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Dossier #25 du site universitaire CAIRN sur "The gilets jaunes movement". Ce dossier se base notamment sur le dossier "La France des « gilets jaunes »", Le Débatmars-avril 2019, 2019/2 (n° 204).Présentation : "The emergence of the gilets jaunes movement in October 2018 took politicians, union leaders, and commentators by surprise. The first serious analyses appeared in January 2019.The journal Le Débat devoted a particularly rich issue to the movement, from which we have selected an article by the sociologist Jean-Pierre Le Goff. Le Goff suggests that the movement, triggered by a measure of “punitive environmentalism” [. . .] is part of “a sociohistorical trend characterized by the erosion of common morality and the crumbling of the ideological, institutional, and organizational frameworks that once underpinned social life and collective action.”The demographer and historian Hervé Le Bras homes in on an aspect he feels sociologists have neglected: the role of the car in society. He shows us why the car was the trigger for the movement’s development and draws an unexpected parallel with the role of the car in the rise of the National front in 1984.Meanwhile, the Bourdieusian sociologist Gérard Mauger argues that the meaning of the movement has been progressively distorted by the media, through a disproportionate emphasis on its excesses.His colleague Vincent Geisser, a generation younger, regards the outpouring of commentaries that are the subject of his analysis as a veritable “fantasy machine” that “operated in every social sphere without exception”—and particularly in the relationships between the movement and the banlieues, Islam, and immigration.We also welcome the perspective of an American historian with an in-depth knowledge of twentieth-century France. He compares the role of the car in the United States and in France, exploring the distinctiveness of the movement, of a type that seems to him unique to France, while also explaining how it fits into the broader context of the growing gulf in Western democracies between elites and a significant proportion of the working classes. Read the full dossier&#160;A new challenge for democracyIn what ways do the gilets jaunes represent a new kind of social movement, and how can it be explained? These are the two questions that the sociologist Jean-Pierre Le Goff endeavors to answer in the journal Le Débat. Although it concerns very different segments of society, the movement can be compared to others like MeToo and Nuit debout. These movements, “marking a break with the old modes of engagement and traditional intermediary bodies,” Le Goff concludes, present “a new and formidable challenge to representative democracy and the rule of law.” Read More...&#160;Carte blanche given to Michael Seidman“A Precedent: The winegrowers’ revolt of 1907” The  gilets jaunes movement displays the greatest similarities to the sporadic peasant revolts that have erupted unpredictably throughout French history. Peasant movements were not opposed to private property or capitalism per se; instead they demanded state protection for goods produced by their own labor. Like the gilets jaunes today, these protesters showed their fierce hostility to a rapacious state that seemed to be offering more fiscal exploitation than social protection. Read More...&#160;The car—just like yesterday, for the Front nationalThe car was the catalyst for the gilets jaunes movement, but why, exactly? In an article published in the journal Études, the demographer Hervé Le Bras offers a penetrating exploration of this question. He notes that the new, modest tax on fuel that stirred up this hornets’ nest “was the latest in a series of measures targeting personal vehicle use.” Further, “for most ordinary French people, the car represents both a substantial expense and an essential guarantor of freedom.” Read More...&#160;A breach of a moral pactSummarizing three recently published (January 2019) books on the gilets jaunes, the sociologist Gérard Mauger invites us to explore how the movement has been influenced by media coverage over time. Drawing on the work of the sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Patrick Champagne, Mauger emphasizes the fact that “any movement that ‘takes to the streets’ must also ‘take to the page,’ seeking to influence public perception and opinion.” Here, the “page” is the set of media resources enlisted to relate and comment on the facts, chief amongst them television. Read More...&#160;Further reading on Cairn.infoFantasy machines The advent of the gilets jaunes has prompted a torrent of interpretations, many of them one-sided. A sizeable percentage of these interpretations are based on “fantasies of identity,” according to the sociologist Vincent Geisser . In the journal Migrations Société , of which he is the editor, Geisser demonstrates how the temptation to apply a “decoding grounded in identity” that goes against the classic interpretative frameworks of sociology has validated the movement while simultaneously discrediting it. The far right and “nationalists” use it to support the gilets jaunes, while the government and commentators loyal to Macron’s political project use it against them. Read More...