Les Gilet Jaunes (The Yellow Vests)
“Les Gilets Jaunes” translates to the yellow vests, and symbolizes in our current day, in France, a protest movement. This movement originated because the people of France claim that the current president is “disconnected” with the day to day economic hardships that the working class faces.
One worker claims that “We have enough of it. There is too much tax in this country. I would say that today we are led by vermin and it is sad to see the country taking this direction.”
These protests have posed a problem for Macron and his presidency, starting when he proposed to raise the fuel tax. This protest then took a broader direction where people were protesting about the tax imposed on the wealthy and going as far to demand the president to step down.
This protest started in 2018, with the proposition of the fuel tax as a step to reduce air pollution. The first to protest were those in rural communities where their way of life depends on gas and can no longer profit off of their jobs if they are paying this extra tax for gas and their wages are already lower than those of the people in cities.
The OECD stated that “France is the most taxed economy out of all of its member countries”
In November more than 250,000 people had gathered in cities across France to join the protests against taxes.
In December the protests quickly turned into rioting and left the most reputable places in Paris in ruins.
Due to the influence of social media and the incapability of the government to reason with officials, the cause has gained supporters as the appeal to join the cause is no longer the tax on gas but rather just a “rallying cry” against the government.
When researching this topic I found a lot of similarities with the LA riots, with the idea that the protests started peacefully but when people are not being heard and nothing is being changed the extremist route is taken. This then raises the question of is everyone really fighting for reasonable taxes or are some just happy to take part in the looting and burning of stores and rallying for whichever cause they can find?
Because as we learned about the riots in LA most people were fighting for their rights, but you had many many people who also took the chance to commit acts of violence just because they could and not for any particular reason.
Sources:
http://en.rfi.fr/france/20190426-yellow-vests-protests-macron-announcement-reforms-paris-eric-drouet
This is a super interesting post, I had heard and seen about the riots but never found out why people were rioting. You give good background about the Yellow Vests. Your connection to the LA riots is super interesting and does seem similar. People are taking advantage of the protests to commit violence.
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