- katrin bennhold
So we first got on the train to France.
- clare toeniskoetter
Can we just take this four-person, right here?
- lynsea garrison
Yeah.
- katrin bennhold
France is one of the founding members of the European Union. It had been at war with Germany on and off for centuries, so it was also very invested in the idea of a united Europe. But recently, France has seen a lot of social unrest, the Yellow Vests. They’ve been out in the streets, protesting on roundabouts and in the center of Paris against this young, dynamic new president, Emmanuel Macron, who just a couple of years ago, a lot of people in Europe saw as the next leader of a liberal Europe. And now, there is this really angry movement that is rejecting him and everything he stands for as elitist, as undemocratic even, and somehow as not French — not serving the interests of ordinary French people.
- train announcement
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
So by questioning Macron, this movement is really also questioning Europe.
- [guitar playing and whistling]
- clare toeniskoetter
That’s pretty good.
[MUSIC]
Maybe we should change our tune.
- [guitar playing and whistling]
- speaker
Yeah, it’s finished!
- [cheering]
- clare toeniskoetter
Thank you!
- katrin bennhold
From The New York Times, this is “The Daily.” I’m Katrin Bennhold. Today: France. It’s Tuesday, June 11.
- katrin bennhold
Reims.
- clare toeniskoetter
Reims.
- katrin bennhold
Try again. Reims.
- clare toeniskoetter
Reims.
- lynsea garrison
Reims.
- katrin bennhold
Yeah, good.
- katrin bennhold
So we get off the train in Reims —
- clare toeniskoetter
I can’t do that R.
- katrin bennhold
— in this city in northern France, and in the middle of this region that makes champagne.
- katrin bennhold
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- speaker
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
We grab a cab. And we’re driving into town, because we’ve heard that there’s a group of Yellow Vest protesters who come every day to this one roundabout. And as we’re driving along, the taxi driver pointed out this shuttered factory. And he said, look.
- speaker
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
Here’s an example of a factory that has moved to Hungary, because it’s cheaper to produce there. And guess what? Hungary is also part of the European Union. So this is what Europe is all about. It placed the working-class people of one country against the working-class people of another.
- clare toeniskoetter
So the first guy we meet is unhappy with the European Union.
- katrin bennhold
Yeah.
- clare toeniskoetter
And what did he say about the Yellow Vests?
- katrin bennhold
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- speaker
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
So this guy said he wasn’t a member of the Yellow Vest movement, but he said he supported them. And this is something that the polls show very clearly in France, that more than half of the French people support this grassroots movement against the government and against Europe.
- clare toeniskoetter
Oh, here. Here.
- katrin bennhold
Oh, yeah. There we go.
- katrin bennhold
So we arrive at this roundabout.
It’s basically this massive highway intersection on the outskirts of Reims, in the middle of suburbia. You’ve got these emblematic, big company names around you. You’ve got a big Ikea. You’ve got a K.F.C. And on the other side, a Burger King.
- lynsea garrison
It smells like campfire.
- katrin bennhold
And on one side, in a sort of grassy corner of this roundabout, is a blazing bonfire and a small wooden shelter, clearly handmade, maybe the size of a one-car garage behind, with a French flag blowing in the wind. And a number of people huddled around the fire with their bright, yellow, reflective vests.
- clare toeniskoetter
Bonjour!
- katrin bennhold
So when we first walked up to this group of people around the fire, they looked at us with a little bit of suspicion. And we sort of hung back a little, until this woman approached us.
- katrin bennhold
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- chlo
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
Her name is Chlo, and she was a sort of small woman, but standing very upright, looking very serious.
- katrin bennhold
[SPEAKING FRENCH] I’m just going to read the back of Chlo’s yellow vest. There’s actually a slogan in the back. It says, “Stop Mr. Macron.”
- katrin bennhold
And she’s written anti-Macron slogans on the back of her yellow vest, which she had decorated with a lot of pins.
- katrin bennhold
Macron, you can’t just milk us like cows. Mr. Macron, reduce your own salary.
- katrin bennhold
She told me that she had six kids.
- katrin bennhold
[SPEAKING FRENCH] Cloe has six children.
- katrin bennhold
Something like a dozen grandchildren.
- chlo
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
But she also tells me she’s kind of the mother of the roundabout.
- chlo
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
And she says that she’s been here pretty much every single day since the beginning, November 17, 2018. It was clear to us that if we wanted to talk to anybody else, we had to get her permission. So we asked her, do you think these people would mind if we approached them? And she turned around. We faced her back.
- chlo
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
Do you want to speak to these journalists? Is it O.K. if they take photos and talk to some of you? And everybody nodded and said, O.K., why not?
- katrin bennhold
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- chlo
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- clare toeniskoetter
Who else did we meet?
