21 March 2019
Cut our taxes, Mr Macron
But don’t take away what they pay for.
By Richard Pooley
You may have seen the picture of the black graffito on the pale wall of Cartier’s swanky jewellery store on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris. It was sprayed around the Cartier plaque by a presumably Marxist gilet jaune during last Saturday’s riot in central Paris: “Pas de Cartier pour les bourgeois”. This was a clever play on words. For Cartier, read quartier. “No quarter to be given to middle class people”. Interesting that the writer did not add “ie” at the end; there was space, should s/he have wished to. Not the middle class as an amorphous mass but each and every member of it was in the writer’s line of fire. Literally. Close by, a building was set on fire, briefly trapping among others a mother and child on an upper floor. From what I read they would count as middle-class. Fortunately they were not seriously hurt. There is further irony in the graffito-writer’s words: the original gilets jaunes were often members of the bourgeoisie – owners of small businesses in villages and towns around France who objected to the imposition of higher fuel taxes by Paris-based bureaucrats and politicians.
The number of gilets jaunes demonstrating and occasionally rioting in Paris and major towns across France had steadily dwindled for many Saturdays up to the beginning of March. The original gathering points – chiefly roundabouts – were either deserted or manned by a few dozen rather than the hundreds seen in late November and December. But around 10,000, many more than the Government had expected, protested in Paris on 16 March (and a further 22,000 in the rest of France). Perhaps this explains the strange reaction of the police. They seemed to stand back and let the rioters do their worst, only using water cannon and tear gas after cars and buildings had been set on fire, shops and restaurants vandalised. Had too few police been called up to deal with the rioters? Whatever the reason, the chief of police in Paris was sacked. Edouard Phillipe, the Prime Minister, declared on television that from this coming Saturday protests by gilets jaunes would be banned in areas that had been worse hit “as soon as we see signs of the presence of radical groups intending to cause damage.” So, will violent protests be allowed in areas spared them so far? President Macron, forced to cut short his skiing holiday and return to Paris, seemed to think so, though surely that was not his intention: “I demand that such scenes are not repeated, especially on that avenue.”
Who now are the gilets jaunes? Well, they certainly are not the 45,000 people who were marching through Paris on the same day demanding much tougher action against man-made climate change. This demonstration got much less attention from the foreign media, though it was widely and positively reported in France. Nor are they the thousands of shopkeepers and small business owners who are applying for compensation from the government for the physical and financial damage they have suffered at the hands of the gilets jaunes. The extremists have taken over the gilet jaune movement. The graffito-writer is typical of the extreme left-wing section. Marine le Pen’s newly-named National Rally party has tried, with without much visible success, to harness the extreme right part. If proof were needed that the movement has split irrevocably into two extremes, it was provided on 9 February when they were filmed fighting with each other through the streets of central Lyon. The only thing which both sides appear to share nowadays is a hatred of Jews.
But the reasons why the gilets jaunes took to the roads, roundabouts and streets of France in such huge numbers on 17 November and for some two months afterwards remain the same. And despite all the violence and clear takeover of the movement by extremists of Left and Right, the most recent opinion polls show just over half of the French still support the gilets jaunes. This was and is a tax revolt. France has been here many times before. I wrote about one of the most successful ones, the Poujadiste revolt of the mid-1950s, in an article in Shaw Sheet in January 2017 – A Cry Of Anger From The Back Of Beyond. I gave a link to this in an article I wrote in January this year; I make no apology for giving it again. In the past few months I have gently urged British friends asking for an explanation for what is going on in France to read this. History does indeed repeat itself. And it is not always a farce the second time round, Karl.
That this is a tax revolt has been brought home to me most forcibly in the past week when I returned to France after a four-month absence, the longest since coming to live in the Lot in 2013. I had left on 17 November, the day of the first gilets jaunes demonstration. I was keen to know what my French friends and acquaintances thought of it all. After attending two village markets, two dinner parties, an exhibition in the Mairie and a conference in the village cinema (attended by the Préfet of the Lot Department no less), I can report that there are two things above all making my French neighbours and friends angry: the weight of taxes that they have to bear and the way in which this burden, they are convinced, is avoided by Them, for which read the Paris elite (including politicians of all stripes, not just Macron) and big corporations. I tried more than once in my fractured French to argue what I have argued recently in the pages of the Shaw Sheet: your high taxes pay for a superb health service, free child care, subsidised rail fares, free education up to and including university, huge pensions etc. Nobody wants to listen. Why should they? I’m a foreigner. What do I know?
I spoke to our mayor on Tuesday night. I asked him if he had attended the second session of Macron’s Grand Debat in nearby Souillac in January. He had. And he and the hundreds of other mayors from the region had been impressed by the president’s forceful presentation of his reforms and by his willingness to listen to and, literally, take note of their many gripes. He seemed optimistic that something good may come out of this nationwide debate. I hope he is right to be. That debate has now come to an end and the president will soon have to make good on his promise that he will take account of what he has been told in any future reforms.
His reforming zeal has certainly not waned. His government recently announced plans to reform France’s absurdly generous unemployment benefit system. Under the current rules, someone who becomes unemployed receives between 57% and 75% of their last salary for two years (three years if they are over 55). This is capped at €1,737 per week; and there are 8,000 unemployed who currently get that maximum – €90,324 per year. Any reform of this system will please my neighbour, Martine. She was telling me on Saturday evening of a couple she knows. He hardly ever worked and showed no willingness to get a job but still got unemployment benefit. His wife had a job all her working life. They are both now receiving a pension. Hers is only €100 a month more than his. So, if Macron really wants to please Martine, he will have to reform the pension system too. Or maybe not. Martine, in her late 50s, is still working. Her husband, Hugues, not much older, has been on a railwayman’s large pension since he was 55. And he, and Martine and their son, Pierre, get free rail travel for the rest of their lives.
