Mobility Crisis Sparked Movement

SENLIS, France — After more than a month of furious, antigovernment demonstrations across France, it is easy to forget that a gasoline tax set all this off.

A few cents per liter at the pump. A step to address climate change, according to President Emmanuel Macron.

Of course, that is not how millions of workers who depend on their cars saw it.

Mobility is the story of globalization and its inequities. Mobility means more than trains, planes and automobiles. It also includes social and economic mobility — being too poor to afford a car, being rich enough to transfer money out of the country. These are all inextricably linked. The weeks of protests by the Yellow Vests have made that clear.

Many of these protesters, predominantly white working poor and middle- class people who barely live on their paychecks and pensions, are in what the author Christophe Guilluy has called “peripheral France.” The term is meant to imply both a state of being and the thousands of small, struggling cities, towns and rural districts beyond the suburbs of places like Paris, Bordeaux, Lyon or Lille.

“As small businesses have been dying in these smaller cities and towns, people find themselves forced to seek jobs elsewhere and to shop even for basic goods in malls,” said Alexis Spire, a French sociologist. “They need cars to survive, because regional trains and buses have declined or no longer serve them. Once you begin to unpack the Yellow Vest phenomenon, the uprising is a lot about mobility.”

Experts have been drawing parallels between the Yellow Vests and the social rifts exposed by Donald J. Trump’s election in the United States and Britain’s plan to leave the European Union. But there are also larger trends at work in France,