France, from the society of movements to the repression of protest

Olivier Filleule presents his research on French movements and police, a point of view that helps explain the country’s political crisis

Olivier Fillieule studies and researches social movements and street dynamics in the field, the interactions between police and protesters and how these evolve. In recent years, he has conducted research on the Gilet Jaune, the spontaneous protest movement that grew in 2018. The sociologist, the first visiting scholar at the Ciampi Institute for 2025, has dealt with these issues and the methodology for approaching them in his lectures. We asked him to talk about the results of his research which are intertwined with the institutional and political crisis that France is going through. 

Let’s start from the big picture, you describe a shift in the way authorities deals with protest. What was the situation before this shift? A short history of police control of protest

Under the 5th republic the State is not exactly listening, but you had intermediary bodies – Unions, social movements, civil society organizations – that still had power. When you had huge mobilization, the power would not necessarily listen, but at least respond in some way. Before 2006, political power would cancel bills that were due to be approved after political pressure from below. In 1995, the Juppé reform pension attempt, was withdrawn after a huge movement against it. This was the strategy: resist to pressure and then, if the pressure continued, abandon the unpopular project. This also means that society as a whole had this idea in mind that if something is unpopular and you mobilize, there are serious chances that the project would be stopped. 

After 2006 with globalization, liberalization in full steam and no big political actor against these processes, and the worsening of lower classes socio-economic conditions, governments also affirm that “the street is not government” and things will change in the way of dealing with protest. It took ten years for this statement to become true: some reforms were, as usual, withdrawn. In 2016, which is the year we say things have changed, comes Macron’s resignation as Economy minister under Francois Hollande and announced he was going to run after Hollande decided to cancel the reform his minister was proposing. After that, things change rapidly: first Macron stopped negotiating and discussing with Unions and other intermediary bodies and started 49-3 an article of the constitution that allows governments to pass laws without the parliamentary vote.  After Macron was elected people started thinking that there was no reason to organize mobilization and and when protests happened, they became increasingly confrontational. 

This process of letting the streets down seems to be a moment of transition in a tradition that had somehow recognized the importance of societal mobilization in the national political culture…

There is a traditional culture of protest, but in my opinion the main reason for the number of movements in France is the way power is concentrated in the hands of the president. Demonstrations were the main way for people and opposition to dissent and obtain results, while in other countries you have referendums or coalition governments. The only exception is probably the farmers who have a corporativist relation with institutions.

When did the shift start, what made it happen? 

I think that Macron was the first to announce this shift. Macron always says what he is going to do, during his campaign he published a book called “Revolution” in which he stated things that were going to happen. Sarkozy and Hollande also did implement different ways of addressing and relating to protests, but they did not state it and did not connect it to the broader idea to change the way the State functions, particularly in the realm of social security. Macron did promise that he was going to change. The first step was blaming Europe for the welfare reform, then it became clear that this was also the political will of French political elite. The Yellow Vest movement is the reaction to this and to a government that is seen as betraying lower classes. 

You have also studied the Gilets Jaune and the State’s reaction to that movement. What were its peculiarities and why the State was caught off guard by that way of organizing the protest?

With colleagues, we have been studying this movement for 6 years now, and I must confess that I am still asking myself what was the stark that started the prairie fire. The movement never gathered millions of people, but it gave the impression of being a huge upsurge because it was everywhere and it was occupying roundabouts, a very visible strategy. A very good idea, as the one of wearing a yellow vest to identify. I don’t think the idea that it worked solely because of the role played by social media is the right explanation. Yes, there were calls on the internet, but when I started following the movement at the very start of it, I noticed that people coming from different backgrounds (lower classes and lower middle class, but different paths) were sharing the kind of deprivation they experienced starting from 2006 – the data tells us that from then on things went bad for lower classes. Sharing experiences helped people realize that it was not related to own individual mistakes but it was something widespread. Another important aspect is that those involved with Yellow Vests were not involved in politics or civil society before and this is also why they were not using traditional ways of protesting, they gathered in roundabouts and started walking with no place to go, sometimes on highways, no strategy, no leader. These features caught the police by total surprise. These were demonstrations that were impossible to control, no porte-parole, no way to negotiate on the streets. As a result you had violence. After a huge demonstration in Paris and a few violent acts from the movement, the government decided that it was enough and the movement had to be finished, even using violent repression. It is understandable that in that moment, like with the riots of 2005, the French elites were worried, if not afraid. So, the government promised money for some reform (that never really arrived) and strong repression of demonstrations. In my opinion, the reason for this violent reaction is that Macron was afraid of losing all political capital only one year after being elected and with many other reforms in mind. Another explanation for the violent reaction is the changes in the way police forces are organized and cuts in public spending. In 2017, the number of high and mid-level officers had shrunk dramatically. Another effect of the cuts is that at one point, governments understand it went too far and then launch a wave of recruitment. As a result, the “quality” of recruitment lowers dramatically : the new policemen are more and more similar to the people they fight. At the same time, their training time in school, again due to budget cuts, shrinks. In a nutshell, crowd policing training before was mainly maintenance of order and how to handle situations, now it is mostly on how to protect yourself from legal actions and practical training is much, much less. 

