For some days now, I’ve been trying to write a text on and for the gilets jaunes, but I can’t do it. Something in the extreme violence and class contempt that is battering down on this movement leaves me paralyzed. For in a certain sense I feel that I personally am being targeted.

It’s hard for me to describe the shock I felt when I saw the first images of the gilets jaunes. In the photos accompanying the articles I saw bodies who almost never appear in the public and media space — suffering bodies ravaged by work, by fatigue, by hunger, by the permanent humiliation of the dominated by the dominant, by social and geographical exclusion. I saw tired bodies and tired hands, broken backs and exhausted faces.

The reason I was so overwhelmed was, of course, my loathing of the violence of the social world and of inequality. But also, and perhaps especially, it was because the bodies that I saw in the photos looked like my father’s, my brother’s, my aunts’ . . . They looked like the bodies of my family, the inhabitants of the village where I lived as a child, of these people whose health is devastated by poverty and misery. Of those people who — rightly — constantly repeated, day after day throughout my childhood, “We count for nothing, no one talks about us.” Hence the reason why I felt personally targeted by the contempt and the violence of the bourgeoisie, which immediately came down on this movement. For me, as me, anyone who insulted a gilet jaune was insulting my father.