THE AFTERMATH:

Glimmer of hope after violent anger

That is why Macron’s plans to raise the gasoline tax, modest an increment as it may seem, was the final straw for so many, the spark that finally set off a seething rage that has been building for years. There was no gas in his car, said Girardin, a carpet-layer who quit a job with a stagnant 1,200-euro a month salary to strike out on his own. But he was no better off now. Weighed down by financial stress, his wife had gone into a depression. “She’s totally closed in on herself,” he said. “We can’t go to the restaurant. All the little pleasures of life are gone,” said Olivier Depourtoux, a night-shift nurse. His parents, after a lifetime of work, were reduced to penury, his father in a nursing home and his mother forced to accept meals from charity. At the roundabout, Laurent Aufrere, a truck driver, was deciding which of that day’s meals to skip. “If I stop rolling, I die. This is not nothing,” Aufrere said. “What’s happening right now is a citizen uprising.”