it necessary and a further 23% said it could even be an opportunity. As with policies like Ulez, there is frequent dissonance between supporting the need for ecological transition and then becoming the financial victim of the measures aimed at achieving it. But according to the Confederation Paysanne, many more farmers would be open to the measures if they were given sufficient support.

What unites the farmers behind the Confederation Paysanne is instead their anti-corporatist tendencies. Beyond their environmental concerns, they support the Ecophyto Plan because the chemical fertilisers it aims to phase out enable the expansion of the major agribusinesses, “which are predators for the other types of agriculture”, as Marandola puts it. For the small farmers who make up the Confederation, ecology isn’t just a virtuous idea or a moral concern. It is the site of the conflicting interests between peasant farmers and these massive companies. And nowhere is this more evident than in the battle over megabasins. These are large man-made reservoirs which provide water for big agribusiness so they can maintain crop yields through drought, which is a growing problem in parts of France. For the farms served by the megabasins, they are a necessary adaptation to climate change that allow them to maintain the national food supply.

The argument against them, made by the coalition of environmental radicals which includes the Confederation, is that they are highly inefficient (since water evaporates off the surface) and that they drain the water table, making them unsustainable in the long run, all while hoarding water from ordinary people and small farmers. And this clash represents one of the most violent divisions within the farmer’s movement. At what has become known as the “Battle of Sainte-Soline”, last year the Confederation Paysanne were directly involved in the sabotage of a megabasin pump which saw several protesters hospitalised in comas and hundreds more injured, along with dozens of police. In a similar case a few months earlier at the Cram-Chabin megabasin, Confederation Paysanne members were also arrested for sabotage. The united front between all farmers big and small, does not survive the zero-sum conflict over water.

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Beyond Bardella’s show of support, the populist Left has made some attempt to become the face of this side of the farmers’ movement. Jean Luc Mélenchon has not made an appearance at the Salon Agriculture, an annual meeting at which politicians are usually desperate to be seen supporting farmers, for 10 years. Instead, he has hosted a counter-salon, laying out an alternative vision of agriculture rooted in the principles of anti-globalisation. This vision has seen La France Insoumise, Mélenchon’s party, act as the most consistent opposition to free trade agreements at the European level. And in this regard, they speak directly to many farmers’ concerns: a new free trade agreement with New Zealand which may lead to the EU being flooded with cheap beef has rattled agricultural unions across the spectrum.

This represents a new direction for the French Left, which tacitly accepted economic globalisation in the Eighties under the leadership of the Parti Socialiste (at the expense of its traditional social base). And even after 2008, the Left remained largely urban, educated and dominated by downwardly mobile graduates. Their resulting programme was therefore generally supportive of European integration, and free-flowing goods and capital, cutting it off from other potential coalition partners, such as farmers. The populist Left was more Eurosceptic, but still struggled to win over peripheral France.

But if La France Insoumise leans further into this politics, they may be able to build a new coalition of voters to challenge the electoral success of the populist Right over the past decade. Farmers in advanced capitalist nations have traditionally voted for the Right, with analyses conducted in the Seventies attributing this “peasant conservatism” to an affinity with other land-owning classes, and a rural lifestyle left relatively unchanged even as the cities were experiencing radical upheavals. However, as the onward march of neoliberalism slowly liquidates the livelihoods of small-hold farmers, one can imagine a Left that stands up for their economic interest being able to make gains.

This leaves a space open which La France Insoumise is taking tentative steps towards capturing. In 2022, Mathilde Hignet, the Insoumise candidate in Ille et Villaine, became the only MP whose pre-election job was agricultural labouring. And one of the most prominent members of La France Insoumise, and 2027 presidential hopeful, Francois Ruffin, has been a tribune of French peasant agriculture for many years now. In recent weeks, he’s been touring the countryside and meeting farmers, just as he did during the Gilets Jaunes protests several years ago.

And, for now, it is the Gilets Jaunes who the French farmers most resemble. Like that earlier movement, the farmers are not an easily identifiable political force, but an ideological melting pot, the product of creative destruction at both ends of the political spectrum. Both uprisings have similarly caught the institutions that usually represent these sections of society off-guard: the trade unions were stunned by the aggression and quick success of the Gilets Jaunes; and the farmers’ movement began without the input of the agricultural unions, which then scrambled to keep up. Both movements even have a similar tactical repertoire, with their weaponisation of traffic and use of road blockades.

The alignment is unsurprising — there was always a significant farming presence among the Gilets Jaunes, and parts of the movement who remain active have joined the farmers in their protests. And the continuities mean the same political opportunity is here, waiting to be exploited. If politicians on Left or Right can become the voice of this messy synthesis of economic rage and communitarianism, an army of radical and angry farmers could be theirs for the taking.

Wearing the yellow vests was a stroke of political genius. The protesters were saying, in effect: “We have been forgotten or ignored by the insolent, thriving France of the big cities. From now on, we will be highly visible.” The bib — which French motorists have to carry by law in their cars — gave the protesters a uniform and a sense of camaraderie. Like almost everything about the Gilets Jaunes, that proved to be misleading.

The protesters quarrelled from the beginning. France would be a better place, they said, if there were no politicians. The people would govern directly through perpetual referenda. Anyone who emerged as a Gilets Jaunes leader was suspected of wanting to be a “politician” and insulted and rejected. They tried to invent a kind of non-ideological anarchism but could never agree what that meant.

Protest became insurrection. At the movement’s peak, in late 2018 and early 2019, the Gilets Jaunes briefly threatened the institutions of the French state. The Elysée Palace was besieged. The Arc de Triomphe was vandalised. A ministry was attacked by a mechanical digger. There was also a rash of attacks on town halls, politicians’ houses and motorway toll stations.

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The state responded to their violence — mostly initiated, in my experience, by the militant wing — with violence. Five demonstrators lost hands and 24 lost eyes to police plastic bullets or stun grenades. Some of the victims were peaceful protesters.

This disappointed many of the original Gilets Jaunes supporters. All the same, the movement continued. There were more than 70 actes — or weekend putsches — of decreasing size before the Covid pandemic brought them to an end. At that point, few of the original Gilets Jaunes remained.

It had begun as a provincial rejection of Paris, politicians, parties, trades unions, the media and all ideologies of the Left, Right or centre. It was simultaneously Poujadiste, demanding less state and less taxes, and state-interventionist, demanding more services and subsidies for the peripheral France of the countryside and outer-suburbs. By the end, however, it was largely urban and Leftist.

Their profile changed bodily, not just demographically. A typical Gilets Jaunes march in the early days was full of wide-bodied provincials — left-behinds with big behinds. By the end, they were mostly slender, metropolitans in their twenties, thirties and forties. Their slogans were not just anti-Macron but anti-capitalist. A typical banner at one of the last Paris marches read: “Capitalism is organised crime.”

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The French media was oddly reluctant to recognise this gradual capture of the movement. It was quicker to seize on the fact that some of the original “personalities” (never say leaders) were connected to the far-Right. They were dismissed as racists. They were portrayed by commentators on the Left as a working-class revolt against globalism, which was brutally suppressed by “Macron’s militias”. They were dismissed by the pro-European, liberal centre as Putin’s poodles, manipulated by lies online. All those portraits are misleading; all contain an element of truth.

In the beginning, it was about pump prices. But that fury set ablaze other provincial grievances: the erosion of public services; low wages; the high cost of living; a new tax on some pensions; Macron’s decision to partially abolish a tax on wealth. On top of this came a decision to reduce the speed limit and country people believe that speeding fines are a crafty way of taxing the ploucs or péquenauds — yokels or rednecks — to subsidise the cities.

One of the central beliefs of the Jaune “philosophy” could be summed up as follows: “All politicians are corrupt and they steal our money. We finance the success of the Bobo (Bourgois Bohemenian) elites in the big cities. They do nothing for us.” But in a recent book, the economist Laurent Davezies dismantled that founding Gilets Jaunes mantra. In fact, he calculated, French cities hugely subsidise the countryside and small towns. The greater Paris area, the Ile-de-France, creates 31% of the nation’s wealth but pays itself only 22% of national income. The rest goes in state transfers to rural or provincial France. In the poorest rural communes, state spending is 36% higher than the national average.

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All the same, it is undeniable that life, jobs, and local sources of pride and wealth have drained from large tracts of provincial France in recent decades — as they have from similar parts of Britain and the United States. Simultaneously, middle- and lower-income people have been squeezed out of the booming cities into unlovely, distant suburbs. They rely on cars to commute to work as outer suburban public services are often, by French standards, poor. These were the twin breeding grounds of the Gilets Jaunes: the small towns outside the glow of France’s booming Metro areas; or the featureless outer ring of conurbations (Paris, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Montpellier) or large towns (Rouen, Caen, Rennes and Nantes).

José-Edouard, a 61-year-old retired building contractor, spoke to me beside a roundabout in rural Calvados on the second weekend of protests on 24 November 2018. “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,” he said. “Every local source of wealth in provincial France, every local economy (bassin d’emploi) has been drained. People can no longer live on what they earn… They are crushed.”

As the movement bounced from anger at petrol prices to attempted revolution, allegations ranged from the reasonable to the lurid and absurd: France was being sold to the UN; taxes were almost all wasted on the gilded lifestyles of politicians (in reality, less than 0.1% goes to them); Brigitte Macron had a de facto state salary of €500,000 a year (in reality, zero). My local roundabout became microcosm of the fragmented, yellow-clad anti-politics nationwide.

José-Edouard soon broke away with a group of followers. Those who remained — including a home-carer, a warehouse worker, an unemployed father of two — made unflattering remarks about him. He wanted to impose his own political line; he had decamped with their €500 cagnotte (kitty) collected from motorists.

Yet they remained as determined as ever. The movement was not just a protest, they said. It was an uprising. All governments would be controlled in future by popular votes online or Référenda d’Initiative Citoyenne (RIC). There would be higher pensions, lower taxes, better services and better welfare payments. All would be financed from the billions saved when the salaries and expenses of politicians were abolished. In a few weeks, however, they had reduced their roundabout picket to Saturdays only. In a few more weeks, they were all gone.

There was a triple paradox at the heart of the original Gilets Jaunes movement. The first was that, while it started and spread rapidly online, it also rescued people from the rural-suburban isolation of their homes. It became a social club as well a social movement. The second is that, although the absence of leaders attracted broad early support, the lack of direction allowed the movement to be hijacked by organised forces, initially from the far-Right, finally by the Left. There were street battles in Lyon, Paris and elsewhere in the New Year between hard-Right and hard-Left urban guerrillas, both groups wearing yellow vests. The Left, partly in the nebulous shape of the Black Bloc movement, eventually won.

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Then there was the fact that the movement, despite its grandiose threats, never had enough support or any remotely workable plan to bring down the French state. President Macron, after a shaky early response, responded skilfully. His Great National Debate allowed people to express and relieve some of their anger. And €10 billion in tax cuts for low and middle incomes and a boost to the minimum wage blunted the edge of fury in Middle France.

Apart from this, the Gilets Jaunes achieved little. They ruined their case by overstating it. They said that leaders were not necessary, but they proved that they were. They were determined to bring down Macron, but he was re-elected last year. While Macron has adopted their demand for more direct democracy and wants to simplify the rules for popular referenda in France, his plan will not look anything like the laptop governments proposed, but never defined, by the Gilets Jaunes.

All the same, the movement revealed a profound animosity towards the ruling elite which cannot be easily dismissed and remains unappeased. The origins of that animosity — even hatred — are rooted in a crisis of distrust, disinformation and dislocation that confronts all 21st-century representative democracies. In France, mainstream parties, the media, the church and the trades unions have lost respect.

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The Gilets Jaunes detested Macron because, they said, he had claimed to be a different kind of politician, but he was the same as his predecessors. In a sense, they were Brexiteers without Boris, or Trumpers without Trump. If they had found and accepted a charismatic leader, they might have gone further.

Will they rise again? I doubt it. A small number of die-hard, rural Yellow Vests remain, but they are marginalised and discredited. Some time ago, I tracked down José-Edouard again (although it turned out that he had given me a false name). He lives in a rather grand converted water mill. He denied he had run away with the “kitty”. He said he left because the others were making racist remarks and that he donated the money to the benevolent fund for fire-fighters. “José-Edouard” still blamed banks, globalism, the European Union and corrupt politicians for the ills of provincial France. Like so many of his former comrades, he has stopped believing that he can do anything about it.

The hunting season in France, which begins as early as August in some north-eastern départments, is in full swing — and inevitably, there will be deaths between now and March, when it closes. According to the National Office of Hunting and Wildlife (ONCFS), since 1999 more than 3,000 shooting accidents have occurred, with in excess of 420 mortalities. Some of the dead were absolute innocents: a 69-year-old woman was shot in her own garden after a hunter fired through her hedge; a driver was killed by a bullet that had rebounded off a wild boar. Most of the dead, however, are hunters themselves, engaged in a pastime which is not just dangerous for the animal.

The ONCFS attributes the deaths to “a failure to comply with basic safety rules,” but one needs to acknowledge the nature of the game in the Hexagon. Significant beasts on the French “to-shoot list” include deer and wild boar, both of which require a round from a rifle — which can spin a projectile a whole kilometre — as opposed to the shotgun standard in British shooting, the range of which is mere metres. Yet the most obvious, and the most culturally significant, reason for the mortalities is the sheer number of people involved in the pursuit. If the number of registered hunters has gone down since the start of the century, it still stands at 1.2 million. By a long shot, hunting is France’s third most popular hobby, after rugby and football.

Hunting is also part of the national bloodstream, part of France’s sense of itself. It may be Europe’s most sophisticated country (Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Hermès, the globe’s three leading luxury brands, are all Gallic), yet it is stubbornly rural, with non-urban areas accounting for one-third of the population (compared to a European average of 28%, and 17% in Britain). And France’s rural population inhabits 551,500 km², making the mainland population density just 11 people per km² — about a quarter that of England. Thus, the nation’s National Institute of Statistics concluded, France is the second most rural country in Europe, after Poland.

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Not unrelatedly, the French are Europe’s most persistently anti-globalist nation, the most possessed by the notion of heritage. It is a country with a strong sense of Patrimoine, a country where bull-fighting and cock-fighting remain legal because they are preservations of the past — and in France heritage can trump animal ethics, let alone the prejudices of “townies”.

