Are France's Yellow Vests and Block Everything protests two sides of the same coin?

Seven years after the "Gilets Jaunes" or Yellow Vests protests and iconic roundabout occupations shook France, a new citizen-based movement called "Bloquons Tout" — Block Everything — is challenging President Emmanuel Macron's government, drawing comparisons to the 2018 events.

But to what extent are the popular uprisings comparable?

The immediate similarity to both is that they emerged on social media, the primary platform for social discontent and rallying people worldwide.

"The Yellow Vests protests were primarily on Facebook, with groups boasting up to 1 million active members, revealing a popular mobilisation fueled by massive, emotional, and viral expression", Véronique Reille Soult, a social media specialist, commented in Les Echos.

"The visible expression of the Block Everything movement is primarily on X and corresponds to a more militant, event-driven mobilisation, which at this stage has not reached the same level of spontaneous support."

The Yellow Vests and Block Everything movements also share the fact that calls for action came not from traditional political parties or trade unions, or clearly identified public leaders, but citizens’ initiatives, defiant of established circles of power.

But besides common disruption strategies, involving high-visibility actions, there are nuances when it comes to identifying protagonists, motives and aims of the individual protests.

Root causes of unrest

Initially sparked by a government fuel tax hike proposal, the Yellow Vests was a spontaneous grassroots movement, later evolving into a massive show of anger against social inequalities and ruling elites.

Drawing support among the working class, pensioners and those most affected by precarity, it highlighted France’s divide between its rural, peripheral areas and its major urban centres.

“We are not the invisible France,” claimed one of their pamphlets.

Jerome Rodrigues, a prominent figure of the movement, told Euronews at the time that what drove people to the streets was simple.

“All that people want is to be able to live from their salaries,” Rodrigues said.

“Just having enough to eat until the end of the month and being able to take the kids to the movies once in a while."

Triggered by the now-former Prime Minister Francois Bayrou's 2026 budget plan, which included a proposal to scrap two public holidays, the Block Everything protest encompasses austerity measures, cuts in pensions and social services, and targets the open-market approach as a whole.

“There is a desire to block the economy in particular,” Patrick Vassort, sociologist and political scientist at the University of Caen, told Radio France. “I think activists have understood that the only way to exert pressure is no longer to march in cities, but to block flows."

"Economic flows include both monetary flows and flows of workers, trucks, and products.”

Like the Yellow Vests, Block Everything has no clearly identifiable leadership. However, it is structured by various internet sites showing ideological, though disparate, roots.

While the alleged initiator of the movement, "Les essentiels" (The Essentials), is a conservative sovereignist group promoting Christianity and France leaving the EU or the so-called Frexit, it was shadowed by groups identifying with radical left ideology, such as “Indignons-nous” ("Let Us Be Indignant"), which now appears as one of the main organisers.

Turmoil and tipping over tables

On the whole, as shown in a recent study by the French Fondation Jean Jaures, the base of the Block Everything movement is more politicised, younger, and from a broader social spectrum than that of the Yellow Vests.

Hence its broader agenda, aiming at “flipping the table” of what supporters deem as a neoliberal political and economic model they slam as ineffective, unfair, corrupt and unable to address the ailments of French society, from financial hardship to the environment.

However, neither the Yellow Vests nor Block Everything can be fully pigeonholed, which is no doubt one of the keys to the catch-all movements’ popularity.

The Block Everything's reach at this stage, dwarfed by the Yellow Vests, has yet to be assessed.

In the seven years that separate the two movements, a trail of events both internal and external has shaken societies worldwide: the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia's war in Ukraine, the Israel-Hamas war, a myriad of climate change-related disasters, and the Trump administration-led transatlantic feud, to name only the most potent.

All of which contributed to an increased sense of despair and anger towards political leadership, widely perceived as incapable of steering the country out of the global rut.

Feelings which are not exclusive to France. Whether in Spain, Germany, Italy, the UK or the Netherlands, a trend of disruptive, citizens-based protest movements has developed across Europe.

The scale of the French movements is nonetheless unique. Beyond its immediate goal of ousting Macron, the question is now whether Block Everything has the potential to develop and contribute to reshaping the country’s political future.

And for Block Everything, there is an obvious lesson it could learn from its neon-coloured hi-viz-wearing predecessor.

“Clearly, there is a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ Yellow Vests in the public debate,” Le Bart said, calling the movement “democracy of the roundabouts”.

According to Le Bart, the Yellow Vests shed light on social groups that usually consider themselves as invisible, “a France that has difficulties at the end of the month, a France of precarity, which limits its own consumption — quite discrete but yet numerically very important.”