Why Paris is burning
Protests over fuel costs reflect anger toward elites
BESANÇON, FRANCE • The scenes from Paris have been terrifying as protesters marched down the Champs-Elysees, hurling projectiles at police and being teargassed in return in the worst violence to hit the capital in 50 years.
Paris police said Sunday that 133 people had been injured and 412 arrested as protesters trashed the streets of the capital during a demonstration Saturday against rising taxes and the high cost of living.
Charred cars, broken windows and downed fences littered many of the city’s most popular tourist areas on Sunday, including major avenues near the Arc de Triomphe, streets around the Champs-Elysees, and the Tuileries garden. Graffiti was sprayed on many stores and buildings.
Activists wearing yellow jackets had torched cars, smashed windows, looted stores, threw rocks at police and tagged the Arc de Triomphe with multicolored graffiti. Police responded with tear gas and water cannons, closing down dozens of streets and Metro stations as they tried to contain the riot.
Government spokesman Benjamin Griveaux said Saturday’s violence was due to extremists who hijacked the protest, people who came “to loot, break and hit police forces.”
But in spite of the destruction in the capital, it is in smaller French towns and cities like Besançon, nestled in the foothills near the Swiss border, where the anger is most deeply felt.
People here are dependent on their cars, so they are especially frustrated with rising diesel prices and a new gasoline tax — the issue at the core of the national “yellow vest” movement that has produced marches and roadblocks throughout France in recent weeks.
“Ask a Parisian — for him none of this is an issue, because he doesn’t need a car,” said Marco Pavan, 55, who said he has driven trucks and taxi cabs in and around Besancon for 30 years.
“We live on the side of a mountain,” Pavan said. “There’s no bus or train to take us anywhere. We have to have a car.”
Many people here see President Emmanuel Macron as part of an elitist coterie that neither understands nor cares how they live, or how the decline of traditional industry has hollowed out their city and limited their prospects.
“And then there’s the disdain — he openly mocks people,” said Yves Rollet, 67, a Besançon retiree who was passing the time listening to a Bach concerto in his parked car. A yellow vest was visible through the windshield.
Rollet said he participated in last weekend’s protest because he was fed up with how Macron governs monarchically and is dismissive of poor and working people.
Rollet recalled an incident in September when Macron told a young, unemployed landscaper that it should be easy to find a job. “If you’re willing and motivated, in hotels, cafés and restaurants, construction, there’s not a single place I go where they don’t say they’re looking for people,” the president, a former investment banker, said to the young man.
Since his election in May 2017, Macron has been one of the world’s leading advocates for action to combat climate change. He tried, unsuccessfully, to convince U.S. President Donald Trump to remain within the 2015 Paris Climate Accords, and he hosted a second major climate summit in Paris in December 2017.
France has more diesel cars than any other country in Europe. Higher taxes on diesel have been part of the climate bargain from the start, and also have featured in global guidelines for years.
Paris and the surrounding suburbs, meanwhile, have moved to ban older-model diesel cars from their roads. And Macron’s government committed France to banning the sales of all gasolinepowered cars by 2040.
Now, Macron’s opponents on both the far-left and the far-right have lent their support to the yellow vest movement, making the protests easier to dismiss as a politicized spectacle.
Sociologists and antipoverty advocates warn that some of the frustration underlying the yellow vest protests is the inevitable result of decades of social fracture between rural France, increasingly devoid of resources, and France’s prosperous large cities.
“In these territories marked by the absence of a tomorrow, there’s a form of post-industrial despair that’s now gnawing at the middle and working classes who suffered the brunt of the brutal crisis in 2008 and the ensuing budget cuts,” said Niels Planel, a poverty reduction consultant. “To give one example, a young student who just finished her bachelors told me that she couldn’t stay in her home region because, in her city, ‘there is nothing,’ ” Planel said.