[Peace-discuss] Can the Yellow Vests Speak?

[David Green]

Can the Yellow Vests Speak?
*By Édouard Louis <https://zcomm.org/author/edouardllouis/>*
* <https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/can-the-yellow-vests-speak/>Source:
Jacobin Magazine
<https://jacobinmag.com/2018/12/france-yellow-vests-gilets-jaunes-austerity-macron>*
December 10, 2018
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Translation by David Broder

One of France’s most brilliant young novelists, Édouard Louis’s work
emphasizes the daily humiliations and petty brutality of life in small-town
France. A critic of the Emmanuel Macron’s government, he has been a vocal
supporter of the “gilets jaunes” or “yellow vests” protests which have
swept across the country in recent weeks, sparked by a row over rising fuel
prices. In particular, the writer has combatted media attempts to smear the
participants as “country bumpkins” or stupid opponents of progress. In this
text, originally published on Les Inrockuptibles, Louis proclaims that
“those who insult the gilets jaunes are insulting people like my father.”

For some days now, I’ve been trying to write a text on and for the gilets
jaunes, but I can’t do it. Something in the extreme violence and class
contempt that is battering down on this movement leaves me paralyzed. For
in a certain sense I feel that I personally am being targeted. It’s hard
for me to describe the shock I felt when I saw the first images of the gilets
jaunes. In the photos accompanying the articles I saw bodies who almost
never appear in the public and media space — suffering bodies ravaged by
work, by fatigue, by hunger, by the permanent humiliation of the dominated
by the dominant, by social and geographical exclusion. I saw tired bodies
and tired hands, broken backs and exhausted faces.The reason I was so
overwhelmed was, of course, my loathing of the violence of the social world
and of inequality. But also, and perhaps especially, it was because the
bodies that I saw in the photos looked like my father’s, my brother’s, my
aunts’ . . . They looked like the bodies of my family, the inhabitants of
the village where I lived as a child, of these people whose health is
devastated by poverty and misery. Of those people who — rightly —
constantly repeated, day after day throughout my childhood, “We count for
nothing, no one talks about us.” Hence the reason why I felt personally
targeted by the contempt and the violence of the bourgeoisie, which
immediately came down on this movement. For me, as me, anyone who insulted
a gilet jaune was insulting my father.Right from the start of this movement
we have seen “experts” and “politicians” in the media belittling,
condemning, and mocking the gilets jaunes and the revolt that they embody.
I saw the words “barbarians,” “idiots,” “yokels,” “irresponsible” spread
across social networks. The media spoke of the gilets jaunes’ “grunting”:
for them, the popular classes do not revolt, but instead grunt like farm
animals. I heard of the “violence of this movement” when a car was torched
or a window was smashed or a statue was tarnished.

A common example, this, of the differential perception of violence: a large
part of the media-political world wanted us to believe that violence is not
the thousands of lives destroyed and reduced to misery by politics, but a
few burnt-out cars. You must really never have experienced poverty, if you
think that graffiti on a historic monument is worse than the impossibility
of being able to take care of yourself, of living, of feeding yourself or
your family.

The gilets jaunes speak of hunger, of precarity, of life and death. The
“politicians” and part of the journalists reply: “the symbols of our
Republic have been tarnished.” But what are these people talking about? How
dare they? What planet are they from? The media also talk about racism and
homophobia among the gilets jaunes. Who are they kidding? I do not want to
talk about my books, here. But it is interesting to note that whenever I
have published a novel I have been accused of stigmatizing poor and rural
France precisely because I mentioned the homophobia and racism that existed
in the village where I lived as a child. Journalists who had never done
anything for the popular classes were enraged, and suddenly set themselves
up to play the defenders of these same classes.

For the dominant, the popular classes are the perfect representation of
what Pierre Bourdieu calls a class-object; an object that can be
manipulated by discourse, one day represented as the salt of the earth —
the authentic poor — and the next day as racists and homophobes. In both
cases, the underlying intention is the same: to prevent the popular
classes’ speech, about themselves, from ever coming to the surface. Too bad
if you have to contradict yourself from one day to the next, so long as
they keep quiet.

Of course, there have been homophobic and racist comments and acts among
the gilets jaunes. But since when have these media and “politicians” been
so concerned about racism and homophobia? What have they done to combat
racism? Have they used their power to speak out about Adama Traoré [a
twenty-four-year-old black man who died in police custody] and the
committee for Adama? To speak out about the police violence that strikes
blacks and Arabs in France every day? And wasn’t it they who gave
[anti-LGBT activist] Frigide Barjot and countless priests a platform at the
very moment of mariage pour tous [the campaign for equal same-sex marriage
rights] and, in so doing, permitted and normalized homophobia on the TV?

When the ruling classes and certain media talk about homophobia and racism
in the gilets jaunes movement, they are not really talking about homophobia
and racism. They are saying “Poor people, shut up!” In any case, the gilets
jaunes movement is still a work in progress, and its language is not yet
fixed in place: if there does exist homophobia or racism among the gilets
jaunes, our responsibility is to transform this language.

There are different ways of saying “I am suffering.” And a social movement
is precisely the moment where the possibility opens up that the suffering
will no longer say “I am suffering because of immigration and my neighbor
who’s on benefits,” but will instead say “I am suffering because of those
who rule. I am suffering because of the class system, because of Emmanuel
Macron and [prime minister] Édouard Philippe.” The social movement is a
moment in which language is subverted, a moment in which the old languages
can be destabilized. That is what is happening today. Indeed, over recent
days we have seen a reformulation of the gilets jaunes’ vocabulary. At the
outset, we only heard talk of petrol and sometimes unpleasant references to
“benefits recipients.” Now we hear words like inequality, wage rises,
injustice.

This movement must continue, for it embodies something right, urgent, and
profoundly radical, because faces and voices that are usually reduced to
invisibility are finally visible and audible. The fight will not be easy:
as we can see, the gilets jaunes represent a sort of Rorschach test for a
large part of the bourgeoisie. The gilets jaunes force them to express
their class contempt and the violence that they usually only express in an
indirect way. That is, the same contempt that has destroyed so many lives
around me, and which continues do so, and ever more so; this contempt that
reduces me to silence and paralyzes me, even to the point that I can’t
write the text I wanted, to express what I wanted to express.

But we must win. For there are many of us now telling ourselves that we
can’t tolerate another defeat for the Left, which is thus also a defeat for
those who suffer.

Republished from Les Inrockuptibles
<https://jacobinmag.com/2018/12/france-yellow-vests-gilets-jaunes-austerity-macron>
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