- katrin bennhold
So we meet a whole cast of characters there.
- micheline
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
We meet Frederick and Micheline.
- frederick
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
This couple of retired vignette workers, who basically spent their entire life making champagne on minimum wage. And now, they’re complaining of back problems after all these years of hard work.
- frederick
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
They’re sort of in charge of comic relief, here. They make everybody laugh.
- rene
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
And we meet Rene.
- rene
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
He’s a retired electrician in a wheelchair. He’s the oldest of 16 children and said that he started working at 14.
- rene
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
He heard about the Yellow Vest movement on TV, last November. Then he came to see it and has been here ever since.
- monique
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
We meet Monique, a retired woman.
- monique
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
Monique has been working for 43 years, she said, and now makes a pension of about 700 euros a month. She tells us that the first time she came to the roundabout, she was just overwhelmed by the kindness here.
- clare toeniskoetter
What else did they tell us?
- katrin bennhold
So a lot of them were telling us how this movement started.
- speaker
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
[MUSIC]
- katrin bennhold
It was last fall when President Macron announced an increase in gas taxes.
- archived recording
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
And this angered a lot of people, and they started posting these videos on Facebook.
- archived recording
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
And they started calling for protests across France.
- archived recording
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
And in one video, someone suggested that people take these yellow, reflective vests —
- archived recording
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
— and use them as a symbol of solidarity. Because in France, everybody is required by law to have these vests in the back of their cars. So very soon, people started gathering across the country for these protests. And they wore these yellow vests.
- archived recording
[COMMOTION]
- katrin bennhold
This idea that gas prices would now be $6 a gallon, roughly, was a slap in the face to a lot of these people, who worked very hard and, as it was, struggled to make ends meet. And it was emblematic of a president who lived in the Paris bubble, in a city with good public transport, who didn’t really have to worry about money nor getting from A to B in a car. So there was a sense that this president was putting these lofty globalist ideas and these European values ahead of just regular French people, who are often struggling.
For working-class people, it was an insult.
- speaker
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
And this became a country-wide grassroots movement.
- clare toeniskoetter
So all these people gather all across the country in Paris, in cities like Reims. What are their goals?
- katrin bennhold
The one goal that unites everybody on that roundabout was that they want to see Macron gone.
- speaker
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
The hatred of this president was so visceral, I’d never seen anything like it.
- speaker
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
It was almost like after Macron, people here were kind of done with leaders. They told me they don’t even want a leader for their own movement. They want direct democracy. They want the voice of the people to be heard. They want referendums, they told me. And beyond that, you can’t even really classify this movement as being either on the right or on the left.
- katrin bennhold
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
This was actually, mostly, an apolitical movement that was just fed up with politics and had become politicized through that.
- speaker
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
And one man I met said he had actually voted for Macron in the last election. And he had had great hopes in him. He trusted him to change France for the better.
- speaker
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
But two years in, he said, he felt completely disillusioned and betrayed by this man.
- speaker
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
He had voted on the left. He had voted for Macron. And now, he said —
- speaker
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
— he was going to vote for Marine Le Pen, this far right politician who has been trying to sell her euroskeptic, anti-immigrant vision of “France first” to the Yellow Vest movement. But my main impression from those conversations on the roundabout was that people were motivated by a desire to humiliate Macron, first, and to basically tear him down.
- speaker
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- clare toeniskoetter
So if they’re not a political movement, what are they actually doing?
- katrin bennhold
So one of the things that they’ve been doing regularly, and the thing that probably most people are aware of, because you’ve seen it on television, is these Saturday marches. And these marches, at times, have become quite violent on both sides, between the police and the Yellow Vests. But then beyond that, and in a very decentralized fashion across the country on these little roundabouts, they will just step into traffic in their Yellow Vests, in little groups. And they will slow down traffic, even stop traffic, and they will engage people.
- speaker
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
And while we were there, this started happening.
- lynsea garrison
Crossing the street. Let’s see what they do.
- katrin bennhold
About half of them start running out onto the street. And they start disrupting traffic, actively.
- [honking]
- speaker
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
And they do it in a very friendly, polite way. They start engaging with drivers, talking to them, handing flyers through their windows. And they say —
- speaker
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
— please, would you mind putting your yellow vest on your dashboard? Thank you. Please, put your yellow vest on your dashboard. Thank you.
- speaker
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
Please, would you mind putting your yellow vest on your dashboard? Thank you. Thank you.
- speaker
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
An so the point of these actions, mainly, it seemed, was to get solidarity from a larger part of the population, beyond the actual movement — to have these very visible signs of support, like the yellow vest in front of their cars, visible on the dashboard.