In 2019 second-home owners on the Ile d’Oléron, off the west coast, brought a case against a cockerel, Maurice, for crowing too early. The locals supported Maurice, and a judge upheld the cock-a-doodle-doos, ordering the plaintiffs to pay €1,000 in damages to Maurice’s owner, Corinne Fesseau. After a host of similar cases in which the unholy trinity of “neo-rurals”, Brit ex-pats and – worst of all – holidaying Parisians complained about the loud and smelly ways of France profonde, the National Assembly backed a bill from Pierre Morel-À-L’Huissier, a deputy from the Lozère, to protect France’s “sensory heritage”. By this was meant “the crowing of the cockerel, the noise of cicadas, the odour of manure.”

President Macron, before he discovered Tik-Tok and the young metropolitan electorate, brazenly tried to win the rural vote by lauding la chasse. He even re-launched the presidential boar hunt at Chambord, the Loire valley hunting castle of the 16th-century French king, François I. Cannily, in the so-called “Chambord Pact”, Macron halved the cost of the hunting licence to €223.64.

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In France, unlike in the UK, hunting is not primarily an elite activity; les chasseurs in our neck of the Charente woods are the local boucher, the boulanger, the garage mechanic, the nurse and the peasant farmer, who all tip up in white Citroen Berlingo vans. It is the hunt that donates the boar to the charity roast, it is the guys from the hunt who mark out the paths in the forest for the village communal walk.

Quite literally, hunting in France doesn’t need to get off its high horse; hunters primarily hunt on foot, rather than aboard an equine. The right to shoot game was won from the aristocracy during the Revolution, and if French property rights are abstruse, it is generally accepted, courtesy of 1789 and All That, that hunters have a right to roam, unless formally forbidden by the landowner. In France, hunting is a Revolutionary act, as opposed to confirmation of class status.

So why do les chasseurs go out on a Sunday with a gun? Some are pragmatic. “It is food on the table, and will keep the family going for a week,” one acquaintance told me about the wild boar in the back of his van. For others the hunt, in shooting crop-destroying boar and deer, is performing a public duty. Many seek immersion in nature, to find their inner selves; or, as Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega Y Gasset described in Meditations on Hunting, the world’s classic on the subject (recently re-published in French as Sur la chasse): “One does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, one kills in order to have hunted.”

Such semi-mystical chasseur-speak draws ridicule from the pressure group Rassemblement pour une France sans Chasse (RAC) (“the Union for a France Free of Hunting”) and the actress-turned-animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot. Opponents of la chasse are increasingly vociferous, and believe they have time and political fashion on their side; the majority of hunters in France are men over 45 years old, and younger generations are polled as being averse to the killing of wild animals.

The poor safety record of the hunt hands ammunition to its critics: there are now calls galore for restrictions on hunting so that joggers, walkers, cyclists and drivers going for a Sunday spin can enjoy their pastimes in peace and safety. A recent online petition directed at President Macron, organised by the Association for the Protection of Wild Animals (ASPAS), called for an outright ban on Sunday hunting and garnered almost 200,000 signatures.

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The most essential phrase in French life is: C’est compliqué. In what is perceived as a calculated blow to hunting, the glue-trapping of birds was finally outlawed by Macron in June, bringing France into line with the rest of the EU. (For decades, France has claimed a derogation under the “preserving heritage” rubric.) In August, trapping with nets and cages was similarly banned as being contrary to the 2009 EU “birds directive”. Perhaps 5,000 hunters engage in the practices, which are abhorred even by some fellow chasseurs. But should the glue-trappers and the netters be defended by the hunting fraternity — and the countryside generally — because, to paraphrase that other essential clause of French life, “an attack on one, is an attack on all”? C’est compliqué.

In the tension between city and country, it is not only the former ramping up the lobbying, the petitioning and the campaigning. The powerful Fédération Nationale des Chasseurs (or FNC), headed by Willy Schraen, has committed itself to combating “the erosion of biodiversity” — to the relief of its members, who consider themselves the original appreciators and champions of nature. After all, the French countryside is speckled with little metal signs in the Tricolour’s red, white and blue announcing land Réserve de Chasse et de Faune Sauvage under a government directive from 1991.

Increasingly, the FNC is targeting Big Farmer and intensive agriculture, which will play well in a country where peasant agriculture plucks the heartstrings. Moreover, in the public war over hunting, the chasseurs are finding allies which give their middle-aged male image a useful makeover. Model and Instagram star Johanna Clermont has become the torchbearer for younger and female hunters, as has 25-year-old Jessica Héraud, leader of the FNC-approved Charente-Maritime women’s hunting federation “Les Dianes”, named for the Roman goddess of hunting. “The fact that women are in the minority in what for years has been a man’s hobby does not mean that they do not have a place in it, quite the contrary,” the FNC states on its website.

The hunters also have friends in the highest branches of the political tree. In the National Assembly, one in five MPs is a member of the Hunting and Territories group; in the Senate, the Hunting and Fishing group has more than 70 members. If Macron himself has now lined up with the environmentalists and animal rights activists, other prominent members of his party are siding with la chasse. Alain Péréa, an En Marche member of the National Assembly, is co-president of the Hunting group.

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Last Saturday, there were pro-hunt protests across all corners of the country — in Mont-de-Marsan, Amiens, Redon, Caen, Charleville-Mézières and Forcalquier. The demonstration in Mont-de-Marsan, a modest-sized town in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, was attended by an intergenerational crowd of 20,000, many of whom were wearing the orange hi-vis vests of the hunter. “Démonstration de force des chasseurs,” went the headline of the regional paper Sud-Ouest Dimanche. The hunters played their trump card: along with the calls for preserving la chasse were the calls in defence of ruralité. In the French mind, la chasse and the countryside are still one, still intertwined. “Macron gravedigger of our traditions” read one placard.

Three years ago, the President first had trouble with the Gilets Jaunes. He should be wary, today, of tangling with the Gilets Oranges. There has been hunting in France since the Paleolithics painted animal scenes on the walls of the caves at Lascaux in the Dordogne. It will take some killing.

On paper, it seems like a straightforward political win. ENA is France’s most prestigious seat of higher education; an officer-training school for senior civil servants which has produced many leading politicians and (more rarely these days) captains of industry. In terms of its preservation of the elite, the closest British comparison might be Eton and Oxford — combined.

Indeed, when General Charles de Gaulle created ENA in 1945, his primary aim was to train a new, meritocratic elite, to replace the social elite whom he believed had betrayed France in 1940. By the 1990s, however, ENA was accused of a new form of betrayal: the creation of a self-perpetuating oligarchy which prevented more practical or inventive talent from rising in the French system.

Since then, the destruction of ENA has become a theme of French politics. The school has been constantly reformed, reduced in size and moved from Paris to Strasbourg. In fact, the all-powerful ENA of legend probably ceased to exist years ago. And yet it has remained a symbol of a know-it-all, elitist French state, with President Macron as its most perfect manifestation.

Macron graduated from ENA in 2004. A dozen years later he became President of the Republic. Laurent Fabius took only 11 years from graduation to become Socialist prime minister (1984-6). Jacques Chirac was an énarque. So was Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, François Hollande and more than a third of the prime ministers of the Fifth Republic.

And yet despite its reputation, ENA is not fee-paying. In theory, it’s open to people of all backgrounds: the 80 students in each year class are paid a salary by the state. Entry is based on tough exams after two years of “prépas” (preparatory courses). Once they’re in, the 80 students are graded from 1 to 80, with those in the top 15 — the “botte” or boot — admitted directly into a kind of praetorian guard of the French civil service, les grand corps, when they graduate. They are guaranteed a senior job and salary for life. (For what it’s worth, Macron came 5^th in his year.)

Although theoretically a place of learning, ENA is actually a place of permanent examination — of stress-testing — rather than education. An ENA graduate once told me: “You learn nothing… It’s a system for grading you, for deciding how well you will cope with the kinds of problems that might be thrown at you.” Another well-known product of ENA in the late 1980s told me: “It was a machine for discovering how flexible your spine was. If it wasn’t flexible, you didn’t do well in the final classification.”

The Covid crisis offers evidence both for and against the ENA effect. France has got many things wrong during the last year, partly because its administrative culture is so ponderous and averse to risk. And yet, on the other hand, its state-funded economic support programme has been exemplary and much copied (including by Britain). That was shaped by Macron (ENA 2002-4), his then Prime Minister Edouard Philippe (ENA 1995-7) and most of all by his finance minister, Bruno Le Maire (ENA 1996-8).

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Even so, ENA remains shorthand for the gulf between a struggling rural and inner suburban France and the administrative, political classes who are viewed as too abstract and too arrogant to grasp the harsh realities of daily life. Macron’s decision to suppress ENA from June and replace it with another smaller college, the Institut du service public or ISP, therefore made political sense.

Stymied by the pandemic, it is the only high-profile reform he can realistically offer before the presidential election next spring. Not that it hasn’t been a long time coming; Macron promised the death of ENA during the Gilets Jaunes’s rural and suburban revolt against the elite in 2018-9. But doing it now fits in with Macron’s wider campaign to seem less arrogant and aloof, along with his apology for failing to grasp sooner the need for a rapid roll-out of Covid vaccines. Destroying ENA in its present form also fits the original Macroniste offer and vision from 2017 of making France a land of opportunity — a can-do, start-up country where top jobs in government are open to clever young people from forgotten rural France and the struggling, multi-racial banlieues.

Though hardly reported, Macron has made other advances in that direction in recent months. Two policies have been introduced to fight social and racial discrimination and allow capable young people from rural or suburban backgrounds to climb the ladder more rapidly in state jobs. In other words, the suppression of ENA will be deployed in Macron’s election campaign next spring as a way of saying: “I have started to open up and change France for the better. The pandemic got in the way — so give me more time to complete the job.”

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In truth, however, abolishing ENA is more like a burial than a murder. The school has ceased in recent years to be the ultimate pinnacle of ambition for hyper-clever, young 20-somethings in France. “ENA was once the place you had to go to prove yourself and to be sure of success. No more,” one 2016 graduate told me. “Young people now strive to go to the HEC (the top French business school) or Polytechnique (the elite engineering college). They used to ‘do ENA’ afterwards. Now they want to go to McKinsey or to Silicon Valley and then come back to France to start their own business.”

Another recent student said that he had learned since graduating that ENA no longer has the same mystique within the French political and administrative system. Ministries, he said, were turning to the big consultancy firms, such as McKinsey, to make the strategic decisions that énarques once made. “Macron’s decision fits this pattern, I fear. It’s part of a trend that’s been going on for several years to downgrade the importance of the senior French administration, to move away from a specifically French approach to French problems and become more international. In the long run, I think that’s something France will regret.”

Is it still the case that, as I was told, you “learn nothing at ENA”?

“That’s certainly true of the 18 months you spend within the walls of ENA itself in Strasbourg, yes,” said my first source. “In the preparatory courses, you learn things. In the two six-month placements in France and abroad, you learn a great deal. But once you’re in Strasbourg, you are incessantly tested and, I would say, taught only that to succeed you must conform.”

The former student, who asked not to be named, was an atypical énarque, the only one in his year who came from a working-class family. “ENA was my dream from the age of 16,” he said. “It was the way I thought I could succeed in life. When I got there, I detested the place. Why? Because the whole ENA approach is detestable.”

After working for several years in government, he left to start his own business. My other informant still works in government but has started to build a political career for himself in the provinces because, he says, “being an énarque no longer helps you so much as all that”.

And so Macron’s decision is not the revolution that he claims — it is more like a recognition of changes that are already happening. Its replacement’s college will be housed in the same building and will have many of the same teachers. Perhaps the most obvious difference is that there will be only 40 students, not 80; hardly a sign that it will be more open.

How they will be selected is still unclear, possibly by high achievement in relation to their social background, rather than just by competitive exam. This approach has already been tried with some success at “Science-Po”, France’s “political university” which sends many of its graduates to ENA. The numbered classification will remain but the top 15 graduates will no longer enter the praetorian ranks of the state service directly. They will have to prove themselves in more lowly work for five years first.

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But will replacing the ENA alone help France to become the land of opportunity that Macron promises? Hardly. France has a baffling system of “first and second divisions” in higher education which will remain largely intact. State university courses, medicine and law apart, are inexpensive, easy to reach but extremely variable in quality. And clever students from well-off families aspire instead to go to a separate archipelago of state-run Grandes Ecoles, like Polytechnique, or to private, fee-paying business schools, like HEC. To reach them, two years of preparatory classes are needed.

Replacing ENA might remove the topmost pinnacle of the mountain. But for the great majority of French youngsters, the slopes to success will remain as forbiddingly steep as ever.

When the Gilets Jaunes protests threatened to unseat Macron from behind his gilded desk in the Elysée, the extremely heavy-handed crowd control methods employed by the French police were brushed off, if they were remarked upon at all, as the necessary response of the liberal state to urban disorder. Despite the inchoate and ideologically-fluid demands of the protestors firmly coalescing on the side of the radical left before the protest wave finally fizzled out, the Gilets Jaunes were framed as a right-wing populist revolt as if by necessity.

Macron was no longer the last-ditch defence of French liberalism from the radical right: he was the anti-Trump, a liberal strongman willing and capable of keeping the world safe for Washington Post commentators by rolling back the then-seemingly unstoppable wave of populist anger, at the helm of a country more or less interchangeable with Europe as a whole in the American imagination.

It is a marker of how far US commentators have self-radicalised since then that Macron is now the target of the New York Times and Washington Post, after daring to criticise their new race-centric ideological passions, and the complex algebraic equations of moral worth and political validity which derive from them. 

Following a wave of brutal jihadist murders targeting innocent French civilians, it is Macron who is the villain in their eyes, for launching a counterattack against the Islamist insurgency within France. There is only one permissible response to jihadist terrorism for European leaders, it seems, which is to light some candles and resolutely ignore the situation until the next attack: to take any meaningful action to prevent future violence is to find yourself accused of Nazism by the American press which idealised you just a few short years ago. 

Once lauded as the liberal bulwark against Europe’s nativist far-right, Macron is now morally suspect for tackling the continent’s Islamist far-right; Europe’s “anti-Trump” is now only comprehensible as a Trumpian figure in the eyes of the New York and Washington press, but there is increasingly little value in paying attention to the hysterical wailing of American commentators.

Instead, we can more profitably assess how far Macron’s worldview has evolved in the nearly four years since he came to power by reading his latest long interview with the Groupe d’Études de Géopolitiques thinktank, published earlier this month. Macron is fond — perhaps too fond — of sharing his important thoughts with the world in long, expansive interviews, and his latest interview is perhaps the purest distillation of the genre. 

