For the last two months, France has been going through one of its biggest social movements in decades. It has developed in opposition to President Emmanuel Macron’s pension reform, which aims at hiking the current legal retirement age from sixty-two to sixty-four. The plan is widely unpopular: two-thirds of the population oppose the bill, a figure that rises to 93 percent when we look at the active population alone. All eight labor federations have created and maintained a united front, the “intersyndicale,” the likes of which hadn’t been seen in decades. On Monday, March 20, the vote of no-confidence against Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne’s government fell only just short of a majority in the Assemblée nationale.

From a strictly institutional perspective, it seems that there are almost no obstacles left to the reform being implemented. But the social picture is radically different. As famous novelist Nicolas Mathieu recently put it, “Right now political rule is legitimate like [Richard] Nixon was after Watergate — less and less. Its legitimacy is mechanical, it is produced by texts and solid institutions, but it has lost what gives life to truly democratic political legitimacy: a certain degree of popular consent.”

The current moment feels like a standstill. On the one hand, a further national day of mobilization this past Thursday — even after the failed no-confidence vote — saw wildcat demonstrations and direct action tactics spread throughout the country like wildfire, and they are showing no sign of abating. On the other, the police has increased its violent, indiscriminate crackdown on all sorts of protest, with hundreds of pictures and videos going viral on social media fueling people’s anger and deeply ingrained sense of injustice.