Anatomy of a Social Crisis and Performance as Protest ritual in Postmodernity: The Chant of the Yellow Vests.

Abstract

Protest has long occurred as an effective communication tool for societies that have suffered from the oppression of their ruling structures. This article therefore aims primarily to analyze the components of the social drama and conflict that gave rise to the citizen mobilizations of the “Gilets jaunes” Yellow Vests in France at the end of 2018 and throughout 2019. In this sense, the ritual dimension is studied, emphasizing the role of performance and its diffusion on social media as fundamental elements of the current activist context. The symbolic object, performative acts such as music and, especially chants, are configured as an indispensable part of citizen mobilizations. For this analysis, the methodology employed was through the ethnographic observation in situ during the marches on the city of Paris; in addition to the hemerographic review and the netnographic monitoring of the protests after 2018 in other cities of France. Through comparative analysis, these observations were contrasted with a part of the bibliography relevant to the different elements that compose this object of study comprises and with other protests that have had an important broadcasting in the globalized world. The above confirms the importance given by democratic societies to protest as a form of citizen communication, as well as to its ritual codes. In the French context, La Marseillaise and Le Chant des Partisans stand out for their symbolic and textual load of civil resistance and active opposition to the alienations produced by the governing structures. Finally, this research aims to offer an approximation of the forms of peaceful resistance in the specific phenomenon of the Yellow Vests, a model that, in a general way, will allow us to study to a certain extent the most relevant cases of protest in recent years. The function of their performative codes, their reception and dissemination on the various platforms that support social networks, whose easy accessibility does not imply the infinite return to nostalgic memory, but a forceful evidence and the clamor for justice.