Yet by cutting through the lofty generalities to examine the specifics of how Macron now views the world, we see him as he sees himself, a liberal of the right, and a defender of the French and European Enlightenment against Chinese totalitarianism, the seductive lures of Europe’s radical right, and the counter-Enlightenment obscurantism of both jihadists and Americans.

Macron begins by asserting that the multilateral framework of what is still nostalgically termed the liberal international order no longer functions. “The UN Security Council no longer produces useful solutions today,” he declares, and “some, such as the WHO, find themselves hostages of the crises of multilateralism,” the latter diagnosis surely being derived from the COVID experience. Indeed, he notes, “we have a crisis with the multilateral framework of 1945: a crisis in terms of its effectiveness, but, and it is even more serious in my opinion, a crisis in terms of the universality of the values upheld by its structures.”

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That crisis, for Macron, is the growing rejection of the very ideological underpinnings of liberalism by the rising civilisation-states of Eurasia, and by the resurgence of political Islam as a force in international politics.

On the tenth anniversary of the Arab Spring, Macron observes that what was birthed by the crisis of authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and North Africa was not the expansion of liberalism on which his predecessor Sarkozy gambled so much, but instead “the return of the mindset of certain peoples and of religion in politics,” and “an extraordinary acceleration of a return of religion on the political scene in a number of these countries.”

The liberal triumphalism of the post-Cold War moment, “based to a great extent, both academically and politically, on a fiction that was the ‘end of history’ and an implicit idea that was the ongoing spread of democracies, individual liberties, etc” was misguided, Macron declares; instead, the clearly observable result is that, contrary to the aspirations of both the Arab Spring protestors and their external supporters, “authoritarian regional powers are re-emerging, theocracies are re-emerging”.

Liberalism is no longer in expansive mode, then, but is instead fighting a defence for its own survival, even in its core European territories: “the fight against terrorism and radical Islamism is a European struggle, a struggle about values,” he declares, where our “struggle today is against barbarity and obscurantism.” The forces of jihadism and autocracy that defeated the Arab Spring abroad now threaten Europe itself even in our own heartlands. Indeed, he continues, “the combat of our generation in Europe will be a combat for our freedoms. Because they are being overturned. And so it will not be the reinvention of the Enlightenment, but we will have to defend the Enlightenment against obscurantism.”

The obscurantism Macron speaks of is not purely external: he also warns of a political current within Europe, “a crisis of the post-1968 and 1989 Western societies,” a form of what he confusingly terms “neoconservatism” but which we could perhaps better term “reaction” or neoreaction, “which is challenging 1968,” and which, he declares — no doubt with an eye on the ever-present electoral threat of the radical right — is a rational and understandable response to the failures of neoliberalism.

The Washington consensus which underwrote post-Cold War neoliberalism, Macron muses, “turned into a dogma whereby the truths were: less state intervention, privatisations, structural reforms, opening up of economies through trade, financialisation of our economies, with a rather monolithic rationale based on the accumulation of profits.”

Whatever the benefits for the workers of China and the CEOs of the United States, the result for the middle class across the Western world was disaster: “it has reduced part of our population to a feeling of uselessness, with deep economic and social, but also mental tragedies: our middle classes in particular, and part of our working classes have been the adjustment variable of this globalisation; and that is intolerable.”

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Identifying himself with the “struggle against this mechanism of capitalism,” the former investment banker now portrays himself as a sceptic of Anglo-Saxon neoliberalism: but it is perhaps more accurate to say that he sees himself saving liberalism by cutting away its excesses, saving liberalism from itself in the economic sphere in a way analogous to his rejection of the American excesses of liberalism in the cultural and political spheres.

The Washington consensus is dead, he declares, and the time for a “Paris consensus,” no doubt under his tutelage, has begun. What this means in practice is not elaborated on with any degree of specificity — he comes out for a vague form of a Green New Deal — but it is hard to avoid the impression Macron’s economic strategy is subordinate to his already expressed  geopolitical musings.

Indeed, and with a degree of triumphalism, Macron now declares that his vision of European strategic autonomy, so controversial when he first advanced it, has been borne out by events. “Three years ago, when I spoke about European sovereignty and strategic autonomy, I was taken for a lunatic,” he muses, “and these ideas were dismissed as French whims,” but no-one’s laughing now. The German defence establishment, represented by the craven Atlanticist submissiveness of the defence minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, may still complain, but “fortunately, the Chancellor [Angela Merkel] does not share this point of view.” 

Assuaging the outrage of think-tankers by stressing Europe’s close bonds of alliance and friendship with America, he nevertheless emphasises the continental bloc’s need to “prevent the Chinese-American duopoly”; indeed, he repeatedly links the two rival superpowers when he argues Europe’s need to assert technological and political independence from both.

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A geostrategic Europe, with a sphere of influence in Africa which he terms a partnership, is at the heart of his vision: chiding Africa once again for its excessive birth rates (and for the first time linking it to Europe’s demographic decline, a dynamic where “for one European country demographically disappearing, in the same period, one African country appears”) and for the abuse of Europe’s asylum system by African economic migrants, Macron posits a Euro-African relationship where France’s post-colonial interests and those of Europe as a whole are perhaps uncomfortably elided.

Yet it is surely in his vision of Europe as a commonwealth, a continent where we share a sense of belonging and ineffable political values despite our division into discrete nation-states, that we see Macron’s evolution most clearly: the defender of the French Revolution’s values has become an unexpected Burkean. It is not just that his horror at the tyranny and fanaticism of what became of the Arab Spring shapes his worldview, as the French Revolution did Burke’s, with his drift to the right deriving from a similar claimed desire to save liberalism from its own worst excesses.

Macron also echoes Burke’s conception of Europe as a political unit, an orderly and pacific civilisation of its own, and a commonwealth of shared values to be defended against internal and external challengers. Whatever divides us Europeans, he asserts, in a quote which could be lifted directly from Burke’s 1796 Letters on a Regicide Peace, “something unites us. We know that we are European when we are outside of Europe. We feel our differences when we are among Europeans, but we feel nostalgia when we leave Europe.” 

But above all, Macron observes, citing our moderate economic ideals, our belief in the value of culture, and our neighbourly relations with the Middle East and with Russia, “we are not the United States of America”. He is surely fortunate then, in the reaction he has now solicited from the other side of the Atlantic: if the basis of Macron’s creation of a geopolitical Europe in his own image is that of our deep and essential difference from the United States, then he has no greater ally than the American press, which draws the dividing lines between Us and Them more clearly with every passing day.

If he himself had held out a week or so longer, he would have seen his publishers Hachette issue a free weekly online Asterix magazine, promising that the moustachioed warrior in the winged helmet would “passer un savon au virus” — give the virus a soaping.

I was informed of the download by the diminutive woman who runs our local maison de la presse in the Charente, as she handed me my neatly folded Le Monde under her plate-glass anti-coronavirus screen. She announced the news with the proud jut of the jaw of a lover talking about her secret beau.

Think Asterix is a just cartoon character who, with his portly pal in stripy keks Obelix, duffs up Caesar’s legions in a swirl of head-banging stars ad infinitum? Oh là là! In France Asterix is a national icon, sitting somewhere in the pantheon of Our Saviours between Joan of Arc and Johnny Halliday.

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The Asterix tales, to put you in the picture, are the creation myth of the Fifth Republic. Its Iliad. Its Cowboy and Indian. Its Epic of Gilgamesh.

Asterix and I were published into the world in the same year, 1961. Courtesy of my mother, a French teacher, I got my eager little hands on Astérix le Gaulois before the others at my sleepy Herefordshire village school. What was instructive was the division among my classmates. Stuart the Swot, with his pens arranged in his blazer top pocket, was obsessed with the brain-wearing internalities of Tintin; while I (detention for blow football with lunch’s marrowfat peas) held a torch for rambunctious, lad-on-the-lash Asterix. He touched my nascent anarcho-traditionalism.

Which leads us across the Channel, and to exegesis of the Asterix phenomenon. Hectares of sub-Derridean deconstruction have been applied to the critical question: why does Asterix so appeal to the French?

Goscinny and Uderzo repeatedly claimed that the mega-success of the books — 380 million copies sold, thus besting Balzac, vanquishing Voltaire, passing Proust — was  because  Asterix and Obelix do “funny things, and that is all”.

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Of course, the books are a laugh. There are slapstick sight-gags for the kids, parodies of the classics and current affairs for the adults, wrapped in vivid, dynamic, bright technicolour, almost cinematic graphics. (Uderzo’s pics were a big BOUM! behind the elevation of the bande dessinée to High Art in France. I once lived across from the Musée de la Bande Dessinée in Angouleme. The queues! The reverence!)

Actually, the Chaplin-meets-Candide humour of the books explains solely their international appeal,  their translation into one hundred and one tongues. (Say this sotto voce in the Francophonie, but the English language versions by Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge are sharper, wittier than the originals, hence the druid Panoramix becoming Getafix, the pooch Idéfix becoming Dogmatix.) Globally, only the Americans have withstood the world-wave of Asterixia; the French, typically, attribute Yankee indifference to lack of taste.

Goscinny and Uderzo were having a blague with their avowals of purely humorous intent, their equally frequent disavowals of ideology. It’s the ideology, stupid, of Asterix that particularly possesses the French. The wisest observation ever on the relationship between the French and Asterix came not from a prof at Sciences Po but a member of the public, who told the visiting New York Times that the comics’ Gauls were “like us, exasperating but endearing”.

Culturally contumacious. Or, what Charles de Gaulle called “our old Gaulish propensity for division and quarrelling”.

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The gilets jaunes were but the 50BC bagarreurs villagers from Asterix in hi-vis jackets.

France is the most authoritarian country in Western Europe, a place where La Poste dictates the size of your letter box. In the Asterix oeuvre the Roman Empire is a perennial stand-in for the dirigiste French state. (And who is Macron, he who compares opponents of his reforms to “unyielding Gauls”, but a latter day Caesar?) Asterix is France’s Ego. Asterix is France’s literary Catharsis.

More: The Roman Empire is metaphor too for the external threats to the l’hexagone; Asterix the product was born in a France consumed by Collaborator Syndrome from the Second World War, the imperial military disaster at Dien Bien Phu, and the war in Algeria. Goscinny and Uderzo stripped back French history to the clean beginning, to “nos ancêtres les Gaulois”, with a hero modelled explicitly on Vercingetorix, the real-life anti-Caesar rebel. With a sweep of a brush and the line of a pen, Goscinny and Uderzo rearranged collective memory of the war to become honour-saving Resistance against Nazi Occupation  (read Gauls vs Romans), while simultaneously creating a French national identity as a people forever proud and pugnacious. Indomitable.

By toutatis! A real magic potion for the tribe!

In case, any reader missed the French connection to the war, Asterix and the Goths (1963) featured Germans with pressure cookers used for torture. Gas chambers, in other words.

Goscinny was Jewish.

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Two thirds of the population of France have read at least one Asterix book, the figure rising to nine tenths of men. And they have supped deep the mythology in its pages. In France life has come to imitate cartoon art; the citizens of the Fifth Republic are not the people of Vichy, but the uppity résistantes of a little village in Lucretia. Dispense with the de Beauvoir, give Houellebecq the hump; it is in the works of Goscinny and Uderzo that you read the mind of the French of the Fifth Republic.

France is in thrall to Gaullism. Asterix the Gaullism, that is. Thus, one medium-sized European country remains heroically unconquered by the mondialisation of everyday life.

The Gaullist resistance is everywhere, from the exclusive totality of ‘Origine France’ meat at Leclerc hypermarket to the anti-Anglo-Saxon language patrols of  l’Académie Francaise.

Of course, the French are their antimonies, the phrase “c’est compliqué’’ a staple of every conversation. Since The Mansions of the Gods in 1973 Asterix has repeatedly biffed consumerism (in the above volume patrician Roman wives scramble to buy authentic antiques from perfect little chichi shops — in reality the humble shops of the Gaulish village selling their everyday items). Oh, the irony.

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Despite  Goscinny dying prematurely in 1977 — “like the Eiffel Tower falling” in the words of one obituarist — and then Uderzo retiring to leave relative unknowns Jean-Yves Ferri and Didier Conrad continuing the series, the Asterix commercial empire has burgeoned bigger than one of Obelix’s wild boar dinners. Aside from Parc Astérix, there are Asterix video games, movies (with Gerard Depardieu as Obelix, a role you feel he was born to play), product endorsements, et cetera, et cetera.

Even as a staunch Gaullist, I  admit that the book-output of the Ferri-Conrad tandem has been variable. They deserve laurels, though, for 2017’s Asterix and the Chariot Race, which contains a  prophecy Getafix would have been proud of. Ferri-Conrad conjured up  a character called… Coronavirus. He is Caesar’s pet charioteer and, naturellement, the evil Emperor leans on race organisers to let him win for the honour of Rome.

Does Astérix le Gaulois beat Coronavirus the Roman?

Are baguettes long? Is Proust’s In Search of Lost Time unreadable?

In the 1980s, the chairman of the newly-privatised Renault was the École Polytechnique and MIT graduate Raymond Lévy, at the same time that the General Confederation of Labour (CGT), the hard-line Communist union, was headed by Henri Krasucki, a Polish-born metalworker and Résistance hero. When the time came for the annual collective wage bargaining sessions, commenters often remarked that Krasucki’s first job had been on the Renault shop floor, never that he and Lévy shared an “ethnicity” — a word that didn’t exist in the political discourse at the time anyway.

In contrast, the past two decades have seen murderous attacks against French Jews in the streets, in their homes, in their synagogues and in the districts where many of them had settled back in 1962, at the end of Algeria’s victorious independence war. Insults, bullying and worse against Jews became common in the classrooms of the difficult banlieues around large cities, where Muslim pupils are the majority, forcing an exodus of Jewish families to calmer areas, and some 50,000 people in the past decade to Israel. A smaller number have moved to London.

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Things have got so bad that a yet-unpublished report commissioned by Ronald S. Lauder, the former U.S. Ambassador to Austria, rates France as the most dangerous place to be a Jew among 11 European countries.

This comes as no surprise here. Since the 1990s, as satellite Arab channels, and later the internet, started spreading the anti-Semitic propaganda that’s the norm in the Middle East, the French state was slow in acknowledging the existence of a problem, and even slower in responding. (One rare exception was the 2004 banning of the Hezbollah-financed Lebanese Al-Manar channel, where, among many comparable offerings, one 12-episode series followed a complicated plot culminating in Jews slaughtering the gentile children they’d kidnapped to make Matzo bread for Passover).