What does the Gilets Jaune movement and the forms of its protest tells us about the crisis of political participation and mobilization in French society? 

Lots of institutions from schools, to associations, Unions, even churches did help socialize people to citizenship. These institutions are weakened both for historic reasons and because of funding cuts. The real thing is though, I think, the growing distrust towards elites. Because of liberalization/privatization, governments abandoned the idea which rose after WWII that the main role of the State was to increase the wellbeing of the whole population. That was never exactly the case but many things went better and people were believing this narrative that their sons and daughter would be better off than them. This climate produces the widening gap of distrust between the elite and the rest. Going back to the Yellow vests, when I say they despise elites I mean politicians, but also professors, journalists and everybody else who would tell you how things work, what to do and how to do it. This distrust has been growing dramatically in the last ten years. Historian E. P. Thompson introduced the concept of “moral economy” that, in a nutshell,  says that there is an implicit contract between the State, the elites and the people. Thompson writes about the Eighteen Seventeen century riots in England, as a revolt against the breaking of the social contract and the increasing of prices due to the enclosure process and a more market oriented economy. In many contemporary protest movements (from the Yellow vests to the Movimento 5 Stelle of the origins) there is this idea that the elites have betrayed the people, breaking the social contract, lying to the people. This distrust extended to all the knowledgeable people. During the Covid-19 epidemic we saw this distrust grow towards the whole health system. With the secondAfter the stupor of the first confinement, the same people I followed and researched on from the Yellow Vests would spill over towards the anti-Vax movement with the exact same rhetoric. All these metaphors and stories (vampires, killing children, etc) which are so strong in the MAGA movement, are linked to a very old imagery and traditions. As soon as people are talking about children being abducted and complot theories like that, you know that the moral economy has collapsed. A good example is the riots in 1750’s Paris, under Louis XV, in a moment in which the moral economy is collapsing, and when stories about the nobility abducting children spread among people. I think we are there and that the concept of moral economy is useful to analyze many movements, which are different, but have this in common. The distrust towards the elites is more than just the people feeling economically insecure. 

Let’s move to the way police relate to protest, what had changed and why?

The first reason for which the police way of acting has changed is resources. The number of officers has been shrinking, while there is a growing pressure. Let’s take the case of the 2005 riots that go on for two-three weeks and the police is overwhelmed. After that one would expect a reaction from institutions and more money put in law enforcement. But there are not enough resources to do that and, therefore, investments are not made in recruiting more personnel, but in buying more powerful devices: flash bombs, new kind of grenades and more recently drones. It is cheaper than hiring policemen and civil servants. Another thing that has changed is the reorganization of the GendarmeriePolice union system. As an Interior minister eyeing the presidency, Nicholas Sarkozy has reorganized  itthe police Union system, and since then the more rightwing of them (Alliance Police Nationale) has been constantly growing and is now the biggest. This process has also changed the relations between the Ministry of Interior and Police Unions, in which, today, we might say that the Union is as powerful than the Ministryen the Union. The third thing that has changed is the shift of the Gendarmerie from the Ministère des Armées and now is under the Interior Ministry. The gendarmerie is a more professional and democratic force than the police. The police prefect of Paris has the whole region under is control and is also very powerful. The last important thing is that because of the lack of professionalized forces the government is using units that are not trained or have experience in the maintenance of order. Against the yellow vests they used the BAC (Brigade Anti-Criminalité) which are trained to arrest drug dealers, their skills are not to deal with protest. So, they used the same harsh methods they would use on the streets against criminals. During a demonstration the police would stand in the face of demonstrations in silence, even when they would be the object of insults, or being thrown objects. Nowadays it’s a confrontation between two “similar” groups. This whole process has made demonstrations more dangerous than before: you don’t see families with kids in the streets anymore, which was not the case in demonstrations a few years ago.

The movements that fight against climate change has also been met with an incredible amount of violence and was also framed as some kind of public enemy. This way of framing opposition this way has two roots: the state of emergency that came for fight against terrorism and the one against hooliganism. In the public discourse (and in judicial repression) the environmental protest is comparable to terrorism.

How deep is the French democratic crisis? Are the issues we have talked about a symptom or a cause of this crisis?

Since the call of special elections from Macron, the situation became blurred. You have the dissolution, the vote and no majority. With no winner you would think that a coalition government would be the rational thing to do. Not in French politics. And the result is a series of mistakes from the president: nominating one prime minister after the other (and I assume that even the Bayrou government won’t last long). These political choices had an effect on the people I research on: for them this is another evidence that nobody listens to the people, who have voted for the extreme right and the left but are stuck with a centre-right government formed by the parties that have lost seats in the elections. For the left and right electorate, for the Yellow Vests, it’s the proof that democracy is in crisis. At the same time, you have this new way of dealing with protest movements that dissuades mobilization.