The Yellow Jacket violence that has afflicted France since mid-November is a multilayered phenomenon, with some root causes that are specifically French, others that are European, and some that are manifest across mature economies more broadly.

The violence is French. Flaming cars and smashed windows have been a recurrent spectacle for decades, with a particular intensity around New Year’s Eve. The usual arsonists are the “disaffected youth” of “les banlieues” (low-income housing projects surrounding the larger and richer metropolises), as well as small groups of “casseurs” who operate at the margins of soccer fandom and radical politics—skinheads, hooligans, rioters, and anarchists.

The Yellow Jackets come from different demographics. Wage earners or self-employed, small farmers or artisans, they came to the capital from rural areas and small towns to challenge a carbon tax. The “casseurs” came out to meet them in the streets and, amidst the excitement of violence, drunk on a power they had never imagined having, the Yellow Jackets enthusiastically borrowed their symbolic language. The result has been a weekend of unprecedented destruction, drawing parallels with medieval revolts and early modern revolutionary waves.

The sobering came quickly. Hundreds were arrested on the spot; dozens were tried within 48 hours, and sent on their way to months of incarceration. Unlike trained casseurs, who know how to escape the police and who may be psychologically prepared for the consequences, the novice revolutionaries went, in the span of a week or two, from law-abiding citizens to convicts, with dramatic consequences for the rest of their lives. They had tasted blood, but for many it was bitter. Women, who had been present in droves on the first barricades, were barely seen again after the pandemonium of December 1.

The disorder was facilitated by the collapse of traditional institutions of civil society: trade unions and political parties with decades of experience in collective action and bargaining. They know how to do crowd control, how to coordinate with the police to keep demonstrations on this side of the law. It is reported that many of the protesters who donned yellow safety vests and came out to block the roads had previously voted for, or felt sympathy for, radical parties, but their action was spontaneous and genuinely “independent” of affiliation. They came as free agents, and were easily carried away.

The desertion of historic parties and unions, those that have shaped European politics since World War II, is not just a French story. Brexit, Macron, and the rise of new contenders (the Five Star Movement in Italy, Ciudadanos and Podemos in Spain, AfD in Germany) are all manifestations of anti-systemic voting across old democracies. Paradoxically, the anti-systemic vote sometimes expresses itself through a pro-systemic agent, as is the case in Spain and, particularly, in France. By voting for Macron and his fledgling La République En Marche (LRM) party, electors purged the traditional ruling class from the institutions of the state, but were left with a substitute whose politics they did not necessarily embrace.

Overnight, Macron acquired all the reins of power, yet he had no real mandate, just a modicum of goodwill for being the disruptor. Macron tested that goodwill repeatedly. His pro-growth, pro-market reforms pushed the limits of what was thought possible in France, but unions were too enfeebled to stop him. The bigger challenge would come, unexpectedly, from an increase in the carbon tax, which could be felt directly at the gas pump.

The rejection of traditional parties and politics, now widespread across well-established democracies, is a consequence of the endemic pathologies of mature economies, and of specific violations of their social contracts. Over the past ten years, since the financial crash, public discourse has pointed at inequality of wealth and income as a source of social strife. This analysis is not wrong, but it deserves closer scrutiny.

People do not measure their situation only, or even necessarily, against that of the wealthiest 1 percent or 0.1 percent. Often the comparison is made closer to home, measured against peers, and particularly against oneself. The question for workers is not “why am I not as rich as Bernard Arnault, the CEO of LVMH?” Rather, it’s “why am I worse off than last year?” or “why am I worse off than my parents?”

Part perception and part reality, the deterioration in living standards has obvious causes. One is that in mature economies, productivity gains are hard to come by, and therefore wage increases elusive. Moreover, productivity gains often occur through automation, which leaves some workers jobless and forces the rest to chip in for social safety nets. Second, governments have arbitrary ways of measuring inflation, and the official figures from central banks may not correspond to what people experience. Stagnant incomes and rising prices have always fed resentment. And year after year of that regimen, with no hope of improvement for oneself or one’s children, will erode any sympathy for the political class.

It must be fate that, just as the French government raised taxes on gas, the Japanese government arrested the CEO of Renault, the main French car manufacturer and a partly state-owned company, for tax evasion. The charges bear on what amounts to some €62 million of unreported income, earned between 2011 and 2017. Carlos Ghosn did not invent the automobile. He is an administrator who revived two venerable car companies by consolidating research and development and cutting costs. For those achievements he was compensated at around €20 million per year, about a thousand times the median yearly wage in France.

