This is popular front a podcast focused on the niche details of modern warfare and

underreported conflict with me Jake Hanrahan. Today we're speaking to Louis Starvagan. He's a political

anthropologist and researcher. He's going to be talking to us about the ongoing riots that are breaking out across France.

There's a lot more to them than just the pension reform which seems to be the only thing cited when the news is

talking about these riots not all the time but often I'm just seeing pension

reform there's a lot more to it than that Louis is going to explain it to us. If you like what we're doing here

support us at patreon.com slash popular front we also have all new merch go to popular front

shop for that. So these clashes have been ongoing in France now for around about two months.

They're getting very violent, very serious. The government is starting to talk about

quote-unquote terrorism and things like this. Things are seeming quite

serious. Before we really get into the kind of crux of the clashes I was thinking maybe you can kind of give us a little timeline to kind of explain where all this come from because as it stands outside of France the media is often saying oh it's just about the pension bill

it's pension bill riots and I was in France recently talking to people there that were part of the

protests and you know most people saying look it's not about that yeah that is kind of what sparked this but we're not doing all of this just because of the pension thing which I found pretty much everybody had that feeling.

So I was thinking maybe you can just kind of take us back to the start and give us a brief

timeline of where all this came from because it hasn't come overnight despite the way it's often reported like that.

Right, yeah, it's actually surprising that it's reported like that because it's been brewing for

for years here in France, you know, I mean, can the physical clashes and the sort of the brewing

you can probably date back to the whole yellow vest protest.

That's what people have in mind today when they go out on the streets and

they see these violent clashes usually they connect them back to the Yellow Vest

protests. So the Yellow Vest protests were these protests that everyone sort of got

to know about and they were they were very violent and I think they've stayed in

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