The revolt of the Gilets Jaunes has been interpreted and analyzed many times in many, sometimes completely opposing, ways. It has been largely viewed, by the right, especially, and most of the dominant media, as a quasi-fascist movement, a form of uncontrollable collective delinquency, in a word: a threat to democracy and existing institutions.

But even among those who were generally sympathetic to social movements, including many activists on the left, reservations about completely new forms of political action and wariness about individuals who do not quite fit in politically have remained very strong, sometimes even leading them to refuse to support what they consider “impure,” “confused” or “unreliable” struggles. That the Gilet Jaunes inspires such reactions shows the extent to which the movement has surprised, embarrassed, puzzled, and even worried people. The Gilet Jaunes, in other words, is a movement that has shaken up the pre-established schemas and the criteria of a well-established “political sociology.”

The main factor that triggered protests, the “carbon tax” on fuel, led some to think the Gilets Jaunes were virulent anti-environmentalists defending the right of drivers to pollute the planet. One thing is certain: this popular revolt is a political event that is significant considering how long it has lasted, how widely it has been supported by the population, how much it has provoked and continues to provoke effects both political and social.

But above all, it is the unique features of this revolt that mark a turning point in social and political history. First, its spontaneous outbreak over social media and its dynamic of self-organization. Second, its sociologically diverse composition of unorganized individuals who often had no prior experience of collective mobilization and who come from a wide range of backgrounds in society — salaried professionals, retirees, unemployed, small business owners — not to mention the massive presence of women. Third, its original forms of action: no longer the traditional union demonstration on the “grand boulevards” of Paris, but instead the occupation of “roundabouts” everywhere in France, and, every Saturday, demonstrations, sometimes violent, in the symbolic bastions of wealth like the Champs Élysées in Paris or the commercial centers of other major cities across the country.

Much discussion has been focused on how to define the movement of the Gilets Jaunes: riot, insurrection, jacquerie? There has been no shortage of lexical suggestions. The main feature of the revolt is probably the breakthrough of voices from below into a public sphere that has silenced them for so long, people of little means usually excluded from any representation, who are ordinarily the objects rather than the subjects of political decisions and economic and financial processes. Yet its most essential feature is that this popular revolt has successfully found new ways to directly and uncompromisingly confront the global neoliberal logic.

What is striking, indeed, is the acute awareness and lucidity of these actors who have not forgotten a thing from the past and who have recognized the continuity running back from Macron to the policies of Sarkozy and Hollande before him. From the outset, very consistently, they have perfectly understood that this logic essentially increases social and territorial inequalities, notably by cutting taxes for the wealthiest while at the same time slashing the social aid and public services on which the poorest rely to survive. It is indisputably Macron’s acceleration of the neoliberal agenda, made intolerable by his provocative statements and contemptuous attitude, that provoked the revolt.

The main outcome of this revolt has been the constitution of a new collective subject who refuses to disassociate the fight for social justice, the struggle for the environment and the search for new practical forms of democracy.

To understand this demand for unity, we must look at the characteristics of the revolt. They are of two kinds. First, although some specialists in political science only want to see it as a supplementary “symptom” of the crisis of representative democracy, we must rather see it more positively as an active, sharp and radical critique of existing political institutions, or instituted politics, with its oligarchical professionalization. Second, rather than looking for traces of past movements in France — hunger riots in the Ancien Régime, sans-culottes, boulangisme, etc. — we do better to focus on the formations of new radical subjectivities resulting from the popular components who had until then been “invisibilized” by their geographic situation, their variety of socioeconomic status, their distance from the political, media and economic system.

These new subjectivities are inseparable from the instituent practices that, precisely, have characterized the movement of the Gilets Jaunes. The revolt has challenged, in a practical way, the methods, modes of organization and classic discourses of social contestation. Many commentators have recognized in this traits of weakness and factors of powerlessness. This critique of the instituted is but the other side of its instituent character, that is, of the invention of new forms of action and organization, which supports Laurent Jeanpierre’s hypothesis, in his essay on the revolt of the roundabouts, that this revolt marks the beginning of a new cycle of social contestation.

Three united refusals

The revolt of the Gilets Jaunes has brutally and directly called into question instituted politics and representation, and it has done so with three simultaneous refusals.

First, the refusal of existing organizations. The movement took off independently from unions and political parties. Moreover, it is a movement that has explicitly refused to adhere to the tradition of the social and popular movements that came out of the worker and socialist — in the largest sense of the word — movements such as they have developed since the 19th century. This, by the way, is why the movement unsettled and disoriented many political and union leaders who did not know what to do with this kind of atypical and “unsanctioned” revolt.

One particularly striking aspect of the movement derives from the fact that the question of capital-labor relations has not been directly presented in the demands, and even the question of unemployment and worsening work conditions has not been central, contrary to numerous other social movements in recent years. The revolt’s target was not “capitalism,” but rather fiscal and social injustice, perceived as what is primarily responsible for making it difficult to live off low incomes. The demands were logically no longer directed at “employers” but at Macron, the state and the “oligarchy,” all unceremoniously mixed together.

Second, the refusal to play the game of elections or the game of delegating “spokespersons.” The revolt refused from the outset to operate within the framework of “representative democracy.” Not only were political parties not invited to participate in the movement, any support of a party was denounced as a “recuperation” or “attempt to co-opt” the movement. As a result, whether they wanted to or not, political parties on the left and on the right kept their distance from the revolt, relegated to the role of spectators in the confrontation between the Gilets Jaunes and the State. The far-left and far-right activists who became invested in the movement most often did so wearing a yellow vest themselves, never openly reclaiming an organization or an ideology.

Third, the refusal of the instituted representation of society that dominant discourses spread and promote. In effect, it was not just the parties, unions and representative institutions which were rejected, but more broadly, the political and media discourses that were supposed to “represent” society. Political discourse, notably, was judged to be too distant and too abstract, that is, too indifferent to “real life,” and thus incapable of signifying the concrete, lived conditions of “people from below.” This refusal of political alienation and objection to “fancy words that mean nothing” were not merely negative.

The Gilets Jaunes sought out a way to articulate a collective voice that could speak out about why it is hard to make a living, social suffering and the social and economic dead-ends that millions of people have run into. By mobilizing the historic memory of the French Revolution, emblems and signifiers like the national flag, the national anthem (la Marseillaise) and phrases like “the People” have greatly helped folks articulate these issues. This collective voice in this way linked daily experiences with the reminder of a founding historical event that people relate to more than the dishonest “blah blah” of politicians.