On 17 November 2018, a mass protest of people wearing yellow jackets, known in French as the gilets jaunes, started in France. What has become the largest social movement in post-war France, overtaking the events of 1968 in size and intensity, started as a protest against fuel tax increases, a ‘green’ carbon tax and the lowering of the speed limit on French national roads to 80 kilometres per hour (50 miles per hour) from 90 kilometres per hour (56 miles per hour). A grassroots movement, outside of traditional political parties and unrelated to trades unions, has caught the political and industrial establishment by surprise. Immediately labelled as populist, reactionary and violent by its adversaries, the movement has been linked to the election of Donald Trump in the United States, the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, and the rise to power of the Five Star Movement party in Italy. While some of this is accurate – it is populist as opposed to elitist, reactionary as opposed to proposing a concrete political programme, and violent in its response to the repression of the French state – the movement will be shown to have much more potential for intellectual challenge than these immediate reactions suggest. The theory I propose here is that the movement itself is best understood as a fundamental challenge to the existing social contract in France – and by extension to other social contracts throughout the world – and its history is not limited to the months of political turmoil it engendered in France or even to the past couple of years of political upheaval in the wider world, but poses a challenge to the very future of our political order. A rethinking of the social contract is necessary given this crisis and framing the present political turmoil in philosophical terms will help shed some light on the opportunities for change that are arising, in part thanks to the movement.

The early days of the movement

Emmanuel Macron had the vision and the cunning to see the crisis of the gilets jaunes as an opportunity for political change. In his New Year's message to the nation on 31 December 2018, after weeks of civil unrest at home, he announced the beginning of a grand débat national, a great debate throughout France, to rethink the terms of the social contract.