Thread by @ClaireBerlinski

So let me elaborate on some of the points I made in this article about the uprising in France for @CityJournal. city-journal.org/police-handlin… This is all from my notes; there wasn't room to publish everything.

The proximate cause of the rage of the Yellow Jackets was a proposal to raise to fuel taxes. The government has now cancelled the proposal in an effort to calm the protesters. It didn’t work. They are not appeased. This should tell you that the gas tax was not the real issue.

So no, this is not “the first mass uprising against eco-elitism,” as some hopeful Anglophone journalists have suggested. Although there are superficial similarities between these protests and populist movements elsewhere, they are indeed superficial.

France, as Anglophones have been noting since the Norman conquest, has its own culture and history—one so rich in popular uprisings and demonstrations that the French commentariat is not asking *whether* this resembles earlier episodes in French history, but *which* episode.

Should we call this a Jacquerie? (Commentariat decided that was too condescending.) Which one of the dozens of peasant revolts against taxation under the Ancien Régime does it most evoke? My vote: the uprising of the Pitauds against the 1548 salt tax. Others differ.

But there's a long history of peasant revolt against taxation here. No one likes the word "peasant" anymore, but geographically, these are the areas that were populated by peasants, and are now populated by the "rural poor," or "Peripheral France."

Those who see a revolution in prospect here are asking, are the Yellow Jackets the new Third Estate? Is this 1848 all over again? Are the protesters Poujadists? Might this be the 1968 for the middle class? Or is this akin to the 2005 riots?

Perhaps it’s like the 2013 Red Bonnet revolt? What about the Nuit Debouts? Street demonstrations are a normal feature of French life. France emerged from a popular revolution, a fact no French leader can ever forget. The call to rise up in the street against the government--

--is right there in the national anthem: "Aux armes citoyens." If you raise people on that, as your central historic founding myth, it's very hard to say, "Okay, citoyens, but this is different, put those armes back down." So street protests play a different role in French--

political life than they do anywhere else I've been. It's not a constitutional role, but it's almost a quasi-constitutional. They have legitimacy simply by existing: The unspoken (and I think largely unexamined) assumption is that if something’s serious enough--

to get that many people off their lazy, apathetic asses and on to the street, it's serious enough to take seriously. It can't be ignored. So yes, in the way the GOP nomination of Trump made many urban people say, "Goodness, perhaps we do should have paid more attention--

--to parts of the country we usually don't think about much," these protests have made many people say, "Wow. Okay. There's a serious problem in the countryside. We need to think about that." There the similarities end, but that's an important similarity: The rural-urban divide.

The 21st century has not been kind to rural areas in developed countries. This is exaggerated in France because France has since Napoleon been so ruthlessly centralized: everything revolves around Paris; there are no other significant power centers.

Anyway, there's a widespread sense here that if many people off their asses and get out on the street, it’s legitimate for that reason alone: It's part of the French conception of democracy: what they're doing is seen as a legitimate political act, like voting.

And given French history, woe betide the ruler who forgets this. I've spoken to people who actually don't agree with anything the GJs are saying (because it's so contradictory, no one could agree with all of it), but literally, to people who agree with none of it--

--yet they still say they "support" them. You've probably seen that something like 70 percent of France when polled says they "support" them. What does that mean? Well, when pushed, these people say, "We're the country of the French Revolution, you have to support them."

That is, they generally think it's a healthy thing for people with grievances to take to the streets; it's sort of akin to me saying, "Well, I didn't vote for him, but I support the president because he's my president." It's a way of affirming the legitimacy of the process.

(And if you think about it, it embodies just as much confused thought. I didn't vote for him but I support him? It's just like saying, "I don't agree with the protesters but I support them." So that's why the number of people who say they support them is so high.

There's a deep-down sense, too, probably largely unconsciously inherited, that you never want to get on the street's bad side, because French Revolutionaries sometimes win--in fact, they won the *key* revolution--and you don't want to be separated from your head.

So France doesn’t merely tolerate street protests: They are a part of its creation myth and national identity. It goes very deep.

The statistic you want to look at, to know how people really feel about these protests--

--is what percentage of the population thinks Macron should declare a State of Emergency, temporarily suspend key civil rights, and bring in the army. I don't have today's numbers,

I expect they number will go up. But as of last week, it was more than 50 percent.

So, they support the protests, yes, of course, but they'd like them to be arrested without judicial oversight and detained without charge.

It's a bit complicated, as all countries are.