Warnings from sociologists, teachers and social workers, in numerous interviews, speeches and books, went unheeded or scorned. As a result, quite a few of the children brought up within this closely-insulated vortex of hatred ended up joining ISIS in Syria, or, like Mohamed Merah who in 2012 shot point-blank Jewish children in their Toulouse primary school, brought terror to France.

This, as well as the 2015 Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan killings, finally roused the French authorities to declare the fight against anti-Semitism a national priority, especially as the Hebdo massacre was followed by an attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris. Yet more horror was to come in 2017 with the horrific murder of 65-year-old Sarah Halimi in Paris. She was tortured and killed by Kabila Traoré, a 27-year-old young neighbour she’d known all his life, the murderer calling out “Allahu Akbar” and, finally, “I have killed the shaitan” (devil).

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Not only did it take time to reclassify the murder specifically as an anti-Semitic hate crime: when the case finally came to court last year, the judge ruled Traoré “psychologically irresponsible” and sent him out to hospital treatment. (France has her share of activist judges — civil servants here — who often find sociological excuses not to sentence delinquents harshly.)

What’s new (“old-new”) is the recent resurgence of a more ancient form of anti-Semitism, born on the far-Right and now often shared on the far-Left. This seems to have left the country strangely unmoved. The rise of conspiracy theories has been charted by sociologists, who find that 22% of the French now believe in some sort of Jewish world-domination conspiracy: this proportion doubles to 44% among the Gilets Jaunes movement. (In fairness it is not just the Jews; large numbers of French people also believe in conspiracies involving the Freemasons and Illuminati.)

Emmanuel Macron, a non-practising Catholic who once worked for two and a half years for the merchant bank Rothschild et Cie, was routinely abused on Gilets Jaunes banners and posters showing him standing in front of a Star of David, surrounded by hooked-nosed Jews, captioned “Rothschild’s man”.

The Gilets Jaunes movement has abated, but similar slogans appeared in union marches against the pensions reform: they are all over the internet and in online comments on the websites of mainstream newspapers. Perhaps more than anywhere else, French anti-Semitism manifests itself across the political spectrum.

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French authorities are at fault here, not because of institutional anti-Semitism but rather that French elites, so resistant to change, are still locked in 1960s ideas. Terrified of being accused of Islamophobia, they have, Left and Right, rejected for two generations the kind of law and order policies that voters clamour for (which explains Marine Le Pen’s swelling support, even without a credible platform). Half-hearted attempts by Nicolas Sarkozy, and later statements by the short-tenured hardline Les Républicains leader, Laurent Wauquiez, were nearly unanimously condemned by commenters and the rest of the political class.

As a result, France accepts a level of petty crime (quaintly called incivilités, as of someone eating the cheese course with their hands) that’s unheard of in the rest of Europe, from the regular burning of thousands of cars on holiday nights annually, to robberies, muggings and vandalism. State school teachers are often attacked by parents angry at their children’s bad marks; nurses and doctors are set upon in hospital emergency services; night bus drivers beaten up by gangs of youths in difficult areas, or simply threatened by clusters of passengers who refuse to pay.

What pushback there is from the police is due to local courage among the teams on the ground, who receive little thanks from their superiors. The feral youth created by this terminal attitude of laissez-faire targets Jews first, but many in France are uncomfortably aware that if Jews went away, they would be next. Until France decides to replace declarative posturing at the top with actual enforcement of the law at the citizen’s level, France will remain the most dangerous place to be a Jew in Europe — and the late 20th century will seem like another age.

To be precise, this is the West’s second class war. The first, in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, pitted the big-firm corporate managers and professionals against industrial and service workers, who had not shared in the gains of the early industrial revolution. During the Great Depression and World War II, that class war came to a negotiated end in Europe and America, thanks to cross-class peace treaties such as Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the British welfare state.

Today, many people consider those postwar ‘settlements’ solely in terms of safety-nets that redistributed income or expanded public services like Britain’s NHS. But the class peace that lasted for a generation after 1945 in the West was based as much on power-sharing as on wealth-sharing.

By the mid-20th century, universal suffrage ensured that all working-class citizens in Western democratic nations could vote (a goal finally achieved for nonwhite Americans in the civil rights era). Yet working-class citizens exercised power in the three realms of government, the economy and the culture by more than votes alone.

Thanks to what I describe in The New Class War as ‘democratic pluralism’, non-college-educated workers had their own mass membership organisations that represented their interests between elections. Local political parties were the basis of national party federations, in which messages went up the chain as well as down.

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In many major industries, corporate managers were compelled to negotiate with trade union representatives. On top of this, religious and civic organisations policed the movies and the media and education, to align their content with the values of working-class majorities.

Today, the petty tribunes of yesterday’s working class — the local party officials, private trade union officials, and, yes, the censorious church members —are all but extinct as social types in many Western democracies. Power has migrated upwards to national political, economic and cultural elites. At the same time, these have grown more homogeneous and insular, fusing into a single, college-credentialed, managerial overclass clustered into a few major hub cities including New York, San Francisco, London and Paris.

Neoliberalism, a combination of free-market libertarianism in economics with social liberalism in culture, has been the orthodoxy shared by Thatcher and Reagan conservatives with centre-Left leaders Blair and Clinton and Obama.

On both sides of the Atlantic, national elites have promoted the technocratic neoliberal vision of a glorious globalised future of dissolving borders, free migration of goods and people and ever-growing demographic diversity — combined, it was assumed, with monolithically liberal values and opinions.

Today’s populist politics is best understood as a counter-revolution from below against this neoliberal revolution from above. Some try to explain populism solely as a backlash by native working-class whites against increasing racial diversity driven by immigration, but this cannot explain why a third of BAME (British, Asian and Minority Ethnic) voters supported Brexit, or why nearly 30% percent of Hispanics in the U.S. voted for Donald Trump in 2016.

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Those who argue that economics is the key to understanding populist revolts are closer to the truth, since across the West, the heartlands of populism are often deindustrialised former manufacturing regions such as the North of England and the American Rust Belt.

Centre-left parties have lost their working-class constituents to populists and conservatives, replacing them with a new alliance of highly-educated white managers and professionals allied with native minorities and many upwardly-mobile immigrants, for whom even low wages and poor working conditions in Western hub cities are better than their former circumstances.

What an exclusive emphasis on economics misses, however, is power — or its absence. Human beings care about power and agency, not just as means to income and wealth, but as ends in themselves. In otherwise quite different societies — many nations in Latin America, the states of the Southern U.S. between the Civil War and the Civil Rights Revolution, and the immigrant-packed Northern cities in the U.S. in the early 20th century — a feeling of powerlessness and exclusion by large elements of the population drove conditions in which demagogic populists thrive.

Populists such as Donald Trump, Nigel Farage and Matteo Salvini sometimes represent the legitimate interests and values of groups that have been excluded by a closed and nepotistic power elite. But history also suggests that populist insurgencies usually fail, through cooptation by the existing establishment or corruption by demagogues who build their own ephemeral cults of personality and personal patronage systems.

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A new democratic pluralism is needed to bring today’s class war to an end in the way that the power-sharing pluralism of the 1950s and 1960s ended the first. This is a challenge far greater than merely revising trade or immigration or social welfare policies to win over populist voters. It requires compelling corporate executives, media tycoons and high-ranking civil servants who have grown accustomed to a lack of pressure from below to show deference to less-educated people in the national heartlands beyond a few economic, cultural and administrative capitols.

This, in turn, requires creating the functional equivalents of yesterday’s trade unions, local political machines and civic pressure groups, in forms suited to the twenty-first century. This would allow those citizens who today are alienated and atomised members of an anomic population, disconnected from the centres of national power, to once again belong to organisations that can pool their numbers and amplify their influence.

With their own lesser, local tribunes to represent their interests and values, members of the working-class majority are likely to be less attracted to Caesarist demagogues who claim to speak for the virtuous people as a whole against the treacherous few.

The details of a new democratic pluralism cannot be specified in advance, and by nature must be negotiated by different actors in society, rather than drawn up in advance in 10-point plans by intellectuals or committees. These new class peace treaties will also vary among Western democracies, depending on local conditions and cultures.

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Will Boris save social democracy?

By David Goodhart

It is possible that Britain, the mother of parliaments and the first modern industrial nation, and the one that pioneered neoliberalism under Margaret Thatcher, will now blaze the trail for what has been called “post-liberalism”. Modern British history is rich in traditions that reject the extreme aspects of liberalism without rejecting democracy, from the One Nation Toryism of Disraeli to the guild socialism of members of the early 20th century English pluralist school like Cole and Laski. More recently, Maurice Glasman’s Blue Labour and Philip Blond’s Red Toryism have sought to correct the excesses of neoliberalism while avoiding the trap of demagogic populism.

Can a new cross-class peace settlement unite those whom David Goodhart has called communitarian, working class “Somewheres” with metropolitan, libertarian “Anywheres” in the UK and other nations? Failure is always an option. In this case, failure would consist of a few token gestures towards alienated populists by establishment elites who remain committed to the neoliberal consensus of the past generation and have no intention of sharing real power with the powerless of all classes and ethnicities.

But we can be certain of this: the political earthquakes of the past few years are not the last. It is not the beginning of the end of a new era in Western democratic politics, but the end of the beginning.

His bad week kicked off with Donald Trump threatening tariffs of up to 100% on a large number of those French goods that actually do sell well abroad — from yoghurt to luxury handbags, champagne, cheese, and cosmetics. This was a retort to France’s unilateral 3% “digital tax” on sales (not profits) on those internet giants, all American, as it happens, with global revenues above €750 million and above €25 million in France.

This “GAFA tax” in turn was a result of French annoyance at the OECD’s perceived inability to come up with effective guidelines for international digital giants to pay tax in the countries they operate in. Other European countries (Italy, Austria, Spain, Belgium) have similar plans, although few have taken the drastic (and very French) tack of a tax based on turnover, not profits. So Macron decided to go it alone, and to go it first.

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Could Macron prove more dangerous than Trump?

By John Lichfield

Trump, the man who once dreamed of having a military parade in Washington modelled on the Bastille Day one, evidently decided to make an example of France, pour encourager les autres.

Then the French President even managed to irk Merkel. It takes talent to annoy the German Chancellor. But she finally snapped  in response to that Economist interview, in which he declared Nato to be “brain-dead”. “I understand your desire for disruptive politics, but I’m tired of picking up the pieces,” she told him. “Over and over, I have to glue together the cups you have broken so that we can then sit down and have a cup of tea together.”

Macron knows that Mrs Merkel is scheduled for departure next year; he’d probably already been briefed, ahead of speaking to the Economist that her GroKo (Great Coalition) was threatened by her SPD partner’s Left. Typically, for a top of the heap Frenchman of his particular stripe, he saw her as “a loser”, and dumped on her accordingly. It’s the sort of venomousness they all learn at ENA, the elite government school Macron attended.

Meanwhile, at home, his popularity is tanking. An Odoxa poll last week gave his negative opinions at two-thirds of the voters (with just 34% favourable); another Ifop poll gives his favourables at 33% against 65% negatives.

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How the gilets jaunes went up in flames

By John Lichfield

The French are unhappy with him and the “Jupiterian” (his own word) persona he constructed to counter the appearance of youth and inexperience. As they see it, the country is careening from one crisis to the next, with a chest-thumping president leading a weak government of clone-like technocrats. Added to which is an even weaker parliament full of inexperienced, first-term Macronistas rubber-stamping most of his legislation, and occasionally indulging in woke amendments (the one last week calling to outlaw any advertising for Black Friday in a good example). Absolutely none of this resonates with the country’s concerns, real or imagined.

The French worry about jobs, insecurity, immigration, the economy, crime; they’re angry about the degradation of public services they used to take for granted, from vanishing country train lines to overcrowded and understaffed hospitals. They complain, bitterly and incessantly, of deep “inequalities” — even though France is in fact more redistributive than Sweden.

Macron has argued back that the French economy is doing better. It’s largely true, but his problem is that it’s not perceived as doing well, partly because some stubborn problem areas remain, with an EU record number of long-term unemployed seniors, young people, minorities. Unemployment has slipped from 10% in 2016 to 8.4%, but uncertainty on too many economic variables (taxation, regulation, social climate) means the very last investment businesses make is manpower.

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How the gilets jaunes could save Macron's skin

By John Lichfield

Hence the surprising amount of support for any kind of social protest in the past year. It would be a mistake to believe that because their weekly demonstrations now only gather a few thousand people, the Gilets Jaunes themselves are no longer a headache for Emmanuel Macron. “The Gilets Jaunes aren’t a movement, they’re a symptom,” says a Préfet who received many delegations of his département’s protesters. “They are a clear manifestation of a deep state of discontent, they’re not a coherent party. Among Thursday’s strikers, officially answering a call by the unions, you’ll find many of the same people who were once stopping traffic on provincial roundabouts.”

He points out that, significantly, 60% of the French support the national strike; and that the strikers’ motives and sociology will, in fact, be quite close to the GJ’s. In his view, the current porous anger (superbly theorised by the American analyst Martin Gurri  in his prescient book,  The Revolt of the Public) is expressed in many ways, from the Left to the Right, to the violent and inchoate. The Gilets Jaunes shape of this has run its course; the motivations, which are a mix of reality-based complaints and deep misperceptions, remain.

Paradoxically, Emmanuel Macron’s chief problem may be that he has essentially destroyed any form of democratic opposition. Whenever someone on the Left or on the Right seemed promising, he co-opted them into his Cabinet, and he continues to do so. As a result, voters find themselves inexorable herded toward a single, unpalatable choice. It’s not clear whether Macron has realised that the wasteland he’s leaving in parliamentary politics will drive people away from the democratic process — making them ripe for a Bolsonaro or an Orbán. The scene will be set for a populist to sweep in.

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Is there still room for the Republicans in France?

By Marie le Conte

This doesn’t yet mean Macron won’t be re-elected in 2022. In all likelihood, he will be up against his favourite opponent, Marine Le Pen, but it will be a much closer shave than before. She’ll lose. But not because she is seen as a Fascist danger. She’ll lose because of her incompetence. Her 30-year-old niece Marion Maréchal, whose turn will come five years later, may become the Matteo Salvini of France — within the far more stable Fifth Republic constitutional system.

