 French national holiday celebrating the crucial moment in the French Revolution when the people stormed the medieval armory and political prison that had long stood as a symbol of royal authority and power. And while Bastille Day is now more typically celebrated with Europe's largest military parade and other such trappings of crude nationalism and reactionary state power, I think that it's worth remembering that the Place de la Bastille remains a major popular square in Paris. It's a meeting point for people from all over the city and beyond, and it's a common sight of protest and political demonstration. Given the turbulence in French politics right now, and particularly this matter of the Gilets jaunes and the broader citizens initiatives of recent years, I think it's a really appropriate day for us to be at this conversation. Well, the Gilets jaunes are often referred to as a movement or otherwise sort of casually thought of as a movement. And I think that that really creates some conceptual confusion in how we assess where they are today. Movements are typically built through a dialectic interplay between spontaneity and organization, whereas the Gilets jaunes moment, on the other hand, arose completely outside of organizational structures and largely in opposition to them. While organizing structures did emerge from within the Gilets jaunes protests, none could ever claim to represent the Yellow Vests as a whole. Rather than a movement, I would argue that the Gilets jaunes represent a broad and largely spontaneous uprising of the working classes against status quo politics and status quo power in France. These Yellow Vests, which are carried by all motorists in France, served as a brilliant unifying visual symbol. But they also belied the fact that underneath those vests could be found the whole breadth of the French working class, ranging from revolutionary to reformist to reactionary, and from visionary to very, very detailed to fairly vacuous, as one would expect any spontaneous uprising born out of something as heterogeneous and politically fragmented as the contemporary working class. All of this is to say that when we're speaking of the Gilets jaunes, there is no real they that can be identified as a coherent body in any way that's more specific than how we would address the challenges of they be politically disaffected and discontented working classes. And unfortunately, broadly speaking, the conditions of the French working class are every bit as bad and unsettled as they were in the period immediately leading up to the uprising. In terms of Gilets jaunes protests or manifestations, they do continue, but there has been no big uptick really since spring of last year. There still are people who go out to roundabouts, though the unprecedented repression of the Macron government seems to have had its intended effect. And more recently, the pandemic has made these gatherings that much more difficult. And there are different political initiatives that have been born out of the uprising that are very, very agated. And some of them, again, are revolutionary, some reformist, and some reactionary. In terms of the recent 2020 municipal elections, there were more than 400 citizens lists, and 66 of them were able to win actually either alone or in coalition. And these were variously influenced by the jude jaune. At the most explicit end, we see that in Bordeaux, the new anti-capitalist party was successful in electing a city councilor who was a former jude jaune activist who had lost his hand in the extreme police repression led by Macron's government. More commonly, we see a more diffuse relationship with these citizens lists employing all sorts of different democratic innovation, picking candidates at random, using local assemblies, advancing lists that don't even have specific candidates in some cases. In these cases, we can feel the influence and the spirit of that uprising even where it's not explicitly present. One of the other big takeaways from these recent elections was the highest rate of abstentionism in modern French history from municipal election. And we know from sociological studies that the majority of people who self-identify as yellow vests abstained from voting in both 2017 and 2019. So it's hard to separate correlation from causation, particularly this soon after the elections. But from my perspective, these two facts are clearly related. Particularly looking at this abstentionism, if we make the mistake of viewing the yellow vests as a coherent movement with precise political goals will inevitably be disappointed by that movement's output or its current situation. However, and while I do believe in the importance of voting and what always are people that get involved in voting, I will take this occasion to channel the original spirits of bestial day and say that the ballot box is perhaps not where the yellow vest greatest mark is meant to be left. I view the Gilles Jeune uprising as a crystallization of recent citizens' protests, including the Nuit Abu protests in 2016 and since then the protests against hospital cuts, against a proposed pension reform. Most recently, the protests against police violence and discrimination against black people, as well as the various citizens' conventions and initiatives. And I look at all of these as sort of one body taken together, I think it's a broad constellation of uprisings that serve as a real condemnation of the systems it stands today. These people stand outside of that system, which for too long has not listened to them, just silenced and minimized and distorted and co-opted their many cries for change and they continue to assert their existence, their collective identity and all of its diversity and the legitimacy of their demands. And this constellation of protests, these diffuse but interrelated uprisings most certainly have the attention of Macron and of all of the political establishment in a way that more traditional political movements of the left have really struggled to do in recent decades. This is not a victory in and of itself, but it does provide a new opening to fight the battles for justice and equality that are being demanded. The best deals of today's France, so to speak, are not yet under siege, but more than at any time in recent memory, ordinary French women and men have those contemporary bastions of political power and control firmly in their sights. I'll just say a few words about the citizens' assemblies and more specifically the citizens' convention for the climate, which was convened by President Macron as an outcome of the great debate that he held principally in response to the LOS uprising. This citizens' convention brought together 150 members from French society drawn by lot and given the task to propose measures to reduce national carbon emissions by 40%. And just recently, the 21st of June, the convention presented a formal list of 149 proposals to President Macron. Those measures that they proposed are very broad. They relate to questions of transportation, of housing, consumption, production, work, the food sector, and so on. Specific examples range from railway investment in the introduction of an aviation tax to the inclusion of the Paris Agreement climate objectives in the Canada-EU Trade Agreement, it's known as CEDA. Some of the proposals, as well as the language used, tend to slide into the sustainable development speak of international institutions, which had already proven to be inadequate before the COVID crisis. And it's also true that there is not a whole lot that is new as such among the 149 proposals. But the fact that this coming from a citizens' convention and as a result of social protest is relatively new. And as a whole, the proposals do show a pretty good political orientation that if implemented would radically change France's relationship, not just to climate change, but also to capitalism. Of course, the words, if implemented, hang over the convention's proposals like a sort of Damocles, particularly given the green wave that's supposedly washed over France in its recent municipal elections. I do believe that Macron's Crépovique-en-Marche party, which remains dominant in parliament, will enact some of the proposals made. However, and also considering a recent cabinet reshuffle in which Macron signaled his intentions to campaign to the right ahead of 2022 with its presidential elections, I think we should not expect to see the implementation of changes that fundamentally challenge the dominant role of the market and large capital and French society. So that's a limitation. This result is necessarily limited, I would say. But it's where we find ourselves, not just in France, but elsewhere in the world, if not enthralled to neoliberal political projects like Macron's, then to even more reactionary ones like those of Trump, Bolsonaro, Duterte, so on, within this global context of retreat and defensive positioning. I really do think that both the fact of the citizen's convention and also its recommendation should be commended. After all, it echoed a long demand of various left movements and it's clear that without legitimation and uprising, it never would have come to pass. So I think this is a very good example of the diffuse ways in which the uprising that started last year can really impact French society in a positive way forward.