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Paper short abstract

The Yellow Vest protesters who came from the urban periphery to Paris in 2018, first objected to a gas tax and finally confronted the reduction of the welfare state in France. What led Yellow Vests to frame an inclusive vision within a context rife with anti-immigrant and racist options.

Paper long abstract

Under the conditions of the shrinking state in France the party of the National Front, now National Rally, presented a program to classify immigrants as second class citizens with less access to entitlements. In 2018, observers feared that the Yellow Vest protesters, mostly from the urban peripheries of France, would turn to this extreme right party.

Instead the Yellow Vests insisted that the state belongs to the people and that the President was “stealing the state” in the cutbacks of health care and other services. Reflecting a moral economy of the state, they framed the state as belonging to them, paid for by them, and answerable to them. At the roundabouts where they built cabins to spend time together, they claimed their rights to state services, such as health, education, retirement, care for the disabled, and the elderly. My five years of research suggests that through these activities and their battle for a commons, the Yellow Vests built an inclusive sense of community which crossed boundaries of race and migration.

The reduction of state services also causes the degradation of social life. Where the lack of transportation and the closing of local stores and cafes had decimated social interactions, the Yellow Vests recreated communities. The ideologies which emerged from these efforts were based on inclusion. As the protests continued, they did not veer towards anti-immigrant and racist directions, explicit in the second class citizen status, but instead towards a demand for universalistic support for a just welfare state.