{"id":43555,"date":"2019-02-06T08:21:36","date_gmt":"2019-02-06T13:21:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=43555"},"modified":"2019-02-06T08:21:38","modified_gmt":"2019-02-06T13:21:38","slug":"frances-yellow-vest-movement-comes-of-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=43555","title":{"rendered":"France\u2019s Yellow Vest Movement Comes of Age"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.thenation.com\/article\/france-yellow-vest-movement-macron\/\">France\u2019s Yellow Vest Movement Comes of Age<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>At its first \u201cAssembly of Assemblies\u201d in late January, this grassroots democratic revolt brought together many people who had never participated in politics.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.thenation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/yellow-vests-rtr-img.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.thenation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/yellow-vests-rtr-img.jpg?scale=896&amp;compress=80\" alt=\"Yellow Vests\"\/><\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Yellow Vest protesters take part in a demonstration holding a banner that reads \u201cAngry but not fascist\u201d in Paris on January 26, 2019.&nbsp;&nbsp;<em>(Reuters \/ Benoit Tessier)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>\u201c<\/strong><strong>T<\/strong>he danger,\u201d Yanis warned, \u201cis that the constant stream of information becomes its own type of ignorance. It\u2019s very easy to forget the human need to educate oneself, and to forge one\u2019s own opinion. What we need is for speech and debate to free themselves everywhere, that they fill every part of daily life, that everyone express themselves, respectfully of course.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What Yanis was recalling was his own initial reaction to the eruption of France\u2019s Yellow Vest revolt in late November 2018. \u201cAt the beginning, there was this fear,\u201d he continued. \u201cThe movement had been covered in media as a ploy of the far right and the fascist movement. I hesitated to go at first just because of that. But I finally decided that it was all the more important to go if that was actually the case, in order to not abandon the battle to them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When people in his hometown of Montceau-les-Mines, in central France, began to organize town meetings at the beginning of December, Yanis decided to go and scope things out. Yanis was amazed to see that more than 1,000 attended the earliest assemblies in late November and early December. People were thinking and talking about politics in ways they had never done before. For too long, democratic life was little more than the habitual cycle of elections, with citizenship reduced to the occasional vote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&nbsp;\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>France\u2019s Yellow Vest Movement Comes of Age At its first \u201cAssembly of Assemblies\u201d in late January, this grassroots democratic revolt brought together many people who had never participated in politics. Yellow Vest protesters take part in a demonstration holding a banner that reads \u201cAngry but not fascist\u201d in Paris on January 26, 2019.&nbsp;&nbsp;(Reuters \/ Benoit [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[333,24313,657,23401,24314],"class_list":["post-43555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-france","tag-harrison-stetler","tag-protests","tag-the-nation","tag-yellow-vest-movement"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=43555"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43555\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43556,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43555\/revisions\/43556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=43555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=43555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=43555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}