Like her father, she’s a good public speaker, but her policies have wobbled depending on which adviser had her ear (pro- and anti-“Frexit”; pro- and anti-euro) or where she was campaigning: in her Northern constituency, most of her electorate once worked in mines or textile factories, now closed; and like to hear of more state aid; in the South-East Rassemblement National bastions, the burning issues are immigration and crime. Few believe she has effective policies to change either.

But another eventuality is currently terrifying the Elysée tacticians. These thirtysomething white men who all look and sound like Macron are said to be working on pre-emptively neutralising what they call the “clown candidate“: a possible run by a non-politician, probably a popular performer (TV presenter, actor, singer…), à la Beppe Grillo or Volodimyr Zelensky. It could be what the French public is waiting for.

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What does it mean to be French?

By John Lichfield

Yet on Macron proudly strides — with Europe in his sights. Even though he is struggling at home, the President, a petit-bourgeois liberal, imbued with his own undeniable but narrow intelligence, considers himself to be Europe’s natural leader. Since Germany will be preoccupied with its difficult political transition, facing signs of an early recession, and with the UK gone (the UK will be gone, won’t it?), who else is there, after all?

Some of his arrogance comes naturally, but some is theorised: why would he go against the tactics defined by de Gaulle, and followed by Giscard, Mitterrand and Chirac? The assumption that nuisance value gives you more clout in international politics has always been a mainstay of French power projection. Macron is simply continuing the tradition.

But alienating friends and not influencing people is all too often coupled with a lack of effort to understand how France’s partners think. And given that many decisions have to be taken unanimously by the EU27, it’s hard to see how he’d make a success of European leadership.

Macron does have a unique way of ruffling feathers — from his Nato remarks to his recent veto against EU membership application for both Albania and North Macedonia and his rudeness to Mrs Merkel. It will trip him again and again: the President will never be a team player. So as the country literally grinds to a halt, Macron stands alone with only his ambition and acolytes for company.

A society has its own Patient Zero, a way by which many of its ills can be remedied. Patient Zero is its system of tax.

Taxation, like death, sadly, is inevitable. In all the years since man settled on the fertile plains between the Tigris and the Euphrates, there has never been a civilisation without taxation. In fact, a sense of duty to the greater collective probably existed in the hunter-gatherer tribes that pre-dated civilisation.

Yet there have been good systems and bad systems. Get your system of tax right, and a healthy and happy civilisation, even a great one, will follow. Get it wrong and you get no end of problems, for history is littered with examples of injudicious or inequitable taxation having terrible consequences. It lurks near the heart of virtually every great revolution or revolt.

“No taxation without representation” was the cry of the American revolutionaries. Punitive taxes led the French to rise up against their decadent leaders in 1789, and the English peasants to do the same back in 1381. Perhaps most explicitly, the Philippine Revolution began with the Cry of Pugad Lawin, exhorting rebels to tear up their tax certificates. From Spartacus to Boudicca to Robin Hood to Mahatma Gandhi, the greatest rebels in history were usually tax rebels.

Even today, there is evidence of this — just across the Channel, where heavy fuel taxes have resulted in the riots of the gilets jaunes.

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Pity the poor avocado-eating graduates

By Mary Harrington

A society’s destiny — whether its people will be prosperous or poor, free or subordinated — is determined by the way it is taxed. How much of a labourer’s labour is his to keep? How much is taken from him? The way a society is taxed speaks volumes.

In the enlightened civilisation that was ancient Athens, taxes were voluntary. Liturgy — “public service” — was the means by which the rich shared their wealth with the rest of the city. Not only did the rich pay for essential public works, whether it was a bridge or a warship, they carried out those works as well — on their own terms.

At the turn of the 20th century in western Europe, tax was running at around 10% of GDP, slightly lower in the US. This dates back to the historical norm of the tithe, a tax which goes all the way back to Mesopotamia. Two world wars, however, ended the halcyon days of low taxes.

At the other end of the spectrum, in authoritarian or totalitarian societies such as Soviet Russia or North Korea, ordinary people have virtually no ownership of their labour, their produce or their profit. Government takes it all.

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Don't write Labour off yet

By Matthew Goodwin

The developed world today sits somewhere in the middle of those two extremes. Excluding inflation (itself a form of tax), in Britain nearly half of everything you will ever earn over the course of your life is taken from you in taxes. The most expensive purchase you ever make is not a house, as many believe, but your government. In France the figure is an eye-watering 57%. No wonder the gilets jaunes are so unhappy.

The idea behind social democracies’ high levels of taxation is that wealth is redistributed to equalise life chances — but how successful has that redistribution been? Economic inequality is rampant. Every year Oxfam puts out incredible statistics stating that just eight men own the same wealth as half the world. Billionaire wealth rises at six times the speed of an ordinary worker’s; a CEO makes in a day what his cleaner makes in a year. So much of the unlevel playing field that is the 21st century developed world economy can be traced back to inequitable systems of tax.

About the only way a young person, starting out with nothing, has to better their lot is through their labour — by working — and yet the worker pays the vast majority of taxes: roughly 50% of government revenue in the developed world comes from income tax (in the UK this includes National Insurance) with another 20%, roughly, from VAT. We tax labour constantly and heavily.

The wealth of the super-rich does not derive from their labour, however — with the exception of a few star sportsmen and CEOs. It comes from the appreciation in the value of their companies, their land, their houses, their stocks, their shares, their bonds, their fine art — what economists call their assets. These go untaxed, unless you sell — so most don’t. One group is taxed heavily, the other is not. Inequality is the inevitable result.

Not only is the worker taxed heavily, he is paid in money that loses its purchasing power, thanks to zero interest rate policies, Quantitative Easing, dubious measures of inflation and all the other means by which governments debase money and levy what Milton Friedman called the inflation tax. But these same assets that go untaxed — equities, houses and so on — actually benefit from the debasement of currency, as they appreciate in price. One lot pays, the other benefits.

Modern tax systems — with a few notable exceptions such as Hong Kong and Singapore — are blighted with complexity. The UK is the worst offender, with a tax code that is the longest in the world: 10 million words and 21,000 pages. The code is about 12 times the length of the Bible! Ten million words is more than most people read in their lifetime.

The table below, taken from my Edinburgh Fringe show of 2016, puts that number in some kind of perspective.

The longer a code is, the more loopholes there are. One group have the resources to find the loopholes, especially multi-nationals, and exploit them; the rest of us don’t and so pay more on a proportional basis. The result is inequality.

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Do manifestos make a difference?

By Tom Chivers

Hong Kong proved one of the most successful economies of the second half of the 20th century, going from shanty town to futuristic city-state in barely 50 years. It did so with taxation that never exceeded 14% of GDP, and in which only the very rich paid income taxes. On the supply side its education, health and transport systems are all superior to our own. Its code is 1.5% the length of the UK’s.

Yet it had one tax we do not have — a tax on land value.

With 60 million acres and a population of 65 million, there is enough land in the UK for everybody, in theory, to have an almost acre each. Yet about two-thirds of UK land is owned by fewer than 6,000 people. In many cases they receive subsidies for the land they own; the ownership of prime city real estate is the domain of the few, while an entire generation cannot afford anywhere to live. Yet houses don’t cost a lot of money to build.

We should tax land, not labour! If a politician really wants to get to the root of society’s ills, and make them good, then he or she should focus all their efforts on tax reform. If only all the political effort that has gone into stopping Brexit had instead been expended on reforming taxation, oh, what might have been!

It is from our system of taxation today — bloated, inequitable, antiquated — that so many of society’s ills emanate. But it is also in our system of taxation where the cure lies. Fix tax, and you are on the way to “fixing” society. The rest will take care of itself. Tax is Patient Zero.

Daylight Robbery – How Tax Shaped the Past and will Change the Future is published by Portfolio Penguin.

Michel Serres, France’s most popular, and most widely recognised, philosopher, was a kind of intellectual Johnny Hallyday.

If Hallyday was France’s “national rock-star”, Serres, a bargeman’s son, was France’s national thinker. Both men were similarly besieged with the adulation of their countrymen even though this was an age when French intellectuals were no longer lauded like pop stars.

Serres was unusual for a French philosopher – and unusual for a philosopher of any kind. He wrote best-selling books. He was a purveyor of hope. He adored the modern world. He was very amusing. He had a treasure-trove of anecdotes from his many lives as a naval officer, academic, mountain climber and TV star (of which we will presently hear one, involving President Charles de Gaulle and a giraffe).

Since he died in June, aged 88, two of Serres’ most recent books have re-entered the French bestseller’s list. One of them, La Petite Poucette, was translated into English in 2014 as Thumbelina: The Culture and Technology of Millennials.

The other, its 2017 sequel, c’était mieux avant! (everything used to be better), is currently available only in French.

The two books make overlapping arguments.

No, the world is not going to hell in a hand-basket. Young people are not separated from reality by their mobile phones. They are better informed and more engaged than any previous generation.

Democracy is not doomed. Au contraire, it is the old model of top-down, “tyrannical” or fake democracy, which will not survive the era of social media, Wikipedia and mobile phones.

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Understanding the 'gilets jaunes'

By John Lichfield

Serres saw the gilets jaunes (yellow jacket) movement, which arose just before he died, as a symptom not of typical French grouchery but a sign of a new and welcome popular unwillingness to accept that the “big people” know best.

Long before Greta Thunberg, Michel Serres forecast that the young would save the planet. Unlike their parents or grandparents, he said, coming generations would no longer place the human race on a self-defeating pedestal above other forms of life. They would develop a “Natural Contract” (the title of another book written by Serres 20 years ago) which would re-establish human beings as partners, not destroyers, of other species, both animal and vegetable.

Here is a short passage from c’était mieux avant, which, though clumsily translated by me, captures something of the power of Michel Serres’ writing.

“This is the real law of the jungle – that you must at all costs avoid complete victory. Only mankind fails to grasp this point… As the day of our triumph approaches we will be forced to leave our pinnacle and reduce ourselves to the ranks of other living things if we want to survive… Quickly, quickly or we will die.”

Serres published more than 80 books. He was one of the 40 “immortals” of the Académie Française. He was trained in mathematical, scientific and literary-philosophical disciplines and tried to break down the popular and academic barriers between them.

He detested what he saw as lazy arguments about the dangers of modern communications, social media and the internet. As a son of the labouring classes and a child of the 1930s and 1940s, he hated suggestions that life had been “better before”.

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When exactly was it “mieux avant”, his 2017 essay asks? When Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot were murdering millions? When simple arguments about family and faith disguised widespread violence and sexual abuse? When women spent their lives in drudgery? When unthinking snobbery meant that his working class, south-western accent was mocked openly by his academic superiors and colleagues?

Mieux avant, a short book easily read by anyone with reasonable French, is a kind of socratic dialogue. “Grand Papa Ronchon” (Grumpy Granddad) defends the past. He is opposed, or educated, by Thumbelina, the millennial teenager from his previous bestseller, whose fast-moving thumbs can summon up a world of knowledge denied to her predecessors.

Mostly Serres agrees with Thumbelina. Occasionally he becomes Grumpy Granddad. He excoriates, for instance, the generic ugliness of the mall-sprawl on the edge of all French towns. In that case, he says, life was “better before”.

The two books have been criticised as too optimistic and simplistic – a 21^st century reincarnation of Voltaire’s Dr Pangloss. “All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds”.

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By Peter Franklin

There are many contradictions and counter-arguments that Serres fails to address. He believes the “new dictators” – he lists Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Brexit and Isis – will ultimately be defeated by a new, engaged, well-informed, grassroots, internet democracy. He ignores the evidence that the internet has been exploited by Trump, Putin, Isis and others to impose a new autocracy, founded on fake news. He dodges the possibility that many Thumbelinas are not following world events on their iPhones.

All the same, Serres is a stimulating and refreshing antidote to the pervasive gloom of the age. He says that humanity, to survive, will have to learn to think small. He also believes that only bold and sweeping ideas can succeed.

The importance of thinking big is the point of one of his favourite anecdotes.

In the early 1960s, Serres was a teacher at France’s most elite academic institution, the Ecole Normale Supérieure, when the president of a newly liberated African colony visited President de Gaulle.

Two students at ‘Norm Sup’ stole a giraffe from the ménagerie in the Paris fifth arrondissement. They placed it in a truck and drove it to the Elysée Palace. Questioned by the police on the gate, they explained that it was a present to De Gaulle from the African leader.

To the subsequent fury of “le général” and his then prime minister, Georges Pompidou, the truck and the giraffe were allowed to enter the palace courtyard.

Serres saw two morals in the story. Humour justifies nearly everything. It is impossible to refuse something as big as a giraffe.

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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Have the yellow jackets turned red?

By John Lichfield

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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Why is French democracy so prone to violence?

By Peter Franklin

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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Why Europe can't cope

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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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Is this Marine's moment?

By John Lichfield

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

The British, the Americans – and no doubt the Luxembourgers – are led to believe that they are blessed and distinct among the peoples of the world. And then there is France. French exceptionalism is exceptional.

The French are taught, like Americans, to believe that their nation represents, and even invented, universal values. Like the British, they are steeped from an early age in historic achievement and national entitlement. They acquire effortlessly an Italian sense of cultural superiority.

When President Emmanuel Macron said recently that it was time for France to “recreate the art of being French”, there was merriment abroad and puzzlement at home. When did the French ever stop being French? Why is being French an “art”?  Is Frenchness not also an infinite capacity for protest, division and complaint?

After living in France for 22 years, and bringing up three children in the French school system, I have come to adore France and also to despair of France. I believe that there is a distinct quality of Frenchness – a way of dressing, an aggressively teasing sense of humour, a commitment to good food and pleasure but above all a particular French way of thinking.

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By Peter Franklin

France is a country which has many successes – from cars, to planes, to trains, to wine, to cheese, to health care, to clothes, to luxury goods, to perfume, to football – but loves to dwell on its failures.

France is not one place but many places, some hugely successful, others struggling. France sometimes confuses myths about itself with reality and often seeks to reform the myth instead of the truth. The Gilets Jaunes are guilty of that; so are many French politicians.

France is a country which is, en masse, prone to anger, pessimism and self-destruction but individually devoted to the pursuit of happiness. France is a country which is (mostly) proud of its past but often distrustful of the future.

So what did Macron mean?

Context is everything. He was talking 10 days after the calamitous fire which disfigured Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. He was announcing adjustments to his reform programme which he labelled “Act Two” of his presidency. He announced, in sum, that he planned to contain the five months old Gilets Jaunes rebellion by adopting a more “human” approach to doing what he planned to do anyway.

