Stolen Trauma

Though the “yellow vest” protests across France are now in their 14th week, clarity has not followed longevity. French politics have entered a turbulent and confused new age. Last Saturday in Paris, the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut was attacked by protesters, who called him a “dirty Jew,” told him “to go back to Tel Aviv,” and warned him he would “die and go to hell.” Police officers managed to protect him from further harm. However, anti-Semitism has now become a regular feature of the gilets jaunes protests, and a march in Paris and other French cities was immediately called by 14 political parties to say “enough” to this dangerous drift in the protesters’ target.

The general confusion extends to the protesters themselves: Since the yellow vests emerged onto the national stage on Nov. 17, 2018, sociologists and political scientists have been busy trying to untangle who they really are and what they really want. Both tasks have proved surprisingly arduous. In both socioeconomic and geographic terms, the protesters wearing yellow vests are a diverse group, hailing from small cities to rural areas, and the so-called squeezed middle on the social strata. That is, they are neither rich nor poor, which in France accounts for a large economic group. Further muddling the picture of their identity are the clear contingents of hard leftists and extreme-right militants in their ranks.

Identity aside, what they want remains unclear beyond their favorite woolly refrain: more public services and less taxes. While the original yellow vest demands on the fuel tax were rapidly met by the government, the second wave of yellow vest protesters seems at a loss as to what they would like to achieve politically. The vagueness of their political program makes it hard to see their protest translating into any fruitful, or permanent, democratic surge.

However, one of the most insidious aspect of this confused age is the way the yellow vests have co-opted and adapted historical language, imagery, and heroism to suit their own needs. In so doing they are bastardizing history in their favor.

The yellow vests like calling themselves “sans-culottes”—the heroic street protesters of the French revolution. To follow that through, French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife would be King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette. Some yellow vests even staged the symbolic beheading of Macron with a doll and animal blood in the southwestern city of Angoulême back in December. They have also called themselves “résistants” and referred to the police as “Vichy,” an unsubtle nod to the Nazi collaborationist police led by Marshal Pétain during World War II. It doesn’t end there; the list of the yellow vests’ fraught historical references is long.

Linguists and semiologists have begun to analyze the peculiar lingua franca of the yellow vests. For one, the protestors talked about being “gassed” by police forces. The use of language was new and unsettling. “On a été gazes,” “We were gassed,” became a refrain on the street. The gassing of which they speak actually referred to the “lacrymos,” or tear gas, used by the police to disperse demonstrators. It is a common police tactic, used for decades and not just in France, of course. This was the first time in public memory that French demonstrators talk of being “gassed.” Adopting this word was jarring. Anyone who has experienced tear gas in a demonstration, however unpleasant, would not typically use this expression for obvious historical reasons: The people we know to have been “gassed” in living memory are those who were assassinated in Nazi extermination camps’ gas chambers. The word “gas” was coined from the Latin “chaos” by the Flemish doctor Jan van Helmont in the 17th century to designate substances “far more subtle or fine … than a vapor, mist, or distilled oiliness, although … many times thicker than air.” Used by the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier in the 18th century, it became a standard chemical term and then a verb widely used in the 20th century, first to talk of the soldiers poisoned by mustard gas in World War I, and then to refer to the attempted extermination of the Jews during the Holocaust. As the linguist Bernard Cerquiglini said in an interview for the daily newspaper Le Figaro on Feb. 4. : “As a citizen, I am shocked. You simply can’t compare teargas to mustard gas and Zyklon B used by the Nazis.”

That sort of semantic outrage has popped up in other instances. Since Nov. 17, the police have faced off with violent protesters who hurl cobblestones, iron bars, pétanque balls, and even bicycles at them. Under French law, the police forces are authorized to use nonlethal weapons to defend themselves in such circumstances. On Feb. 2, the yellow vests demonstrated against police violence and the use of nonlethal riot control guns and rubber bullets.

And, indeed, rubber bullets have injured many protesters—some have lost eyes or hands. Since the beginning of the protests, 1,000 police forces and 1,700 protesters have been injured, a dozen of them permanently.

But what’s new here is that injured yellow vest protesters are not simply protesting, they are calling themselves “gueules cassées” or “broken faces.” The expression is known by most French as the one given to the 15,000 French servicemen facially disfigured for life during World War I. “It is a stunning lack of political and historical knowledge,” Cerquiglini told Le Figaro.

It is also a clear case of historic manipulation to win sympathy. On Dec. 1, 2018, after some yellow vests ransacked and vandalized the Arc de Triomphe and its museum, their supporters such as the essayist Thomas Guénolé tried to explain their actions on social media by asserting that “The Arc de Triomphe is not a symbol of the Republic. It is a monument to the Napoleonic Empire.” The message was that it is legitimate to attack Napoleonic symbols. However, this too is one of the many historical reinventions spread by the yellow vests and their supporters. The famous carved arch was envisaged as a celebration of the armies of the French Revolution and of the empire and, by the time it was unveiled in 1836, it was also a monument of reconciliation. The French writer Honoré de Balzac wrote in his 1842 novel A Woman of Thirty: “The men most exhausted by the fight started between Europe and France had all laid down their hatred after walking underneath the Arc de Triomphe.”

Obscene and absurdist use of language is one of the many features of the yellow vest movement. Its lack of political and historical culture is another. This is not to say that the original movement was entirely devoid of political and social legitimacy. Instead it is to say that the recent mutations of the protests have taken on a decidedly Orwellian newspeak and gone in the chilling direction of rewriting history.