Leaderless

The last time this happened, according to a French scholar, it produced the French Revolution. There is a certain peril in that.

The marches in the streets and, eventually, the siege on the Bastille began when the most ordinary inhabitants of Paris marched in the streets protesting a severe shortage of flour. Observing the tumult from her palace window, the French queen reportedly asked an aide what the trouble was. Her aide replied that the people wanted bread. Well then, said the Queen, let them eat cake!

Alas, there was not enough cake in the royal kitchen to feed the multitudes. The hungry continued their protests and things just spiraled from there. Soon the mob overran the infamous Bastille, Paris’ main prison.

At that point, they realized they had power. But they had no leaders. There were no ideologues to provide direction to an amorphous and aimless movement of people simply enraged by their own plight.

Into the chaos, the Jacobins stepped in. The Jacobins, led by Robespierre, were a bunch of demagogues who spent their days filibustering at the EstatesGeneral, a quasi-parliament without any power.

Angry mobs and cynical demagogues make for an ugly compound. One thing led to another, culminating in the Reign of Terror where thousands of aristocrats, clergymen and others were sent to the guillotine to be decapitated. In the end, Robespierre himself met his fate by the same machine.

This was a foretaste of the terrible things to come over the succeeding years. A revolution announced for all humankind began consuming its own children and eventually imploding after inflicting much cruelty on their people. The ideologues of the Khmer Rouge were all educated in France and presumably fascinated by Robespierre.

For four weekends running, Paris and several other French cities were rocked by violent demonstrations that shook the political establishment to the core. The participants in these demonstrations had no clear organizational affiliation nor ideological identity.

For convenience, the mobs are simply referred to as the Gilets Jaunes (yellow vests) for the high visibility jackets they wore during the protests. French law requires motorists to have this jacket in their vehicles. This explains why they are so ubiquitous.

The first Gilets Jaunes demonstrations were apparently brought together through social media. The initial participants were lower class and provincial workers who depended on their vehicles for their livelihood. They were protesting a new tax to be imposed on fuel.

Stunned by the violence that erupted in the streets of Paris, including the desecration of several famous monuments, the Macron government reversed course and withdrew the proposed fuel taxes. That did not stop the demonstrations, however.

The last two weekends, the protestors expanded their demands. They protested the deepening inequality and wanted Emmanuel Macron removed from the presidency. Quick opinion polls conducted showed the demand of the protestors endorsed by a substantial majority of French citizens.

Lately, too, middle class professionals and students became more visible in the street protests. The demonstrations were endorsed by the far-left CGT and by the far-right National Front led by the anti-immigrant Marine Le Pen.

This tells us this amorphous protest movement is evolving toward assuming a more ideological form, although the alliance between the far-left and the farright groups will have to be deemed remarkable. We will see how this will congeal – or cause the dissipation of a spontaneous movement because of ideological tensions.

Even more remarkably, the Macron government appears to be trying to appease the protestors by readily granting concessions to them. Macron often strikes a rather Napoleonic pose, conveying a certain firmness in leadership. But his approval ratings have fallen through the floor.

Ironically, Emmanuel Macron swept to power on the back of a social movement, En Marche, which eventually converted itself into the ruling party. Only after taking power did this once amorphous movement develop some organizational form. In the process, this movement swept all the traditional, ideology-based political parties off the board.

Macron presented the French people the option of a truly modern capitalist economy that is supposed to lift standards of living. He was also more pro-EU than his German counterpart Angela Merkel. He was vulnerable on both counts. Building a truly modern capitalist economy in France required dismantling the devoutly held social contract between the state and the people. The last time there were riots in French streets was when a conservative government tried to solve the problem of high youth unemployment by relaxing the country’s tough labor laws.

To the mind of an economist, doing so made eminent sense. But that was horror to a society that saw its complex edifice of social protection as its civilizational contribution.

After two years in power, Macron has failed to improve the lot of the French. Only the richest one percent improved their incomes. The rest were either stagnant or in decline. The issue of fuel taxes runs smack against these statistics.

When things are not going too well, people tend to blame the influx of immigrants for it. This is true across Europe. The large wave of immigration the past few years sparked a strong nationalist backlash that increased the political influence of the rightist parties.

Both the slow response of the domestic economy to Macron’s reforms and his strong adherence to the more hospitable EU attitude toward immigration propel the French leader’s increasing unpopularity. To strengthen his political position, Macron will soon be giving in to every populist and nationalist demand.