The allegation that he was evading taxes came to a public already primed for outrage by the fiscal scandals revealed in the Panama Papers and the Luxembourg Leaks. Mr. Ghosn, a Franco-Lebanese Brazilian, embodies globalization, as do the hundreds of thousands of migrants who are looking at Europe for well-paid jobs that may very well not exist. The United States faces similar challenges, and the anti-globalization, anti-immigrant discourse has been vociferous on both shores of the Atlantic. But unlike Europe, the United States has been able to smooth the edges with loose monetary policies and deficit spending.

In the United States, wages may be stagnant, but money is cheap, and the combination of tax cuts for corporations and very liberal government expenditures helps to create jobs. (Minimum wages and benefits are also lower in the United States than in Europe.) The downside is cyclical overvaluation in asset markets—bubbles that burst every decade or so, but that are reflated immediately by the Fed’s generous lending.

Eurozone countries, on the other hand, are constrained by the strict Maastricht rules that limit deficit spending (to 3 percent of GDP) and gross public debt (to 60 percent of GDP). In theory, those rules should have driven governments, in periods of rapid growth and full employment, to save money for lean years. When recession hit, they could have engaged in deficit spending to boost demand, in line with good Keynesian catechism.

In practice, for most Eurozone countries, fast growth and full employment never happened. Trapped in low-growth mode, always on the edge of recession, always exceeding their allowance (but not by too much to avoid the ire of Brussels and Berlin), they could not spend their way out of economic mediocrity. Unemployment remained as endemic as the debt remained irreducible.

Perhaps there was no other option, for the United States is unique in its ability to spend and borrow. A few European countries indulged in lavish borrowing, at their own peril. When the debtors called, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, they were wrecked. Spain and Ireland were forced to tighten their belts, and felt the pain for years afterward. But Greece, which had flaunted the fiscal rules with gusto (and malice), imploded. Its GDP collapsed and, ten years later, is nowhere near recovery.

Europe has a funny economy. It contains enough talent, hard workers, and cutting-edge technology for world-renowned firms to thrive. But beneath the glitz, wealth is not spreading fast. Europe has few native billionaires, and France only a handful. Flashy CEOs like Mr. Ghosn are tacky exceptions rather than the norm. Minimum wage aside, the average European worker makes far less than his American counterpart, especially in net terms. The much-derided consumerism of the West is duller on that side of the Atlantic, because unemployment keeps wages low, income taxes have to be paid, and payroll contributions to welfare have to be made.

The Yellow Jackets are not destitute. The truly impoverished can be found aplenty in and around France’s cities: living in tents or out of shopping carts, too disenfranchised to have access to welfare, too poor to be affected by a tax on gasoline. By contrast, the Yellow Jackets work, for the most part. But what they earn has to be spent, and very little of it on luxury. And since they do work, they feel they are being ransomed for those who have even less: those who lost their jobs due to globalization, and the asylum-seeking immigrants who cannot get one in the first place.

To those burdens, the environment (broadly conceived) has added new ones. The diesel cars most of them drive to save money are demonized and are being progressively phased out. (The tax increase that triggered the protests was highest on diesel fuel.) Their commutes are beset by hidden speed traps, which burden drivers with pricey tickets. (Just recently, the legal speed limit was reduced even further.) The electricity they used to buy cheaply from French nuclear plants is getting more expensive, to finance the transition to renewable energy. The cigarettes many still smoke cost a small fortune, most of it in taxes.

Among them, the farmers are the objects of the most severe scorn: for polluting waterways, for killing bees, for animal cruelty, even for poisoning children by spreading carcinogenic substances (glyphosate) and GMOs. Work in the fields has to accommodate the lifestyle of wild species, adding to labor and costs. Sustainability keeps fishermen on the docks, until depleted stocks can rebound. Herders have to coexist with reintroduced wolves and bears attacking their flocks.

The eco-revolution is still niche; it is a luxury. Rural France remains a world of long hours and small profits. It is also a dying world where babies are not born, schools are closing, and hospitals are leaving—an impoverished world from which the state is seen to disengage, but which it still dares to tax.

The radical, and to some extent even the traditional, currents from the Left and the Right envy the rage of the Yellow Jackets and their ability to humiliate the government. The marginalized parties would love to leverage their fury to hit back at Macron. But they can’t, both because the Yellow Jackets won’t let them (so far), and because the fight is not theirs. The Yellow Jackets are strictly reactionary. They don’t have a vision for the future or a political agenda, and they barely have a moral argument to articulate. It seems that they trust no one, and all they want is more personal comfort. It is hard to build and sustain a political movement around that.