Here is a full passage from his comments during a two and half hour Elysée press conference:

“We must reconstruct together very profoundly what I would like to call the art of being French, which is a very specific way of being what we are. The art of being French is both deeply rooted and universal, to be attached to our history and our roots but able to embrace the future.”

“It’s an ability to argue about everything endlessly and it is, very profoundly, an ability to refuse to adapt to a world which escapes us, to refuse to yield to the law of the survival of the strongest and to pursue a policy of resistance and ambition, for today and tomorrow.”

Some French commentators said that this was not about the art of being French so much as the “art of being Macron” – a delight in spinning verbal webs which dissolve on contact. Maybe. But the abstraction of such comments is also quintessentially French.

Abstraction – love of the theoretical, the sweeping and the ideal – is hard-wired into the French language and the French character and therefore into French politics. It is a vital component in the “art of being French” and also a part, I will argue, of the “problem of being French”.

What Macron was attempting to achieve with these comments was three-fold. He was using the Notre Dame calamity to wrap himself in the cloak of France’s long history. He was implying that the restoration of French self-confidence and creativity was a sacred duty, like the restoration of Notre Dame. And he was trying to counter the impression – once encouraged by himself but now caricatured by the Far Right, the Far Left and the Gilets Jaunes – that he is a globalist who regards French national traditions and habits of mind as handicap and a misfortune.

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In another part of his press conference, Macron called on the French to “work harder”. He suggested that part of France’s problem was that, on average, the French put in less time creating wealth than other countries.

With impeccable timing, a story emerged to backed this up. Australian engineers sent to France to work on a submarine programme for the their navy have been astonished by the long lunch breaks and extended holidays of their French counterparts. The Australians are used to taking a sandwich at their desks or drawing boards. The French insist on 90 minutes or two hours in a local brasserie.

An OECD survey last year showed – unsurprisingly – that the French spent more time eating and drinking in an average day, 2 hours and 13 minutes, than any other nation. The average is one hour and 30 minutes; Americans take one hour and two minutes.

And yet, the view that the French are somehow lazy or unproductive is wrong, as Macron himself has admitted. In terms of individual productivity, according to the OECD, French workers create more wealth per hour or per day than the Germans.

France’s real problem is that it has a smaller proportion of its adult population in productive work than other developed nations. Early retirement, high youth unemployment and interminable studies mean that France has barely 70% of its 16 to 65 population in work – compared to almost 80% in, say, Britain and Germany.

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Macron said that he was not expecting individual French workers to put in longer hours by abandoning the official 35 hour week or to retire later than the present target age of 62. But he did not grapple with the core problem of how to enlarge France’s narrow, productive work force. Either suggestion would have produced an angry reaction from the moderate trades unions whose cooperation Macron needs to counter Gilet Jaune anger and boost economic recovery in the next three years.

This is a perfect example of how France finds its problems difficult to name or define, and therefore to solve. The country prefers to argue about myths than to confront reality. And the Gilets Jaunes are as guilty as anyone. They have some legitimate grievances but one of their principal complaints – that the rich don’t pay their way in France – is absurd.

Over 56% of French GDP is claimed by the state. The greatest tax burden falls on the rich. France has more “social transfers” from rich to poor, and rich areas to poor areas, than any other EU country. How efficiently such transfers are spent is another question.

Other countries elude problems. France mistakes what its true problems are. The French – and not just the intellectual French – like to construct a theory and then use it to explain the facts. Other nations like to examine the facts and then construct theories.

Sudir Hazareesingh, in his book “How the French think”, traces the phenomenon to 17th-century philosopher-mathematican Descartes and the 18^th-century idealist Jean-Jacques Rousseau. British 17^th and 18^th-century thinkers believed in starting with observable facts. Descartes trusted only the deduction capacity of the mind. Rousseau believed in a perfectible ideal.

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In France, Hazareesingh suggests, the theoretical construct is all. This explains, he says, why French of both Right and Left become so angry about something so seemingly unthreatening (to British eyes) as a muslim headscarf. The concept of the secular French state and the separation of state and religion is inviolable. Thus, a muslim girl wearing a headscarf in a state school or a muslim woman wearing a ‘running hijab’ to go jogging becomes an existential threat to the Republic.

There are, of course, exceptions to French abstraction and idealism. The French are great engineers and you don’t solve engineering problems by theories alone. The French commitment to l’art de vivre is far from abstract. It is physical and immediate – a quite separate strand of Frenchness which goes far beyond the wealthy and leisured classes.

My neighbours in Normandy, a retired car-worker and a retired cleaner, drive 40 kilometres to buy the right kind of mussels, or eggs, or piece of charcuterie. The early Gilets Jaunes roundabout protests turned into festivals of sausage grilling, with sheafs of fresh baguettes and a multiple choice of sauces.

But the abstract French cast of mind is also something which can be found across all classes and all regions. It suffuses the French education system, where kids are taught how to deconstruct sentences from the age of eight.

In all opinion surveys across France, the nation en masse is more pessimistic and dissatisfied than its individuals. Asked if their own lives are going well, French people are likely to say “oui”. Asked if the country is going well, they are almost certain to say “non”.

Personal life is about the immediate and tangible. Politics is about the theoretical and the ideal, which can never be attained. I am not sure that the French habit of mind can be blamed on Descartes and Rousseau alone. Why did French philosophers think the way that way in the first place?

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The best explanation that I have heard came in an interview that I conducted a few years ago with Professor Michael Edwards, the only Englishman ever elected to the Académie Française. Professor Edwards is an acclaimed poet in both languages.

He says that he thinks differently – that he becomes a different person – when he is thinking or speaking in French.

English, he said, is a language which “grips reality”, which follows the contours of events just as an “English country lane follows the contours of the landscape”. France is a language, which “hovers over events like a hot-air balloon” – a more passive language, a more abstract language.

Let me push the argument further, at risk of becoming dangerously abstract myself. I believe the French language and French cast of mind create a predisposition for the ideal and the categorical. This feeds – and maybe partly explains – the French attraction to political violence and social anger.

In France, there is always a principle which has been betrayed; an ideal which has been trampled; an injustice to be fought; a heresy to be exorcised.

Charles de Gaulle famously said that it was impossible to govern a country which had 248 types of cheese. He underestimated the problem. There are over 500 types of French cheese – some people insist that there are over 1,000. What De Gaulle perhaps meant to say is that it is impossible to govern a country which is perpetually, perversely disappointed, a country which constantly demands change and rejects all changes.

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If you look again at the passage from Macron on “recreating the art of being French”, he is wrestling with precisely these problems. How can you persuade such a quarrelsome, demanding nation to square globalism and Frenchness, tradition and modernity, protection and enrepreneurship, risk and continued social guarantees?

In the 50 years since De Gaulle disappeared from French political life, the French have voted for change, one way or another, in every national election but one. Their distrust of all politicians and all reforms has now been magnified by on-line halls of mirrors in the form of ‘anger sites’ on the internet.

But the problem is not new. The ‘art of being French’ and the ‘problem of being French’ were always facing mirrors. Rather than “reconstruct” the art of being French, Macron needs to find a way of deconstructing France’s myths about France, convincing France of its own achievements and reconciling France’s political pessimism with its everyday joie de vivre. Good luck with that.

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 gilets jaunes protests in France are a case in point. Once it was clear that Emmanuel Macron would not be toppled, the British press shifted its attention back to Brexit. With his abysmal approval ratings now recovering, the French President looks much safer in his job than, say, Theresa May.

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That, however, is not the end of the story. For a start, the protests are far from over, and while the British may joke that ‘the French are always revolting’, there’s nothing typical about the events of the last few months.

In an extraordinary essay for the American Interest, Claire Berlinski describes the immense cost of the protests so far:

“According to the police, there have so far been 1,700 serious injuries among the protesters, and 1,000 among law-enforcement officers. In no normal social movement in France do you have violence like this.”

She does add, however, that the “police may well be making things worse by using weapons that cause awful wounds.”

Then there’s the economic cost:

“It is hard to put a precise figure on the economic damage the rioters have done so far. From the Arc de Triomphe to Place de la République, windows have been shuttered, covered in plywood, or smashed. Before the New Year, professional and business associations were suggesting the figure exceeded $15 billion…

“According to the Ministry of Labor, some 58,000 people have lost their jobs or been partially unemployed by the crisis.”

Berlinski also mentions the targeted vandalism of “roughly half of France’s traffic radar detection systems” – considered fair game because the protesters believe “the state was running a speeding-ticket racket.”

Clearly, the protesters consider Macron’s presidency to be fair game too. Indeed, the extent of their fury would suggest that the government is not just unpopular, but also, in their eyes, illegitimate.

But on what grounds? Macron was elected by a two-to-one margin and his supporters have a thumping majority in the French Assembly. Theresa May, Angela Merkel and Donald Trump can only dream of so convincing a mandate.

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But, as Berlinski acknowledges, there is another narrative:

“…critics have been swift to say that Macron is not popular and does not have the support of the masses. This is true: Macron was elected by white-collar professionals who amount to about 20-30 percent of the electorate. He won by default, because the alternatives were so disgusting.”

This is the problem with the French electoral system: it is a generator of negative votes. Both the President and members of the Assembly are elected through a two-round voting process – the top two candidates from the first round going through to a run-off in the second round. This encourages voting for protest parties in the first round because voters know that they can make a more serious decision in the second round. However, that second round may be between two candidates that most of the electorate didn’t vote for in the first. For instance, in the 2017 Presidential election, the combined first round vote share for Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen was just 45 per cent. Thus in the second round, most voters are effectively casting another kind of negative vote – against whichever of the final two candidates they like the least.

But it gets worse. The profile that the first round gives to protest parties has enabled the hard Right and hard Left to build their strength. Even in Presidential elections, there is a very realistic possibility of a protest candidate making it through to the run-off (as happened with Marine Le Pen). This leaves the moderate majority of voters with no choice but to elect the establishment candidate.

Berlinski says this is no argument against Macron’s legitimacy – “a vote against is as valid, electorally, as a vote for.”

Constitutionally, she’s right – but democratically, it’s a disaster. Of course, no electoral system is perfect. First past the post and proportional representation systems have their flaws, but by-and-large they encourage people and communities to make a positive choice for whoever they most prefer.

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The French system, though, is an accident waiting to happen. A slightly different first round result in 2017 could have presented the voters with a final choice between two extreme candidates. What actually happened wasn’t as bad, but is still dangerous. Everyone can see that the system hands all of the power and most of the representation to the ‘knowledge class’, while excluding those angriest about being left behind.

None of this is deliberate – the rules were drawn up decades ago – but they couldn’t be better designed to stoke up resentment.

Yellow-vested hordes had ravaged Paris. There was talk of a civil war. Jupiter, aka Emmanuel Macron, disappeared from public view. He was silent and, some say, scared. He secretly visited the nuclear bunker below the Elysée Palace, just in case.

Three months later, Jupiter is back in his heaven.

He has written a letter, in 24 languages, to the peoples of Europe. He has started a “Great Debate” on the future of France. He has soared, modestly, in the French opinion polls from 23% to 34%.

Emmanuel Macron has started talking again. And it seems that he doesn’t know when to stop. He spent 14 hours, a French presidential record, talking to farmers at France’s annual agricultural show. He also regularly spends six or seven hours in his shirt-sleeves answering questions in village halls as part of his Great National Debate.

His 1,700-word letter, or op-ed, published by newspapers in all 28 EU countries, called for radical new common European policies on trade, competition, defence, social media, industrial research, climate and immigration.

What has changed? Could this wiser and bolder Macron put the Yellow Vest rebellion behind him and re-ignite his presidency with an unlikely “mid-term” victory for his centrist party in the European elections in May?

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Might he manage to claim the de facto leadership of Europe as Angela Merkel drifts into retirement? And, with the British awkward squad out of the way, could he reshape the European Union to France’s liking? Could he bring to fruition his vision of a “protective” EU which defends European “economic sovereignty” against China and America and defends European liberal democracy against nationalism, populism and Russia.

To British eurosceptics, Macron’s Letter to Europe and his appeal for an “EU renaissance” was an arrogant imposition – but also a windfall. Here was a man confronted with popular rebellion in France who was lecturing Britain about the “lies and irresponsibility” of Brexiteers. Here also was a French president calling for centralised new policies for defence, climate, migration and research. Here was proof that the EU was frog-marching (no pun intended) its peoples towards a federal state.

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Seen from the French end of the Channel Tunnel, though, there is no contradiction between a Macron who is under populist siege at home and a Macron who is trying to set a new agenda for Europe. The passage in his op-ed attacking Brexiteers – “anger mongers, backed by fake news, (who) promise anything and everything” – was also aimed at the dottier theories and demands of the Gilets Jaunes (yellow jackets). His appeal for a more “protective” EU, devoted to European “economic sovereignty”, was a response to the anti-market, anti-globalist rhetoric of French Hard Left and Far Right.

Macron’s Letter to Europe was – perhaps first and foremost – a Letter to France. It was, in effect, his manifesto for the European elections at the end of May. Even before the Gilets Jaunes rebellion exploded, Macron had incautiously made the European poll a plebiscite on his first two years in office. He had spoken of making the European elections an EU-wide referendum for or against the “leprosy” of nationalism and populism.

He now fights the election on 26 May against the backdrop of the most prolonged period of popular unrest in France since World War Two. Opinion polls put his centrist party, La République En Marche (LREM), neck-and-neck with Marine Le Pen’s far-Right Rassemblement National – at around 22 to 24 % of the total vote.

If LREM tops the poll, even by one per cent, it will make no technical difference to the remaining three years of Macron’s presidency. Having an extra Macroniste Euro MP or two is of little practical importance.

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But it would be a remarkable victory. It would re-launch a presidency which recently appeared doomed to the one-term failure of his predecessors Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande. In no EU country since European elections began 40 years ago has so much depended on the results of a European poll.

To “win” Macron must motivate and mobilise the young, urban, European-minded voters who often cannot be bothered to vote in European elections. His Letter to Europe was, above all, aimed at them.

In past years, the European elections have attracted only 40% of registered voters in France, compared to 70% in national elections. Recent surveys suggest that over 50% of the French plan to vote on 26 May.

President Macron is praying that those “new” voters are young, urban pro-European and pro-Macron and not provincial, embittered and pro-Yellow Jacket or far Right or far Left. He has weathered the worst of the Gilets movement. He has recovered his confidence and has risen in the polls for the first time in a year. But his domestic situation remains fragile and hazardous.

