The protests in France are extraordinary for their breadth of popular support among the people of France (roughly 75% at the last poll). And for their emotional intensity.
The people of France are pissed off.
This is exactly the sort of social unrest that will erupt more and more frequently around the world if the economic and political elites continue to behave as they have. Wealth and power have been stripped from the public and been concentrated into the hands of fewer and fewer people.
The imbalances are extreme and obscene. The elites, living in their own bubbles of exclusion, seem to be utterly clueless about the effects their actions are having on the psyches of the billions who outnumber them.
In other words, history is repeating itself.
Les Gilets Jaunes
Here’s a quick recap of France's protests led by Les Gilets Jaunes, or "The Yellow Vests", to get you up to speed.
In May of 2018, a woman from a “Department” in France (Seine-et-Marne), which is a governmental administrative division below the national level, started an on-line petition on Change.org to protest the new fuel taxes. The petition gathered 300,000 signatures by October.
In parallel, and also not-so-coincidentally located from within the very same department, two men started a Facebook event calling for a protest to “block all roads” on November 17th 2018.
In France there’s a bureaucratic rule that every vehicle must be equipped with two yellow safety vests in the event that the car has to pull over to change a flat. A viral video produced to promote November's road-blocking event, proposed using these yellow vests as a means of identifying and bonding with the protestors (a good idea, by the way, worth noting for future reference should you ever want to start a popular movement).
The Nov 17th protest attracted over 300,000 people. Roads were successfully blocked, though a few casualties occured, most of which were the sorts of accidents that happen when people clog roads that other people are trying to drive on. A pensioner was run over, and a motorcyclist was killed by a van trying to drive around a road block.
Still, all things considered, the protests were far from what could be generally termed as “violent” at the beginning.
by dennisc 
