The image is arresting: long tables snaking through the cobbled streets of a provincial French town, laden with charcuterie and baguettes, surrounded by citizens draped in tricolour sashes. These are not Bastille Day celebrations but the so-called 'banquets populaires' that have become the new theatre of protest against President Macron's pension reforms. Groups like Les Gilets Jaunes have appropriated the centuries-old tradition of the 'banquet républicain', turning a communal meal into a declaration of defiance.
Across the English Channel, British commentators have rushed to sketch a flattering contrast: here, they argue, we queue quietly at polling stations and write measured letters to the editor. Our civic discourse, they insist, remains a model of stability. But this self-congratulation is a comfortable fiction.
The French banquet protests are not a symptom of continental excess. They are a mirror. Look closer and you see the same raw ingredients of rage simmering beneath Britain's own social compact: a squeezed middle class, a sense of regional abandonment, and a political class that seems to dine in a different world.
The French are simply more honest about their anger. They break bread while breaking norms. In Britain, we prefer to seethe behind net curtains.
The 'populist' label is a dismissive shorthand for what are actually very reasonable demands: that the state's contract with its citizens be respected. When Macron bypassed parliament to force through a pension age hike, he did not merely offend French political tradition. He insulted the very idea that ordinary people should have a say in the terms of their own labour.
The banquets are a reclaiming of public space and public voice. The British elite might smile at this Gallic melodrama, but they would do well to remember the Yellow Vests did not emerge from a vacuum. They came from the same disenchantment that delivered Brexit and fuels the cost-of-living protests in our own cities.
The difference is one of style, not substance. French rage is convivial; British rage is bottled. The civic discourse lauded as a model of stability is, in fact, a holding pattern.
The petition, the letter to the MP, the orderly demonstration on Parliament Square: these are safety valves that work only as long as people believe the system can be fixed from within. The French banquets suggest that belief is fraying. They are not a warning about France.
They are a warning about us.