The Gilets Jaunes have lost strength (less than 40,000 turned out last weekend, compared to 243,000 in mid-November) but they have not gone away. They have now protested in French cities for 16 weeks in a row and a special three-day protest is planned for “Act 17” this weekend. They have become a slow-motion insurrection, a weekends-only putsch, which wants to topple Macron and impose a form of grass-roots government via the internet.

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But the violence and anti-semitism of some Gilets Jaunes has eroded much of the public’s support. Furthermore, Macron’s  €10bn package of concessions in December, including extra public aid to people on the minimum wage, took some wind from the yellow sails. Even more important in swaying public opinion, arguably, has been the Great National Debate, an idea that Macron dreamed up in his panic of early December.

But while the debate has thus far proved to be an extraordinary success, it could yet turn into a trap. There will have been over 6,000 public meetings by the time the debate ends next week with hundreds of thousands of contributions submitted on the internet.

In theory, the public’s views will be synthesised by mid-April into a series of proposals on taxation, more efficient government, political representation and the environment. Macron is considering whether he will put these ideas to a referendum in June or September.

The Gilets Jaunes, though, are waiting in ambush. If the ideas which emerge from the Great Debate are bland and minimal (as seems probable), they plan to detonate a second wave of rebellions when the weather turns warmer in spring and early summer. Just in time for the European elections.

But let us assume, though, that he prevails. Let us leave aside the uncertainties surrounding Brexit, and assume that his Letter to France wins the day for him. How achievable is the French president’s vision for Europe?

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His ambition is clear. Macron has called for a conference of EU countries at the end of the year to plot the way ahead; Angela Merkel’s Cheshire Cat-like fade-out from German and European politics does seem to offer a leadership opportunity. But while he can talk a good game, how much can he achieve?

His plans for new EU spending in areas such as health, climate, high-tech research and defence won’t go far. Post-Brexit quarrels already loom on how to fund the existing EU budget and how much of it to spend on agriculture. In these battles, France and Germany line up on opposite sides.

The one area in which France and Germany may see eye to eye, though, is Macron’s ideas for “European economic sovereignty”. He wants to change the EU’s rules on “fair and free” competition to allow the emergence of European industrial and financial “champions” – in effect new “European airbuses” for rail manufacture, batteries, artificial intelligence and maybe banking. He also wants to allow “European preference” in public procurement policies.

The idea is to enable Europe to defend itself against “bullying” by giant Chinese or American corporations in the decades ahead. Some German politicians, including the economy minister Peter Altmaier, agree. Britain would have been fiercely opposed but Britain will, probably, have departed. Other free-market countries, notably the Netherlands, will object but will find themselves isolated.

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By John Kampfner

It is reasonable to expect, in the years ahead, a significant shift in EU doctrine towards long-held, interventionist French ideas. Some progress is also likely on Macron’s proposals (but not entirely his own) for an EU-wide policy to protect European democracies from automated fake-news production lines on the internet. The target here is Russia. Expect resistance from some eastern European countries (Poland and Hungary) but support from others.

There is an intellectual and political coherence to Macron’s European ideas. They are all intended to answer the Great Eurosceptic Question: what does Europe do for us? Even Viktor Orban, the Hungarian Prime Minister, accused by Macron of being part of a “leprosy” of rising nationalism, praised the French president’s letter as a “step in the right direction”.

From trade, to immigration, to research, to democracy, Macron wants to encourage Europeans to see the EU as something that “protects” them. He seeks ammunition to fight the nationalist-populist argument that the EU is a distant, abstract bureaucracy which tramples national interests or values.

But let’s consider and savour the paradox. He talks of creating a Europe-wide backlash against nationalism. He needs European ammunition to win a European election. His European views are, no doubt, sincere. But his most pressing motivation, and the biggest immediate stakes, are personal and domestic – to save his own presidency.

Delors’ address has gone down in the annals of trade union history. Cowed by Thatcher, weakened by deindustrialisation and with membership falling and influence waning, it was a case, for many trade unionists, of any port in a storm.

And in a speech peppered with push-button talk of the ‘social dimension’ of the EEC (as it then was) – how by ‘pooling resources’ its member states would fight the scourge of unemployment, deliver improved workers’ rights, extend collective bargaining and invest billions in areas suffering industrial decline – Delors managed to convince the bulk of a once sceptical movement to fall in behind his vision.

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Could Brexit fix our broken politics?

By Giles Fraser

For some, the love affair between the representatives of British workers and a remote, supranational, explicitly anti-socialist institution stood as something of a mystery. But the relationship should be seen in the context not only of the wider Left’s tribulations around that time, but also its rejection of the old Bennite cause of greater democracy as a central feature of national and economic independence, and in its place its embrace of a more liberal, globalist, cosmopolitan agenda.

What is more of a mystery is that the affair has endured in spite of Delors’ vision turning into an utter nightmare – unemployment is rife throughout the EU area, the monetary union has failed, old tensions have been the rekindled and neoliberal economics is entrenched.

That trade union leaders who stand against austerity, privatisation, the predominance of market forces and unaccountable political and corporate power continue to rally to the flag of an institution at whose core these things are embedded remains, for some of us in the movement, a source of great frustration.

TUC leader Frances O’Grady can regularly be heard demanding the UK stay hitched to the Single Market. This, she says, is the only way to guarantee workers’ rights. But not only does such an argument devalue the historical role played by trade unions in winning advances for workers, it spreads pessimism about what might be achieved outside of the EU in the future. It might also lead some to question the very point of joining a trade union in the first place.

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Why did union leaders abandon the workers?

By Paul Embery

The TUC’s exhortations on this should be taken with a pinch of salt. We shouldn’t forget that, back in the day, it was among the loudest cheerleaders in favour of the UK joining the Euro, warning that investment, jobs, trade and living standards would suffer if we stayed out. It couldn’t have been more wrong.

Despite the working-class playing a significant role in the Brexit vote (59% of voters who perceive themselves as working-class voted Leave, and Leave won greater support in areas with lower levels of income, education and skills), the TUC has all but backed a second referendum – raising the almost comical prospect of the voice of British workers going around the country telling British workers they are wrong.

Its stance over Brexit is, of course, indicative of the movement’s increasing estrangement from the working-class, particularly in those former industrial heartlands where the nostrums of the metropolitan liberal elite have little traction, and something resembling a traditional working-class culture still endures. Tragically, the trade union movement is largely absent from these communities and thus commands no loyalty among their inhabitants. Worse, large parts of the movement’s leadership see these people as a different breed: a mob to be kept in check, their rougher edges smoothed, their ‘reactionary’ working-class views tempered.

It is this mindset which has meant that, despite the TUC having a history of pledging solidarity to internationalist causes and movements, it has uttered not a word and lifted not a finger in support of the gilets jaunes in France. These magnificent protests – an explosion of genuine working-class anger, a guttural roar against an arrogant, detached establishment, enjoying massive support from workers across urban and rural France (and beyond) – have generated not a syllable of support from the representatives of British workers just a few miles across the Channel.

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Understanding the 'gilets jaunes'

By John Lichfield

Why so? Because unlike in, say, Venezuela or Colombia or Cuba or Palestine, the gilets jaunes are the wrong type of anti-establishment protestor. Like those who voted for Brexit, they are just a bit too working-class, too earthy and ‘populist’. Their unrefined views don’t accord with the pro-EU, liberal cosmopolitan agenda, so they must be kept at arm’s length.

And this sums the British trade union movement up. Like the wider Left, it doesn’t do working-class revolts any more. Not real ones. Especially if they are a bit too close to home. Protests will be embraced only if they are fashionable. So while the Soixante-Huitards are still talked about in reverential tones among the British Left, the gilets jaunes are dumped in the basket of deplorables with Brexit voters. God forbid a serious yellow vest movement emerges in Britain. Then the TUC’s priorities would be tested.

Through Brexit, an accidental alliance has emerged between two groups alienated by the modern liberal establishment and holding fast to old-fashioned communitarian, small ‘c’ conservative values: on the one hand the working-class post-industrial towns, and on the other middle-class suburbia. It’s what the commentator David Goodhart has perceptively identified as the ‘Gavin and Stacey’ coalition, an “illustration of a benign independent-mindedness and pride in place that infuses two Brexit heartlands: Essex and ex-industrial South Wales”.

The trade union movement, like the Labour party and wider Left, must, if it is to recover its lost influence, strive every day to win the hearts and minds of these communities.

Less Islington and Camden. More Barry Island and Billericay, please.

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The fake patriotism of the liberal Left

By Paul Embery

Then both sisters, tired of living with a succession of old men, marry new, young, ambitious husbands. In fact, one of the sisters, rarely able to make clear choices, takes two new husbands simultaneously.

These twin hubbies, Luigi and Matteo, are jealous of one another. They are also fascinated by, but wary of, the other sister’s husband, Emmanuel.

The various husbands, being young and ambitious, start to wash the dirty family laundry in public. The result: a stonker of a family quarrel, reminiscent of those seen in Italian movies from the 1950s. The neighbourhood is delighted but also alarmed. Where will this all end?

I speak of the great Franco-Italian quarrel of 2019.

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Why Europe can't cope

By Helen Thompson

On one level, it’s an absurd, sisterly spat which has long been in the making. It’s also a political manoeuvre before the European Elections in May, which are shaping up as the most interesting European elections since European elections began 40 years ago.

But it is also something deeper and, from a European Union viewpoint, darker – a skirmish which portends a wider war for the soul of Europe. Should the Europe of the 21^st century be  based on the supranational EU project which started over 60 years ago? Or should it revert to the much looser cooperation between nations which broke down so calamitously twice in the 20^th century?

France withdrew its ambassador to Rome last week and, pointedly, reminded the world that this was the first time this had happened since Benito Mussolini declared war on France in 1940. It was also the first time since the creation of the EEC/EU in 1958 that one member state had withdrawn its ambassador to another.

There have been a series of jibes, insults and accusations hurled across the Alps in recent months. Most have come from the populist coalition government in Italy and its Number Two – really its de facto number one – Matteo Salvini, leader of the hard-Right Liga party. He accused the French, inter alia, of exploiting their ex-colonies in Africa and stealing their gold or dollar reserves to finance France’s debt. This is the kind of lie-by-exaggeration that Donald Trump might be proud of.

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By John Lichfield

Some of the insults have come from the centrist pro-European French President, Emmanuel Macron. He implicitly included Italy alongside Hungary and Poland when he warned of a “growing leprosy” of populist nationalism which threatened to destroy the EU.

He also said that the populist Italian government was “cynical” and “irresponsible” for closing its ports to African boat people. Then Mr Macron cynically refused to take a boatload of migrants himself.

In recent weeks, the junior leader of the junior Italian coalition partner, the country’s de facto number three, Luigi di Maio, joined the battle.  He championed the Gilets Jaunes or yellow jackets, who have been campaigning, often violently, since mid-November to depose Macron and tear up the French constitution.

Last week he crossed a diplomatic Rubicon. Without informing the French government, he turned up in the outer suburban town of Montargis, south of Paris, for a photo-opportunity with a group of people whom he described as “the leaders of the Gilets Jaunes”.

Mr Di Maio, head of the anti-politics Five Star movement, praised the yellow vests as the French equivalent of his own party: a rejection of perpetual elites in favour of a popular government on the internet, by and for the grass-roots.

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By John Lichfield

Mr Di Maio had not done his homework properly. The group of half a dozen people that he met in Montargis were insignificant figures in an officially leaderless movement. One of them, Christophe Chalençon, is an obscure, far-Right activist who called last year for a military coup against Macron (and was disowned by other yellow vests).

The real leader of the breakaway group of Gilets Jaunes that Mr Di Maio thought that he was meeting is an impressive young auxiliary nurse called Ingrid Levavasseur. She plans to run a list of candidates in the European Parliament elections in May.

Madame Levavasseur was not informed of the Italian leader’s visit to France. She said that the meeting was “horrible”, a “total usurpation”, an unjustified invasion of French internal affairs and the work of a “world of sharks”, including Mr Di Maio. Several “spokespeople” for other tribes of the splintering and re-splintering Gilets Jaunes said roughly the same thing.

As a result, Mr Di Maio, was made to look ridiculous in the Italian and French media. His invasion of Gaul was supposed, Caesar-like, to shore up his weakening position at home in the uneasy coalition with Mr Salvini’s Liga party. The European elections are widely predicted to lead to early Italian parliamentary elections in the summer. If anything, Mr Di Maoio’s botched intervention has made him seem more feeble.

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By John Lichfield

In which case, did Emmanuel Macron and the French government overreact by withdrawing their ambassador to Rome? Maybe.

Part of Macron’s calculation was also electoral. His centrist La République En Marche party is vying with Marine Le Pen’s far Right Rassemblement National for top spot in the French part of the European poll on 26 May. Coming first in European Parliament elections has little practical significance, but would be an extraordinary mid-term triumph for a young president who has been battered by low opinion polls and street protests for months.

Just before the emergence of the Gilets Jaunes, President Macron had declared himself to be the champion of the supra-national European Union model of open markets and open borders, the rule of common laws and democratic values. He positioned himself as the man who would defeat the “anti-European”, nationalist-populist trend – or “leprosy” – which had taken power or a share of power in Italy, Austria, Poland and Hungary.

“Defeat” by Mme Le Pen in the European elections would be a bitter blow for Macron. By taking such a dramatic stand against Di Maio’s calculated – or miscalculated – insult, the French president hoped to galvanise pro-European opinion in France to take the European elections seriously (the usual turnout is around 40%) and vote for his party in May.

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Europe's democratic difficulties

By Helen Thompson

In any case, there were good reasons, or excuses, for France to take such dramatic action. Mr di Maio’s arrival unannounced on French soil to hob-nob with a violent dissident went beyond all the usual tolerated limits of interference by one EU government in the internal affairs of another. Such interference is banned by the EU treaties.

“But, but, but”, British Eurosceptics might well splutter, Macron interferes in British “internal affairs” all the time. On several occasions recently, he has spoken of the 2016 British referendum decision to leave the EU as “based on lies” and impossible to deliver because “you can’t deliver a lie or something that doesn’t exist”.

Isn’t that interference in a British internal affairs? No, not really. If Macron had turned up unannounced at a meeting of British Remainers in, say, Reading, and called for a second referendum, that would have been interference. His comments on Brexit – a subject of vital importance to France and the whole of the EU, not just the UK – were made at public meetings in France.

