“I’m not a live streamer, I’m not a journalist, I’m a plumber… I’m a plumber who used to be a cop and I find myself in the middle of all this mess…” – Mickaël, interview 04/29/2021.
Abstract
This article investigates a core practice of the Yellow Vest movement (YVM), born in the fall of 2018 in France: its publicizing through social media. While other mobilized groups organized events that conformed to routine media framing, the Yellow Vests (YVs) did not seek to adhere to journalistic representations and expectations. In fact, the general coverage did not match their own experiences of the YVM, which gave rise to a direct hostility toward the media. In contrast, the efforts of some individuals to provide an alternative public image of the demonstrations on social media became popular within the movement, especially the productions of videographers emanating from (or sympathizers of) the YVs. We focus here specifically on this latter group, examining their uses of social media, their social trajectories, and characteristics (i.e., previous politicization, professional skills, and experiences of repression and police violence). While the text merely exhibits excerpts from semi-structured interviews with videographers (n = 11), our findings are based on a larger qualitative research consisting of observations of marches throughout the movement (from late November 2018 to early December 2019), interviews with journalists and photographers (n = 24), and the analysis of their videos disseminated on social media (n = 224 videos). We argue that these videographers, though diverse in terms of their social backgrounds and concerns, generally all occupied devalued social positions while also possessing a necessary cultural capital (broadly intended) and a degree of politicization that fueled their self-confidence and ability to raise their voices. The aims of their heterogeneous forms of expression evolved over time, gradually coalescing around the issue of protecting people by tracking and denouncing police violence.
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Notes
ACAB, an acronym for "All cops are bastards," is an anti-police slogan.
This research is funded by the French Ministry of Culture and the French National Research Agency (ANR). We thank Maximilien Gidon for his contribution to the compilation and analysis of the video corpus, as well as express our gratitude for the feedback provided by Ingeborg Misje Bergem, Matthew Powers, and Silvio Waisbord. We are grateful to the entire Gilets Jaunes research project team and participants of the "Understanding the French Yellow Vest Movement through the Lens of Mixed Methods" study day (Paris, 09/29/2021) for their valuable comments. We thank Maya Judd for her help for the translation of this article. Last but not least, we are grateful to the reviewers valuable and insightful comments that led to possible improvements in the current version.
“Far Right Sees Fresh Recruits In Yellow Vests “, The New York Times, New York edition, Dec. 17, 2018, Section A, Page 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/16/world/europe/france-national-front-yellow-vests.html, consulted on September 6, 2022.
As it is the case with other movements (Watkins, 2001)
So much so that they organized a demonstration in Paris in late April 2019 to protest the media’s treatment of the movement.
All our interviewees but one spontaneously mentioned this issue.
Over the period studied (33 weeks), in the corpus of articles (n = 6,230) on the YVs published by the regional daily newspaper La Dépêche du Midi, just 6% mention injured people, 1.3% mention police violence. By contrast, on a single day in April 2019, “street medics” (volunteer medics) counted 146 wounded in Toulouse. The day after, two articles mention injured demonstrators: one uses the figure from the prefecture (14 wounded), the other mentions only 2 wounded.
The Prefecture of Toulouse counted a maximum of 13 wounded during the first acts. When the “street medics” began to count the wounded themselves, starting with Act 18, the discrepancies in the figures were striking: while the Prefecture only mentions one policeman wounded, the “street medics” declared 40 demonstrators wounded.
An independent journalist, David Dufresne, collected the cases of wounded demonstrators and shared them on Twitter and then on Mediapart (pureplayer website) using photos and clips from numerous videographers as evidence. Le Monde, the national newspaper of reference, began to mention police violence in several articles on 7 December 2018, but only began a real investigation in its 14 May 2019 issue, with its headlining of police brutality: "Investigation into the spiral of police violence." This last article circulated widely and sparked much debate in the following months.
Despite our small sample size, this result is in line with findings from the YV Collective quantitative survey that constructed a statistical portrait of the movement in several French cities (Collectif GJ, 2019).
The authors explain that YVs in the protests are more often of middle-class backgrounds, whereas those in the traffic circles tend to be working-class (Collectif GJ, 2019).
Most of the Yellow Vests are worried about precarity, and the unemployment rate among them is higher than the national one (+ 6%). They also tend to occupy under-valued and low-paid jobs: workers, employees, or small self-employed businesses. Male YVs are mostly craftsmen, civil servants, industrial workers, or truck drivers, while many of the female YVs work in the “care” sector and personal services: nurses, caregivers, or cleaning ladies. (Collectif GJ, 2019).
The economic precarity of the interviewees is evident when looking at income per household: 25% report living in a household where income is less than 1,200 euros per month, 50% under 2,000 euros per month, and 75% under 2,900 euros per month (Collectif GJ, 2019).
“For many interviewees, this is their first experience in a social movement. This is the case for 46% of respondents at traffic circles, compared to 29% at demonstrations, more frequently attended by individuals with greater experience.” (Collectif GJ, 2019).
Her late entry into the movement, several months after her father, is linked to her primary and secondary socialization in a privileged bourgeois environment (daughter of a senior civil servant, living in a seaside town, attended a private Catholic high school).
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Baisnée, O., Cavé, A., Gousset, C. et al. The digital coverage of the yellow vest movement as protest activity. Fr Polit 20, 529–549 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41253-022-00190-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41253-022-00190-0