- speaker
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
Eventually, they started very confidently, casually almost, marching across the street, and singing their songs, and chanting, revolution! And it was a very joyous, very powerful moment, where this small group of elderly protesters in their yellow vests, across this roundabout, with a lot of cars honking in support, and they were crossing the street.
- [commotion]
- katrin bennhold
So then suddenly, the sky breaks open.
- [thunder]
- katrin bennhold
And it’s like the mother of all thunderstorms that comes down on us on this roundabout. It is the middle of the afternoon. And within two minutes, we’re all drenched. It’s pouring down, and thunder, and lightning. It’s super dramatic.
- [shouting]
- katrin bennhold
And basically, everybody laughs and sings and keeps chanting, revolution, and then sort of runs through this incredible downpour.
- [shouting]
- katrin bennhold
And seeks shelter in the tiny wooden hut.
And people huddle together and look outside into the dark sky as this downpour unfolds and comes down on the bonfire.
- speaker
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- clare toeniskoetter
And what’s it like in the shelter?
- katrin bennhold
It was kind of like a microcosm of the French way of life that these people are trying to protect. You had a little bar on the left with coffee, and pastries, and some potatoes.
- speaker
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
You had a sofa on the right with a few pétanque balls on the floor.
- clare toeniskoetter
What’s pétanque?
- katrin bennhold
It’s a bit like croquet. It’s a quintessentially French thing. So on this tiny space, this seven square meters, you have people crowding on the sofa, singing the “Marseillaise,” the national anthem, laughing, chatting and drinking coffee.
- [singing]
- katrin bennhold
It’s all incredibly civilized, and jovial, and incredibly French.
- clare toeniskoetter
I felt so much camaraderie in this room.
- katrin bennhold
Yes. Here we were on this really not very pleasant piece of land. It was muddy. It was noisy, surrounded by highways. And yet, they had created this sort of community.
- clare toeniskoetter
It really felt like a living room.
- katrin bennhold
You sort of wondered whether it was real, that this may be wishful thinking, that there may be a lot of naïveté, that how could this ever get anywhere without leadership, without organization? But there was something so vibrant, and optimistic, and so determined. The simple fact that there was a dozen people who had come to this muddy roundabout every single day since November 17th last year — that, in itself, is an incredible achievement.
- speaker
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
So a lot of people on that roundabout told me they weren’t there for themselves. They said they were there for their children and for their grandchildren. They basically said they were there for the next generation. Now, France doesn’t have the same levels of inequality as the United States or even Britain. But inequality has been rising here, too. And young people are particularly affected by this. Youth unemployment is high, and poverty among those under the age of 25 has actually been increasing in recent years.
So when I spotted a young girl in the back of the shelter, I wanted to talk to her. And so I went over.
- elisa
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
Elisa is 12. Her mother, Helene, is one of the Yellow Vesters.
- katrin bennhold
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
She said she’s really proud of her mom.
- elisa
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
And she said, she’s creating a better world, a world in which people talk to each other more on the streets and spend less time on their telephones.
- katrin bennhold
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- speaker
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
So then, just as suddenly as the rain had started, it stopped. And the sky brightened, and we stepped out. And the fire was still going.
- [fire crackling]
- [singing]
- katrin bennhold
We’ll be right back.
- speaker
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
So by now, it’s 6:30 in the evening, and the girl, Elisa, needs to head home with her parents, Jeremy and Helene. But we want to keep talking, so they invite us over.
- speaker
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- [buzzer]
- katrin bennhold
So we get to their apartment. It’s on the top floor. And when we come in, we find this very sparsely decorated but very homey space. There are a lot of plants. There’s a lot of fabric. And when we get to the living room, the whole family is sitting around the table — Helene, her husband, Jeremy, an electrician, their three children, Hugo, Luna and Elisa. They’re all high school-aged — 18, 14 and 12. And what’s really obvious is that the children really want to take part in this conversation. They’re all taking extra chairs and huddling around the table with us.
- clare toeniskoetter
And their dog.
- katrin bennhold
Their dog! How could I forget?
- [dog barking]
- katrin bennhold
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
So Jeremy and Helene were neighbors as children. They grew up next to each other.
- clare toeniskoetter
In Reims?
- katrin bennhold
In Reims.
- jeremy klein
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
Both of them are from working-class families. Jeremy’s father worked in a factory. Helene’s father was a policeman. And they spoke of a sort of modest but comfortable upbringing.
- jeremy klein
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
They both started working as teenagers. Jeremy at 15, Helene at 16.
- jeremy klein
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
When they first started working, they said things weren’t so bad. Work hours were reasonable. Salaries increased from one year to the next. But at some point, Jeremy, in particular, said that life started getting really tough.