In any case, the whole of the French mainstream media, Right and Left, has supported Macron’s decision. Mme Le Pen has been left floundering. As a fierce French sovereigntist, should she praise Di Maio for sticking it to the pro- European Macron? Or attack Di Maio for invading France’s political space?

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By Matthew Goodwin

It is difficult to see where the row goes in the short-term. The two countries are bound together by centuries of shared history and culture, and profound economic integration.

Italy is France’s third-biggest market for exports. France is the second most important export market for Italy. French banks hold €285 billion in Italian debt – about a sixth of Italy’s staggering €2 trillion total (130% of its GDP). It is not in the interest of either country to destabilise the other.

Some of the quarrels between the two nations go back a long way. Others have been invented or revived by Salvini and to a lesser extent, until now, by Di Maio.

The finger-pointing on illegal migration started before Macron was elected in 2017 or the Italian far Right-populist coalition took power last year. There are now 5,000,000 foreign-born residents of Italy, compared to 1,300,000 in 2002. Most of the increase comes from absorbing African and Middle Eastern migrants who have crossed the Mediterranean from Libya.

Most other EU countries, and especially France, have been reluctant to share this burden. Salvini called Macron a “hypocrite” last year when he lectured the Italian government on their human rights responsibilities and then refused to admit a ship-load of migrants that was floating in the Med. Salvini also tweeted videos of French police blocking migrants at the French-Italian border.

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There is more. Italy accuses France (starting long before the present incumbents) of picking off Italian business jewels but preventing Italian companies from buying French “champions”. The latest spat is over a Paris-willed, Franco-German challenge to the proposed takeover by Italy’s Fincantieri S.p.A of France’s Chantiers de l’Atlantique – the company which built the Queen Mary 2 and other state-of-the-art cruise liners.

Salvini has also explicitly spelled out long-standing Italian unhappiness with the budgetary rules which underpin the single European currency. He has blamed a “Franco-German axis” which ignores the interests of Southern EU states.

He was forced to back down in December and accept objections from Brussels to the Italian coalition’s attempt to increase unilaterally its agreed annual budget deficit. Cue Italian fury when France was allowed to exceed its limit this year to fund a €10 billion package of concessions in response to the demands of the Gilets Jaunes.  

Salvini also accuses France of sheltering 15 Left-wing Italian terrorists, convicted in absentia for attacks on politicians in the 1970s. And there have been quarrels over Libya, a former Italian colony, where Rome accuses Paris of advancing its national interests.

Mr Salvini’s accusation that France subsidises its own debt by exploiting its own former African countries is rejected by most independent economists. Salvini also claimed that French exploitation of African countries was “causing” the migrant flow across the Mediterranean. In truth, few of them come from francophone countries.

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By James Bloodworth

There was even an unpleasant spat between the media of the two countries when France won the soccer World Cup last July. Italy had failed even to qualify for the finals in Russia. Some Italian journalists suggested that the multi-ethnic France team was not truly French.

Such quarrels are jealousies between EU countries, and have always existed. They did not begin with, or end with, the creation of the Common Market and then the European Union. The difference is that they have mostly been confined in the past to private rows between leaders and public rows in the press.

Salvini, and now Di Maio, and to an extent Macron, have brought these disputes into the open. In Salvini’s case, he has overstated them in emotive language, of the same kind he uses against domestic political foes in Italy. There are resemblances with Donald Trump’s attack-dog “diplomacy” against America’s allies.

Some commentators believe that this is a “good thing” for the European Union. For the first time, they say, it has created a political forum in Europe akin to that of a national stage. The political savaging of today will, they say, become the common European identity of tomorrow.

Alberto Allemano, 43, Italian-born professor of European integration at the internationally-respected French business school, HEC, says: “There is a Europeanisation of the political space. Is that a bad thing? I don’t think so. Usually, the European Parliament elections have been just a collection of national elections where voters expressed their approval or disapproval of national politicians.”

“For the first time, in 2019, two different visions of Europe will confront one another. The European elections will finally be about Europe.”

This is an interesting argument but may be overblown. Will the turn-out in the European elections really be higher? Will voters in France, or other countries, really base their votes more on European issues?

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The West divided: Populism versus liberalism in the 21st century

By Peter Franklin

The darker interpretation of the 2019 Franco-Italian war of words is that the post-war consensus which created the EU is breaking down. These are, after all, two of the founding members of the Common Market, two of original Big Three within the original EEC Six of 1958.

To that you must add the nationalist, anti-democratic drift in Hungary and Poland. You must also add the growing nationalist and anti-Brussels feeling in other member states, including France. In a poll last week, 40% of French people said that they were like to leave the EU (Frexit). Some Gilets Jaunes are fiercely anti-Brussels. Others, such as Ingrid Levavasseur, are pro-European.

Paradoxically, the divisive forces within the EU have been weakened, or at least changed, by Brexit. The messy and contentious British withdrawal – the doubts about how, or even if, Brexit can happen – have discredited the full-frontal, anti-EU arguments in the 27.

But they have not gone away. Through Maldini, Di Maio, Viktor Orban, Marine Le Pen and others they are taking a new form. The Maldini/Le Pen argument is that the EU should be “reformed” from the inside, to make it a looser collection of trading states. For “reformed” from the inside, read dismantled from the inside.

The starting gun for that battle may have been accidentally fired last week in the small town of Montargis, south of Paris.

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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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Could the gilets jaunes topple Macron?

By John Lichfield

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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What's driving this French revolution?

By John Lichfield

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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By Douglas Murray

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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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.

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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).

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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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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

Hundreds of people in yellow, high-visibility jackets blocked the traffic. The police had fled. Six open-top, tourist-buses were trapped. Chinese passengers took photographs with their mobile phones, as if convinced that this was a French cultural event staged just for them.

Corentin and Sylvie were in their early 60s and neatly dressed, except that they too wore the fluorescent, high-viz jackets, which are the symbol of France’s latest street revolution. The expression on their faces said: Are we really part of this. Us? Respectable people like us?

“We have never been on a demonstration before, never in our lives,” Corentin said. “Usually we are sitting at home in front of the television asking ‘who do these people out on the streets think they are? Why does the government allow it?’”

“But enough is enough. This is about petrol and diesel prices, yes, but it’s also about people like us, people not at the top nor at the bottom – people who are sick to the teeth of being punished and fleeced to pay for everyone else.”

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More than 280,000 people blocked streets and roads in 2,000 demonstrations against petrol pump prices across France on Saturday and Sunday. One protestor in Savoie, a woman in her 60’s, was killed when the driver of a blocked car, taking her child to the doctor, panicked and reversed into the crowd. Over 400 other demonstrators were hurt, 14 of them seriously. They were mostly knocked over by motorists who objected to being delayed.

The protesters range from the middle class suburban elderly to the rural poor. Most road-blocks were good-humoured and well-behaved, although there was a scattering of racist and homophobic attacks on drivers who refused to halt, including an incident near Lyon where demonstrators snatched away the head-scarf of a muslim woman.

The uniform of the revolt is the yellow hi-viz jacket, or gilet jaune, which French drivers must carry in their vehicles by law. The protest has no formal leaders or organisation and has refused help from political parties or trades unions. It is predominantly rural and outer suburban, anti-Metropolitan and anti-politician but cannot easily be dismissed as a populist trend of hard-Right or hard-Left.

It has spread like wild-fire from several, unconnected petitions and blogs first posted on social media late last month. Two of the petitions were posted by women – a 50-something hypnotherapist in rural Brittany called Jacline Mouraud and a 30-something commercial traveller in the outer Paris suburbs, called Priscillia Ludosky. Neither had any previous connection with politics.

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Ms Ludosky, 33, moved to the Paris suburbs from Martinique in the French West Indies as a child.  She runs a business selling perfume and cosmetics. Her dreadlocks and fluent, confident voice have become familiar to French TV viewers in the last few weeks.

Intelligent, entrepreneurial, suburban and black, Ms Ludosky is an effective spokeswoman for the yellow jacket movement. She symbolises how hard the protest is to define and how difficult it will be for President Emmanuel Macron to contain or to appease.

“We are a non-political movement that is sick of politics and politicians,” Ms Ludosky said in an interview with UnHerd, just after Saturday’s nationwide protests:

“It started with anger about new taxes on petrol and diesel but it’s about a general, nationwide fury. New taxes and higher taxes in France always seem to land on the people in the middle or at the bottom – pensioners, small business-people, people on low salaries, people in the suburbs or the countryside who have to drive a long way to work.

“Emmanuel Macron promised to be a different kind of President but nothing has changed. We just want him to make an effort for us for once.”

The government hopes that, after letting off steam, the unstructured protest will subside.

No chance, Ms Ludovsky told UnHerd. If the government thinks that it has ridden out the storm, it is in for a surprise.

The movement’s informal ‘spokespeople’ are discussing a rolling series of actions this week, next weekend and into December, she said. There is talk of truck drivers joining the protest. There is a possibility of a mass intervention by farmers – veterans and victors of many a bloody-minded confrontation with government in the past.

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The protest follows a centuries old French tradition of apparently leaderless unprisings by the lower orders, or La France d’en bas. It has been compared to the Jacquerie, the peasant rebellion in the 14th century, or to the 1968 student uprising. The centre-Right newspaper Le Figaro speaks of a Digital Jacquerie, because the movement spread online. There have also been comparisons with the anti-tax, anti-state protests led by a small shop-keeper, Pierre Poujade, in the 1950s, which gave the world ‘poujadism‘.

The French sociologist Alexis Spire cautions that these parallels, as well as comparisons with protest movements in other countries, are misleading. Poujadism, like the Tea Party movement in the US, was an attack on the state and on public spending. The yellow jackets are anti-government-as-usual, but they are pro-state and pro-state-spending. They complain that Paris does not spend enough on rural and suburban roads, public transport or hospitals – while piling heavy, new taxes onto non-Metropolitan France.

The spontaneous protest also reflects the collapse of the traditional French party-political structure. People, like Corentin and Sylvie, protesting in the Place de la Concorde, say they have lost faith in the centre-Right, the centre-Left and Macron’s new centre, to address their frustrations or anger. They also have no faith in the extremes of Right or Left, represented by Marine Le Pen or Jean-Luc Mélenchon (both of whom have tried to muscle in on the protest and have been rebuffed).

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“We are here because we no longer believe that any kind of politicians will help us,” said Corentin, a retired trader in the Rungis wholesale food market south of Paris. “Whoever, we elect seems only to be interested in improving their own salaries and perks.”

Macron came to power 19 months ago riding this anti-party-political wave. He presented himself as a reforming rebel from outside the usual political “castes”. He is now dismissed in rural and much of suburban France as just “another politician” and worse, a technocratic, pointy-headed “president of the rich”.  His approval rating sank this weekend to a new low of 25 per cent.

This pattern is not entirely new. In the last 25 years, Presidents Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande have suffered the same catastrophic collapse in popular support soon after their election. This can, in part, be explained by a characteristically French brand of perversity. The country cries out for “reform”, in the abstract, but opposes all “reforms”.

Something new is happening, however. The yellow jacket protests expose fault lines that stretch well beyond France:  motorists v environmentalists; cities v the countryside and outer suburbs; the working class, the struggling middle, the middle-aged and the old v the Metropolitan and the enterprising young.

The immediate cause of the protest – a steep rise in petrol and diesel pump prices – was not wholly Macron’s ‘fault’.  Most of the rise was due to a global spike in oil prices. This was compounded by a long-standing policy to drive up taxes on car fuel, and especially on diesel, for environmental reasons.

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Diesel has been undertaxed for decades in France, in the mistaken belief that it polluted less than petrol. As a result 60% cent of French cars are diesel-powered – a figure which rises to 70-80 % in some rural or outer-suburban areas.

Macron – backed by much of young, Metropolitan France – sees the petrol tax rises as a necessary move towards an oil-free future. The government has been bombarding Twitter in recent days with ads pointing out the health dangers of pollution from diesel fumes and the carbon-emission threat to global warming.

The yellow jackets say that the global warming arguments are being deployed hypocritically. Over 60% of the petrol and diesel pump price in France goes to the government, they complain. Only a small fraction of that goes to pay for better rural public transport or for other environmental projects to prepare France for an oil-free or oil-reduced future. Most goes to the general state budget.

But even before the petrol and diesel prices spiked, Macron was detested by ‘middle France’ for a series of tax reforms intended to make the country more competitive internationally. He abolished part of an annual “tax on fortunes”, to encourage capital investment. He increased a supplementary income tax and applied it to pensioners for the first time to bring the perennial French deficit within the Eurozone’s 3% of GDP limit. These changes may have been justified but they were poorly explained.

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Rural France was also incensed by Macron’s decision in July to reduce the maximum speed on two lane roads from 90 kph to 80 kph. Macron says that this is part of push to save lives in a country which has double the road mortality of the UK, with the same number of people and cars.

Rubbish, says rural and outer-suburban France. It is part of a push to increase the government’s Euros 1bn a year earnings from speeding fines. In their view, the ‘radar money’ goes directly to pay for ministerial limousines and rises in parliamentary salaries.

But there is also a deeper and older issue: a sense that tens of thousands of French people are being left behind, ignored or exploited by the thriving world of Metropolitan France, which includes not just Paris but Lyon, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Grenoble and many other cities. François de Rugy, France’s environment minister – or “minister for ecological transition” – sums up the issue well.

“I see above all the profound anxieties of a peri-urban France, imprisoned in an all-car world. There is an in-between France, which lives neither in the country nor in the town and whose homes are far from their place of work. “

“That France has the impression that they are invisible in the political debate. They have never been given a say in a policy which promotes urban sprawl while failing to address the question of poor rural and outer-urban public transport.”

Rugy is less persuasive when asked what the government can do to address these “anxieties” and appease the yellow jackets. The new petrol-pump taxes in January will not be scrapped, he says. Instead, the government will provide bigger grants for poorer people who swap an old car for fuel-efficient, less-polluting one. There will be tax-breaks for people who drive long distances to work and incentives for ride-sharing.

The French government is hoping that the strength of the yellow-jacket movement – its inexperience, its lack of traditional structure, its disparate demands – will be its downfall. It is also praying for a further downward drift in oil prices to calm tempers.

Priscillia Ludosky believes that the government is mistaken. “They are under-estimating how strongly people feel and how much our movement is growing every day,” she said. “They are judging us by the way that politics usually works in France. But we are not about politics as usual. That is what defines us. That is the whole point.”

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