The Yellow Jackets could take down the government only in fortuitous circumstances. By accident or exasperation, the police could kill some of them, even just one of them under compellingly empathetic circumstances. Public opinion is made with images. The government already looks inept after the havoc in Paris. It would look criminal if the Yellow Jackets had their Neda or Aylan Kurdi moment.¹

Worse than a photogenic death would be defection, the security forces either walking away or crossing over. Reports allege that the Yellow Jackets have repeatedly tried to make such an appeal. There are similarities between the two sides, if only in terms of income and social condition. But to convince people whose life and career depends on the state is no easy feat. After a first weekend of chaos, the government deployed forces on such a scale that Paris seemed to have more police than protesters, squashing any speculation of defection.

The pain of the Yellow Jackets is a common experience in mature economies. It is born in part from a misguided nostalgia about a romanticized past—a time before globalization and mass immigration when “things were better.” But their doom mostly comes from technological change and global population growth, and it is all but impossible to stand against that. The British tried, by voting for Brexit, but that has brought them little solace.

What the rage of the Yellow Jackets exposes is that the adaptation to the new environmental age, if it happens at all, is going to be painful, especially at the lower end of the income ladder. The promises that new, high-productivity jobs will be created ring only partially true. Wind turbines clearly have to be erected and maintained. Solar farms have to be tended to. But not everyone will find their place in the new green economy. For most people, it is going to mean sacrifice.

The Greens understand that this is their challenge: to sell pain. Their dynamic is essentially sectarian, and their discourse religious in tone. As with any religious movement, their ranks include shrill doomsayers, moralizing bullies, and a few opportunists. But you also find eloquent prophets like Aurélien Barrau, who speak pointedly the language of Apocalypse, sacrifice and salvation.

Macron had a long run of luck. He rolled over the political class, bullied the trade unions, pushed forward a mainstream, pro-growth agenda, and even tried to address some environmental concerns—not enough to satisfy his star Environment Minister, who resigned in August, but enough to stand tall with the progressive leaders of California, Germany, and Canada. But Macron, for all his youthful charisma, did not know how to sell pain. When the people called him out with violence, the young President flinched. The increase in the carbon tax was suspended, then dropped.

A simple way to ease pain is to apply analgesic. Since World War II, that has been the role of growth—every year was supposed to be a little better for everyone than the one before, with consumption the metric by which one could measure progress. But there is an inherent contradiction between growth and protecting the environment, and while some still try to fudge the issue, other voices are now explicitly calling for halting growth. Not that there is that much growth to halt to begin with—the Eurozone has grown by less than 1 percent a year since the last financial crisis, ten years ago.

If growth is not the solution, there is redistribution, and the environmentalists are pushing in that direction. The paradigm is simple: taking from those who have to ease the pain of those who have not. The Yellow Jackets, in their own way, are asking for nothing less when they demand that Macron reinstates the wealth tax he had eliminated to spur growth.

But redistribution is something of a fraud. First of all, who should bear the burden of redistribution? The middle and upper-middle classes, which have more disposable income than the Yellow Jackets base, also vote at the polls or with their feet. Second, the wealth of the wealthier is hardly a renewable resource; the government already captures close to 50 percent of GDP (even more than that, if voluntary services with progressive pricing are included). France risks running out of wealth to tax before it can elevate the poorest, let alone save the environment.

Then again, why should France become virtuous when large chunks of the world are growing at a breakneck pace, trampling on the environment? Not quite eight billion humans today could be 12 billion tomorrow. True, they are all sharing the same planet, but that only means there will be many free riders among them. If climate change is unavoidable, resources may be better deployed adjusting to it rather than trying to reverse it.

Macron’s choice now is twofold: either he can follow in the footsteps of his predecessors, and spend the rest of his term staying out of trouble, or he can find another way forward. Macron has been all fist and no glove. The French call him regal, authoritarian, a President for the wealthy. He could certainly think of more creative, less painful ways to implement his agenda. Rather than taxes, for instance, if Macron wanted to wean French drivers off their diesel engines, he could have offered a 30 percent exception to the speed limits for electric vehicles. Instead, the little candy he brought, after weeks of crisis, to his grand televised speech on December 10—a €100 increase of the minimum monthly wage and tax reductions on some income—was quickly derided as crumbs.

Cars will probably burn until the New Year, to keep up with tradition, but winter should silence the Yellow Jackets. Regardless, the turmoil in Paris stands as a cautionary tale for Macron and other likeminded leaders. Reformist politicians had better figure out how to sell sacrifice if they do not want revolutions to carry them away.