The French are at it again. Not with a strike, not with a riot, but with a table. This week, the so-called ‘Giant Banquets’ movement saw thousands of protesters sit down to communal meals in Paris, Lyons, and Marseille, demanding that the government redistribute wealth from the super-rich to the hungry. The response from the French leftist elite has been telling: fury, ridicule, and a deep-seated anxiety that this working-class pushback might just stick.
For those of us watching from this side of the Channel, the spectacle feels both alien and uncomfortably familiar. In Britain, we pride ourselves on doing things differently. Our class system, for all its injustices, has historically absorbed dissent through a stubborn order of deference and unspoken rules. The French, by contrast, have always taken to the streets with a baguette in one hand and a placard in the other. But the ‘banquets’ are a reminder that even the most stable-seeming structures can tremble when the price of bread becomes a political weapon.
The logic is simple: a group of citizens, many of them low-paid workers and unemployed, organise a vast public meal. They bring their own food, share it freely, and invite the homeless and the marginalised. The message is that the state has failed to ensure the basic dignity of a full stomach. The elite’s response has been to accuse them of ‘populism’ and ‘irresponsibility’. One prominent left-wing commentator called it ‘a cynical circus that distracts from real reform’. But for the people sitting down to eat, the reform they want is a living wage and a government that does not look the other way when supermarket prices double.
Let us be honest: Britain is not immune. We have our own food banks, our own cost of living crisis, our own wage stagnation that has left millions choosing between heating and eating. Yet our trade unions, once the engines of working-class power, have largely been tamed. Strikes are rare and often tightly controlled. The north of England, where I was raised, knows the gnaw of an empty stomach in a way that Westminster pretends does not exist. But our resistance has been quieter, more resigned. We do not hold banquets. We queue at food banks and vote, sometimes, for the party that promises the least pain.
So why does the French approach unsettle the British leftist elite so much? Because it threatens the narrative that gradual, managed change within the system is enough. The ‘banquets’ are a direct challenge to the idea that the market will eventually sort things out. They are a physical, public rejection of the notion that a few tax tweaks and charitable gestures will solve the inequality that is rotting our societies from within.
In Britain, we have historical reasons to be wary of the French model. Our own class system has been remarkably resilient, partly because it has always offered a safety valve: the working class can improve their lot through education, hard work, and the occasional council estate hero making good. But that valve is now jammed. Social mobility is at a record low. The children of the poor are more likely to stay poor than anywhere else in Europe. Yet we still cling to the belief that our system is more stable, more decent, more British.
The truth is that stability is not always a virtue. Sometimes it is just the inertia of an unequal society that refuses to admit it is broken. The French ‘banquets’ may be a messy, emotional, slightly romantic response to crisis. But they have done what years of polite reports and petitions have failed to do: they have forced the leftist elite to show their true colours. They are terrified of a movement that will not wait for permission.
As a reporter who has spent years tracking the cost of living, I watch these banquets with a mix of envy and frustration. Envy because the French are willing to disrupt their own lives for a principle. Frustration because here in Britain, we are still waiting for our politicians to notice that the kitchen table has become a battlefield. The class system we are so proud of is not stable. It is just quiet.
