Dear conservatives: France’s ‘yellow jacket’ protesters are not our friends

I like and respect Sexton, and I also share his belief that President Emmanuel Macron’s policy is wrongheaded here. French gas prices are too high, and Macron’s policy would raise them without adequate cause. And Macron’s stated interest in using gas taxes to combat climate change is quite absurd: Any gas usage reduction is a tiny drop in the ocean of Chinese carbon emissions and their increasing trajectory.

Still, the yellow jackets don’t deserve conservative support. Because at the margin, this is no longer a battle between bad government policy and peaceful protesters against that policy. It’s a struggle between the rule of law and the rule of the mob. The current state of France’s Arc de Triomphe attests to as much. Protesters this weekend decided to desecrate the monument, attacking a statue of the republic’s version of Lady Liberty, “Marianne,” and destroying other statues. A video posted to Facebook shows dozens of protesters marauding through the Arc’s museum.

That protesters would desecrate such a defining symbol of French glory says much about what this movement now is: thuggery veiled as political opposition. But if you don’t think that this treatment of national monuments alone discredits the yellow jackets, then consider their treatment of Parisian persons and property. As the center-left Le Monde reports, this weekend saw hundreds of cars burned out, dozens of buildings or street stalls destroyed, and dozens of injured police officers. Many small business owners have suffered losses during the riots. These things are very poor testaments to conservative values. On the contrary, when one considers that the protesters are also calling for the re-institution of a wealth tax, and of massive new government spending, it’s clear that the yellow jackets aren’t conservative.

But that agenda speaks to something: the fact that that what’s really going on here is a rebellion against Macron’s reform program. While Macron has successfully passed some economic reforms to open up France’s statist economy to greater competition and higher growth, the dividends have yet to show. In part this is because Macron hasn’t been bold enough with his reforms. But it’s also because Macron retains a hardheadedness that, whiles necessary to fix France, also upsets many vested interests. Evidencing as much, France’s powerful unions are getting involved in the yellow jacket rebellion, sensing that they can use it to knock out Macron’s broader economic reform program. As France 24 reports, the big unions are calling for a nationwide strike on Dec. 14th to demand a cancellation of the planned fuel tax hikes alongside their standing demands for minimum wage hikes and pension boosts.

Regardless, there should be no equivocating in our assessments of what’s going on here. The violence afflicting French streets is a challenge to the rule of law and to the democratic authority of the French state. Macron’s fuel tax policy is misguided, but that’s no longer what this crisis is about. It’s about the power of the president to make policy under democratic remit. Correspondingly, Macron can no more tolerate this aggression than he can tolerate his own political castration.

Macron should be clear and find his inner Napoleon, the master of order. He should offer dialogue and respect to peaceful protesters, but only escalation against the mob. And no Frenchman or Frenchwoman, nor any American conservative, should have any qualms about Macron’s doing so. The yellow jacket fanatics have proven themselves the enemies of the truth to which the Arc de Triomphe attests: the glory of the Napoleonic era, the patriotic sacrifices of the First World War era, and the willingness of the fifth republic to endure in the modern era. They must be defeated.