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The men beat on their drums. Thank you. I'm sorry. I'm going to Hello and welcome to another episode of politics theory other. My name is Alex

Doherty and today I'm joined by Sebastian Budgeon to discuss the Yellow Vests

protest movement in France, the heavy-handed reaction of the French government and the increasing

and popularity of Emmanuel Macron.

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Sebastian Budgeon is a senior editor at Verso Books, and he's also on the editorial board of

historical materialism.

So the Gilles-Ajean, or the Yellow Vest Movement, emerged in France in mid-November in apparent response to high fuel prices, in part due to a carbon tax, and the high cost of living

amongst people living in rural areas in small towns.

Could you say something about the emergence of the protest movement?

What seems to be its regional, ethnic and class composition? What provoked the protests? And did they

develop in as spontaneous a way as it appears? Yes. So the movement generally did emerge as a

self-organized spontaneous movement. And I mean that in the real sense of the word.

I mean, as we know, lots of social movements are described as spontaneous, whereas in fact that

...