- jeremy klein
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
The thing that made him mad was the eastward expansion of the European Union. He mentioned companies that would come from other countries, Eastern European countries, that were able to undercut companies like his own in competing for contracts.
- jeremy klein
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- helene
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- jeremy klein
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
He mentioned people from those countries eventually coming to France and competing directly with people like him for jobs. And so increasingly, there was a sense that their salaries and their job opportunities were stagnating. Their living standards were stagnating. And when his dad was able to buy a house in his 30s with a young family, Jeremy felt that he can barely make ends meet.
- jeremy klein
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- jeremy klein
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
He struggles to pay his bills. He has to borrow money from his own parents, and he feels humiliated by this.
- helene
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- jeremy klein
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
He seemed tired, frustrated, and he had aged beyond his age. He was only 38 and a very handsome man, but he looked older.
- jeremy klein
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
He said he wishes he could take his children to the cinema. He wants to take them bowling.
- jeremy klein
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
And he summed it all up by saying —
- jeremy klein
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
— we don’t live. We just work.
- helene
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
And his wife, Helene, she said sometimes, she just cries.
- helene
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
There days, she says, when all she has is two euros to cook for five people, two meals. She says she goes to the shop, buys a pack of pasta, buys a pack of bacon, and makes two meals.
- helene
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- clare toeniskoetter
What do they do with all this frustration?
- katrin bennhold
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
So for most of their lives, they’ve stayed away from politics. Jeremy told me that his parents have always voted. And he said, and look where that got us to. So he said, what’s the point of voting?
- jeremy klein
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
So at some point, they start hearing about the Yellow Vest movement. And at first, they really think it’s not for them. Jeremy told us he thought, this is for people on the minimum wage. This is for people who are unemployed. This is for really poor people, he said.
- jeremy klein
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
But then they hear some more about it. And at some point, he decides to check it out, and they go. And it was a revelation for them. They arrived on this roundabout, and they realized they knew a lot of people there. And the ones that they didn’t know, they met. And they discovered that a lot of the people there on that roundabout had very similar experiences to their own. And what I found really striking is how they expressed the sense of relief that they weren’t the only ones.
- jeremy klein
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- helene
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
[MUSIC]
- katrin bennhold
We’ll be right back.
- jeremy klein
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
So over the course of the evening, over and over again, I saw this family that was angry not just with Macron, but with Europe.
- jeremy klein
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
The European Union had caused wage stagnation. The European Union had increased unemployment. The European Union had basically created the sense of a race to the bottom. So Jeremy was pretty clear when I asked him whether he felt European.
- jeremy klein
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
He said, not at all.
- jeremy klein
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
He said, I feel French. Only French.
- clare toeniskoetter
And what about their kids, Katrin?
- katrin bennhold
Luna, who’s 14, sounded completely disillusioned, already.
- luna
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
She said, Europe? What is Europe?
Europe, to me, is not much. It’s just a group of countries trading together.
- clare toeniskoetter
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
What do you want to be?
- katrin bennhold
We ask her what she wants to be when she grows up.
- luna
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
And she told us she would love to work with animals. But then she pauses.
- luna
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
- katrin bennhold
And she said that’s just a dream, and that she’s probably going to end up following into her father’s footsteps and become an electrician. She didn’t feel like she had a choice.
- clare toeniskoetter
And what do you make of all this?
- katrin bennhold
I think, despite all the camaraderie that we saw on the roundabout, and despite the optimism around the table at Jeremy and Helene’s house, this movement has been fading. It’s been dwindling in numbers. And for the moment, it doesn’t look like something that is going to last or grow into something that can lead people credibly out of crisis and provide a future avenue for them, with real, substantive solutions to these very real and pressing challenges. [MUSIC] A couple of years ago, we all saw Macron’s rise. And we thought, here’s a man. And this man made a movement. And now, the question is this counter-movement. Can it make a man? Can it make a woman? Can it make a leader? Will there be somebody, some face to this movement that will take it forward in a more strategic way? But that hasn’t happened yet. And if it doesn’t happen, then the question is, where will this go next? Where will these people go next?
- clare toeniskoetter
Merci.
- katrin bennhold
So ahead of these E.U. elections, I find myself wondering, could the members of this Yellow Vest movement be tempted by the far right? By someone like Marine Le Pen and her party, which stands for these anti-liberal, anti-E.U. values that would address some of their frustrations, but at the same time is so all-consumed with immigration, a subject that really wasn’t something that came up a lot in the conversations with the people we met? So the question, I guess, is at this point, are people in this movement prepared to put someone like Marine Le Pen into power just because they’re so angry with everybody else? And recent polling suggests they might.
- [chatter]
That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Katrin Bennhold. See you tomorrow in Italy.
[MUSIC]