Yellow Vests: We’re Facing a Revolution!

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Political sociologist at the Emile Durkheim Center in Bordeaux, France

2 Translator

Abstract

More than a year has passed since a series of protests began in France called the “Yellow Vests Movement”. During this period, the dominant image of the official French media of protesters is as follows: They break the windows of stores, shops and banks and create violence and chaos wherever they are. It can be said at the outset that this movement has a fluid, vague identity and that analysts are seeking to understand the logic of the protests more closely. The present text is a translation of Lupine’s journal interview with Vincent Tibrej, a professor of political science at Emile Durkheim Center in Bordeaux, a political sociologist who has been exploring new citizen mobilization dynamics and the transformation of fan relationships in the context of the current generation since 2014. In this interview, he cites the effects of generational changes on the emergence of new types of protests in France, including the specific effects of the emergence and social emergence of the “baby boomers” generation, the effect of lowering social trust in electoral politics, and of Other types of non-electoral politics in the shadow of social legitimization speak of voting mechanisms, the effect of the communications revolution on protests, the points of commonality and differences in the way protests are analyzed in relation to Gustave Le Bon’s model of analysis in “Crowd Psychology”.

Keywords