From Barricades to Roundabouts

Hjem // Arrangementer // From Barricades to Roundabouts

The Banquet Hall of the Workers' Museum displays the message "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," reminding us that the revolution came to us from France. Reflect on this as you attend the lecture on the Yellow Vests and a century of uprisings in France, presented by French historian Mathilde Larrère and Danish political scientist Anne-Sofie Dichman.

Thursday, 12 September 2024, 5:00-6:30 PM in the banquet hall at Arbejdermuseet
The event is in collaboration with the French Institute and is part of the Golden Days festival.
(Note: The event will be in English.)

Tickets: 125,- (Students: 50,-)

The Yellow Vests Movement 🦺

On September 17, 2018, nearly 300,000 people wearing high-visibility vests occupied numerous roundabouts across France in response to the government’s decision to raise the fuel tax. This popular uprising, quickly known as the “Yellow Vests,” lasted over a year and brought President Macron’s initiatives, especially on climate change, to a halt. The Gilets Jaunes movement had unique characteristics, particularly related to social and territorial inequalities in the context of climate change. However, it also shared many points with other social movements and is part of a long history of uprisings in France and Europe.

Can past popular uprisings shed light on the present? Who and what are the rebels up against? Who are these people? And who are these women, often invisible in such mobilizations but primary victims of social and climate injustice?

To answer these questions, two researchers specializing in social movements and the status of women, French historian Mathilde Larrère and Danish political scientist Anne-Sofie Dichman, will look back on over a hundred years of uprising history in France, from the industrial revolution to today. They will examine how people live and resist contemporary political conditions marked by global warming and social and gender inequality.

More about the speakers:

Mathilde Larrère is a historian and research lecturer at Université Gustave Eiffel (Paris Est), specializing in social movements in 19th-century France. After completing her Ph.D. on the National Guard in Paris during the July Monarchy, she continued her work on feminist movements and will publish a book in September 2024 on the history of the conquest of rights in France.

Anne-Sofie Dichman holds a PhD in political theory from the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, and is incoming postdoc at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Through immersive fieldwork with Yellow Vests (women in particular) in France, Dichman’s PhD explores how the French activists criticize current ways of governing France, while they also experiment with new socio-ecological ways of living.