There was general surprise, back on November 17 last year, when more than three hundred thousand protesters wearing yellow vests seized hold of roads and roundabouts around France. At first, what galvanized them was a single demand — opposition to a planned fuel tax hike. Yet this was just the first day of a spectacular outpouring of popular anger which gripped France over several months. Just weeks into the protests, President Emmanuel Macron scrapped the planned tax rise that had first triggered the revolt. Yet the movement’s determination only intensified, as it developed a wider platform of demands. It forcefully brought questions of fiscal, social, and environmental justice onto the political and media agenda, while also insisting on the need for strengthened popular participation in democratic life itself.

Given this movement’s surprising origins — outside the traditional party or labor movement structures — much ink has been spilled trying to define the gilets jaunes’ real nature. These sharp debates involved not only journalists or social scientists but also the activists involved. Indeed, this free-form movement evaded traditional forms of representation and never allowed itself to be recuperated by the opposition parties — whether on the left or the right. Yet precisely given the strengthening of a liberal/far-right binary in France’s electoral politics — with successes for both Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National and Emmanuel Macron in May’s European elections — over time the gilets jaunes have gradually faded from the headlines.

This does not mean the movement is over — indeed, this weekend marks a special “53 act” to mark its first anniversary. The anger that drove the movement’s initial emergence has not gone away — indeed, it may even be sharpening, along with the inequalities that the movement has so powerfully denounced. Just as the gilets jaunes’ own demands widened from the issue of fuel tax to embrace other issues of social and climate justice, in recent months we have also seen this spirit of revolt spreading out across ever more varied parts of the population. Still protesting and still developing its structures, the gilets jaunes movement is still working now to put politics back in the people’s hands.