Three months since the start of the gilets jaunes movement, everyone can agree that France is going through a decisive moment in its history. Despite the tireless efforts to repress, slander, and belittle the movement — and we have been told that it is on the brink of collapse ever since November — the yellow-vested protesters are still with us.

Every Saturday for fourteen weeks they have taken to the streets of towns around France in their tens of thousands. They have continued to occupy roundabouts and parking lots and to blockade malls, toll stations, and logistics hubs. They have organized assemblies and flooded social media and the press from all sides. And they don’t seem to want to stop there.

From the start there were the incredulous and the skeptical, irritated to see these “hicks” from la France profonde rebel against the rise in the fuel price or hostile to a “petty bourgeois” uprising supposedly directed by the far right. Today, they have been forced to recognize that the gilets jaunes movement has proven much more complex — and surprising — than it had first appeared.