I’m sorry for my ignorance, but could you please explain why the protests started?. I tried looking it up on YouTube and the like but it’s a little......... all over the place. Plus I’d like to hear it from your side. Thank you 💛
(also answering people in the notes of the original post: @theinconvenientlifestyle @crimsonphaquer)
Sure, it’s ok, thank you for paying attention to what’s happening. It’s making me hope to see so many people sharing what we’re suffering through. The more people know, the less my government can afford to fuck up. The reason why it’s confusing, it’s because the protests started against a law and are now against a wildly different thing that is linked a lot more to French society and protesting against the violences we endure every week. Also, keep in mind I’m just one person, and I’m constantly switching between two languages when I write those posts because the vocabulary I’m familiar with during protests doesn’t always translate well. Might I also add that there are some protesters who don’t follow the general reasons why people are protesting, but what I’m explaining here goes for the vast majority.
So, when it started, the yellow jacket movement was a response to a law the government wanted to pass, which would increase the price of car gas through a tax that is originally for the environement. Which, great, I’m all for it. The problem is, that instead of taxing, let’s say, oil companies, that tax was reflected directly in the price everyone pays when they’re filling their tank. Now that ties into French society in a special way. Because of History, France is a very unbalanced country. I’m not going into details because that’s an entire essay in and of itself, but Paris is nothing like the rest of France, and most people don’t view parisiens as French, and parisiens don’t view the rest of France as being the same as them. That also translates into the fact that most jobs are centralized so the average French has to take the car an insane amount every day, and that tax was so ridiculously high when you take into account just how much people drive, that most people would pay more in gas than rent every month. That made a lot of people angry, especially because as the government was talking about being eco-friendly and taxing polluting gas and blablabla, it was also signing nuclear agreements and making a bunch of extremely eco-unfriendly deals all over the place.
You must have heard somewhere that we like our strikes. We do. So when the tax was announced, the yellow jacket movement was created, and we striked. The protests were pretty mild, they were kept within the boundaries of “a few hours each saturday” for the first few weeks. But then Macron announced that he would cancel the wealthy tax (the one that makes millionaires pay an amount of tax that makes sense considering how much they make each year). That really pissed people off. So now they were protesting for the gas, and the fact that Macron was appealing to the rich by removing the tax. But the thing you gotta understand, is that this had been brewing for a long time. Two years ago, there was a nationwide movement against a law that was eventually passed through a measure called 49:3 which is a dictatorial measure that allows the government to pass any law that congress disapproves of if they say it’s important enough (spoiler alert: it wasn’t, it was a law to fuck over people who work jobs on the side, the youth joining the work force, etc.). Then last year there was the student protest that I covered here, which ended in so much violence that people my age were sent to the hospital and high-schoolers and middle-schoolers were protesting with us (uni students) and facing the police. You can’t even imagine how many times I’ve heard from my parents, my family, my family’s friends, my teachers, even my doctor, that “it’s going to break someday. You’ll see, one day, it’s going to explode.”
I’ve been hearing that for at least five years. Five years of adults oblivious to the way they were grooming my generation to be angry, to be weary, to be suspicious of everything the government was doing, until we started it all two years ago, and now here we are.
But you may think, how did it go from protesting two taxes to the blood bath that it is now? Police violence, is how it happened. Or, to go back even further, it’s a story of how the government fucked up. They thought that sending the CRS (security police) would calm the protests and they would eventually die down. What happened was police officers fucking up repeatedly, until the government was forced to recognize what was happening and apologize, but by then there had been too many injured, too much fucking up from the gov not owning up to their mistake and the police saying they never hurt anyone (when we had freaking video evidence). And as the weeks went by, it shifted from the gas tax (that Macron cancelled in hopes of calming things down, but too late) to protesting against police violence, against the unfairness of how we’re treated, against the laws the police itself is breaking multiple times a month. And now, it’s not even about why we’re fighting, it’s about fighting period. That’s why I said in the post that this is a civil war. Because the reason we fight now, is to defend ourselves. Because if we stop going into the street, we’re dead. They’ll pass laws to silence us, laws to forbid us from protesting, laws that protect the police when they do things like drag me and my friends by the hair and order minors to kneel in rows, hands behind their heads, while pointing guns at them like we’re in fucking Nazi Germany.
Right now, it’s a fight between us and them, the people vs. the power, and does that not stink of civil war to you?