The Truth About France’s Yellow Vests

by Erik Svane (January 2019)

Self Portrait in a Yellow Vest, Egon Schiele, 1914

The more laws and restrictions there are,

The poorer people become

The more rules and regulations,

The more thieves and robbers.

—Lao Tzu

Not a single media report I have read or seen about the Yellow Vest demonstrations in Paris and across France has not been slanted by Fake News. The problem is that crucial information has been omitted.

In fact, the imposition of ever harsher rules has been going on for the past decade and a half or so—whether the government was on the right or on the left—and that is why the choice of garb, les gilets jaunes (the yellow jackets), by the demonstrators is particularly ironic.

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Since Emmanuel Macron became president in May, 2017, the extent to which his government has doubled down on repressive road safety measures defies belief.

gendarmes over to these company employees, to take over the business of the mobile radars in their shiny new fleets of vehicles (more below). Meanwhile, other private companies have been receiving similar contracts from city governments, which means that employees earn their keep doing mostly nothing but driving up and down the city streets all day long, while a license plate reader decides which car owners will be getting an automatically-generated fine. Multiple reports of quotas and other searches for profits have certainly not helped.
In May 2018, the number of items required to be examined during a vehicle inspection was increased, as well as the cost of the inspection. These inspections are obligatory every two years.
On July 1, Prime Minister Édouard Philippe ordered what no other country in Europe or in the West (or, as far as I know, on the planet) has done: go against the march of progress by reducing the slowness limit (sorry, the speed limit) on 400,000 km of secondary (country) roads by 10 km/h, decreasing the limit from 90 km/h (56 mph) to 80 km/h (49 mph).

We Are Not Milch Cows!

Take this dynamic outside the Land of the Free, and you can see the war on cars (or, if you prefer to be more general, the war on freedom) factored by two or three. But even in the Old World, there comes a point when the people say Enough!

Indeed, in the New York Post, Anne-Elisabeth Moutet has a choice word for the Yellow Vests: les déplorables:

Their lives are fenced in by an ever-growing skein of nanny-state regulations.

15 Years of a Swelling Surveillance State

Over the years, the radars have become evermore stealthy and insidious. For instance, radars have gone from contraptions being able to photograph a single car on only one side on the road, in the lane closest to the machine (with a burst of white flash quite jolting to the driver at nighttime), to taking multiple pictures over the entire roadway simultaneously of several vehicles driving in both directions.

The first radars were installed in 2003 under President Jacques Chirac and his interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy and, in the beginning, drivers were always warned by a road sign when a radar could be expected ahead (which brought about exactly what allegedly was the desired goal, to get cars to slow down).

An uneventful drive through the Loire Valley, for a Frenchman or for a family of tourists, is hardly as serene as it once was when you can expect a ticket (or several!) in the mail within a matter of a week or two.

Eventually—in spite of the insistent promises of then-interior minister Sarkozy—new radars were installed without road signs announcing their presence.

We have seen the financial aspect of the problem: millions of Euros are spent, and wasted, by the government and by citizens alike on a marginal issue, an entirely self-created problem.

When your money, your license, your job, your very livelihood are at stake, by a ruling élite (deliberately or otherwise) creating paupers and lawbreakers (see the Lao Tzu quote at the start of this article), and when, out of the blue, you receive a ticket in the mail for a totally uneventful drive a week earlier, then you effectively have little recourse but to resort to immorality or, at least, to some ingenuous solutions.

s 1984? Contrarians will protest that la belle France seems like anything but dystopian; how can any foreign visitor to la Tour Eiffel, Montmartre, or the Riviera imagine a vision of a “a boot stamping on a human face”? At the same time, do not forget Ronald Reagan’s words (the “most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help”) applied to, and translated into, la langue française. And what is more helpful to the general public, supposedly, than public transportation? What, au contraire, is more irksome—to a bureaucrat wanting to help—than a self-reliant citizen with his own car and therefore in no need of assistance?

Couple the Gipper quote with what George Carlin said about the United States, applied to the rest of the Western world:

When fascism comes to America, it will not be in brown and black shirts. It will not be with jack-boots. It will be Nike sneakers and Smiley shirts.

What is the Future for the Yellow Vest Revolt?

I have been tear gassed. I have been drenched with the water cannon. I have seen, barely a meter on my right, a fellow Gilet Jaune slammed forward on his face, hit in the back of the head with a cobblestone aimed at the riot policemen facing him.

On December 10, Emmanuel Macron went on television and held a speech where he appeared contrite, and spelled out a number of initiatives, including taking the tax hike off the table (that is now being challenged by a handful of NGOs, including Greenpeace).

Repeal of the parking fine travesty.
Repeal of the vehicle security overhaul.
A repeal, or at least a thorough trimming, of the radar-industrial complex.

In this matter, as Boulevard Voltaire put it laconically, the government has failed to respond—meaning they are not ready to give up their cash cow.

A lot of people are fearing the movement is petering out. Every Saturday, the media seem to be making a point out how fewer people are demonstrating, as compared to the previous week.

From the sounds heard on the streets, this is more Fake News from media outlets that are as much in cahoots with the statists as they are in America, if not more.

If too many people, if too many gilets jaunes, especially, believe the Fake media reports, a grand opportunity for more liberté in France will have been wasted . . ..

______________________

Erik Svane is a Paris-based writer and journalist, the author or co-author of several books, fiction and non-fiction. He has been the main blogger at No Pasarán for the past 14 years and worked in the movie business (behind and in front of the camera). He is writing a graphic novel biography of Abraham Lincoln.

Follow NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast

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