Yellow vests movement

 Yellow vests movement (protest,  populism)

Date	17 November 2018 - Present
Interest of	Anonyme Citoyen
Description	A series of mass demonstrations in France expression dissatisfaction with the political process. Subject to increasingly violent repression.

The Yellow vests movement (gilets janues) was a grassroots political and economic justice movement in France. It started in 2018 and in 2019 was subject to increasingly violent repression by the French state authorities.

History

After an online petition posted in May had attracted nearly a million signatures, mass demonstrations began on 17 November. The movement was initially motivated by rising fuel prices and a high cost of living; it claims that a disproportionate burden of the government's tax reforms were falling on the working and middle classes, especially in rural areas. The protesters have called for lower fuel taxes, a reintroduction of the solidarity tax on wealth, a minimum-wage increase, the implementation of Citizens' initiative referendums, among other things. On 29 November 2018, a list of 42 demands was made public and went viral on social media, becoming de facto a structuring basis for the movement, covering a wide range of eclectic topics, mostly related to democracy, social and fiscal justice.

Response

Prison sentences for using Facebook

Hedi Martin, an organiser, was sentenced to six months' imprisonment after publishing an event on Facebook.

Police violence

At the end of 2019 315 protestors had been injured in the head due to the police force using grenade launchers and aiming deliberately too high in some cases, while other accounts blame insufficient training. Leaving some people with fractured skulls, 25 lost an eye, five lost a hand and one woman died of injuries caused by a grenade.

On 1 December 2018, an 80 year old, Zineb Redouane, was killed by a tear gas grenade. Olivier Beziade was shot in the back of the head by French police in January 2019. By January 2019, around 2000 unarmed demonstrators had been seriously injured, including lost eyes and hands. Around 3000 had been lightly injured.

Grenade launcher / Tear gas

12122 LBD rounds (from the LBD 40 grenade launcher), 1428 instant tear gas grenades and 4942 hand-held sting grenades were fired or thrown between the beginning of the yellow vest movement and 4th February 2019. A third of the eye injuries caused by police weapons in France in the last 20 years have happened during yellow vest protests.

Permission to "open fire"

In March 2019, Bruno Leray explicitly allowed the French police "open fire" if they deemed that lives were threatened by Yellow Vest.

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