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Analyzes, surveys, collective works ... academics are passionate about "yellow vests". Many researchers are trying to decipher this complex and unprecedented social movement that is being written before our eyes. From the report to politics and the sociological profile of the protesters, what do the social sciences tell us about "yellow vests"?
Heterogeneous, present throughout the territory and constantly changing, the movement of "yellow vests" is difficult to identify. If global and precise data are lacking, the sociological profile of the demonstrators is pretty well known : from the popular and middle classes, they live in rural and peri-urban areas, low-educated, they are assets that suffer from precariousness, explains Tristan Guerra of the PACTE laboratory of Sciences-Po Grenoble.
This scholar is one of the authors of a vast socio-political survey conducted using questionnaires distributed on Facebook groups of "yellow vests". " Our originality in Grenoble is to have built a multidimensional indicator of precariousness that will measure the precariousness of people quite finely: did they go on vacation? Can they rely on a loved one when needed? We have collected through open questions many testimonials of yellow vests that explain to us that they have not visited the hairdresser for three years ... a whole series of things that are quite humiliating for them .
According to this survey, the movement of "yellow vests" appears to be mostly apartisan. In fact, 60% of respondents are not on the left / right scale . An apartisan movement, but not apolitical, insists Tristan Guerra. " They do politics in the sense that they demonstrate, they block roundabouts, they boycott, they campaign online, a new form of mobilization that is also essential. They do politics differently from the majority of French people who only vote. Most of the yellow vests we surveyed go to the polls, and those who go there take refuge in radical political offers. But in no way can we say that they are apolitical .
Accelerated politicization
Novices in partisan mobilization, the "yellow vests" have learned over time to build a speech increasingly sophisticated: a demand for lower fuel prices in November, the movement articulates today social demands and requirements of direct democracy . The field survey conducted by the sociologist Raphaël Challier seems to illustrate locally this phenomenon of accelerated politicization.
The researcher spent several months questioning and observing "yellow vests" on the roundabouts of a small town in Lorraine. " You have a minority of people who follow the political news and who, without being militant, will diffuse different figures of injustice. I am thinking, for example, of GAFAM, the digital multinationals that pay little tax in France. And these figures will be shared later, that is to say that more and more yellow vests are appropriate and this helps to change the worldview of regulars roundabout .
According to Raphael Challier, the movement of "yellow vests" is indicative of a more general crisis of political representation that could well be amplified in the coming years as leaders as well as political and union activists are no longer able to mobilize classes popular. " I think it would be difficult for these yellow vests to mobilize in more formalized frameworks like partisan cadres, because they have biographical trajectories, ways of being, of working collectively, of expressing the political speech that denote within parties. You have a popular culture that opposes more specialized political forms that are also those of the wealthy classes. It also offers explanations on the rather general nervousness of political activists, except in certain territories, during the movement of the yellow vests ".