When the revolution did not look like you thought it would: the Yellow Vest Movement through radical-left activists’ imaginaries

ABSTRACT The radical left in France has been in decline in France since the 1980s, with union-membership falling and working-class voters moving towards the populist radical right. When the Yellow Vest Movement (YVM) appeared in 2018, it seemed to encapsulate the very demographic that the radical left had lost touch with. However, the YVM did not appear as a straightforward left-wing movement, with unions and radical-left parties branding it as a petty bourgeois tax-protest or as the radical right in disguise. This article is based on interviews with radical-left activists that decided to join the YVM to wage ideological combat within it. Building on a grounded theory approach concerned primarily with culture, I investigate how Marxist social imaginaries shaped the activists’ interpretation of the YVM. In particular, I explore the key concepts ‘vanguardism’, ‘revolutionary spontaneity’ and ‘false consciousness’ to understand the interviewees’ often contradicting rationales and interpretations of the YVM. I find that the radical-left activists got involved in the YVM with the objective of turning it into a left-wing movement, while at the same time appreciating the disorganized, horizontal anti-intellectualism of the YVM.