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Look at this photo. There’s an armored police truck the size of a studio apartment blasting a water cannon down a Paris street, and directly in its path is a grown adult in a full Pink Panther costume, tail and all, running through the spray like he’s late for brunch. And the street signs in the corner point to République, Bastille, and Gare de Lyon. The city’s actual signage is giving directions to the revolution. In America, our signs point to an Applebee’s and a megachurch. In Paris, the signs say: “Overthrow the monarchy, two kilometers. Bathrooms on your left.”
Here’s what Americans don’t understand about the French.
We think of them as wine-sipping, beret-wearing, croissant-nibbling surrender monkeys. Meanwhile, the French have spent 237 years forcing their rulers to give them things. And it works. Let’s go to the scoreboard.
1789: they stormed the Bastille, toppled a king, and put the aristocracy on a strict no-head diet. 1936: around two million workers went on strike and occupied their factories, and within weeks the government handed them two weeks of paid vacation, a 40-hour workweek, and collective bargaining. Two weeks of paid vacation, in 1936! Today, in 2026, the United States still has no federal law guaranteeing you a single paid day off. The French have had five weeks by law since 1982. The French were sunbathing on the Riviera while your grandfather was asking his foreman if he could leave early for his own wedding.
1968: roughly ten million workers struck, about two-thirds of the entire French workforce, and the government raised the minimum wage by 35 percent. Thirty-five percent! The U.S. federal minimum wage has been $7.25 since 2009. That’s seventeen years. There are kids in high school who have never lived in an America where the minimum wage went up. In 1995, strikes shut down trains for weeks and the government pulled back its pension cuts. In 2006, millions marched against a law letting employers fire young workers without cause, and the government withdrew it. In 2018, the Yellow Vests blocked traffic circles across the country over a fuel tax, and Macron scrapped the tax and coughed up roughly ten billion euros in concessions, including a hundred-euro monthly boost for minimum-wage workers. In 2023, Macron forced through a pension reform raising the retirement age without a final vote, despite more than a million people in the streets. The French didn’t stop. Two years later, a government fighting to survive suspended that reform until after the next election. Even when they lose, they win on appeal.
And now they’re back. Today, around 550,000 people demonstrated across France, according to the Interior Minister himself.  When the guy in charge of the riot police says half a million, you know the real number is “everyone’s cousin.” The protests have spread to 140 cities.  It started with high school and college students. Students spent two weeks blockading schools before major labor unions joined in, with rallies in Paris, Lille, Lyon, Marseille, and Toulouse, and thousands have been detained.  Teenagers! French teenagers are shutting down the government. American teenagers are shutting down their camera on Zoom class. What are the French kids demanding? Fixed classrooms, enough teachers, and school buildings that can handle rising heat, after years of underinvestment in public education.  That’s it. Classrooms that aren’t falling apart. They’re so radical.
Then the adults showed up. On top of the school cuts, fuel prices are spiking because of the US-Israeli war on Iran, and the government is trying to push an austerity budget through a hung parliament.  And here’s where the bond market starts sweating. France’s borrowing costs have hit their highest level in 24 years, a warning sign not seen since the eurozone debt crisis of 2011.  So the government says, “We’re broke, we have to cut.” And the people say, “Okay, cut from who?”
Great question. Let’s talk about who.
In 1996, France’s 500 richest families held about 80 billion euros, roughly 6 percent of GDP. By 2024, that had multiplied fifteenfold to 1.228 trillion euros, about 42 percent of GDP.  Six percent to forty-two percent. If your kid’s math homework showed growth like that, you’d assume they cheated, and you’d be right. Meanwhile, according to economist Gabriel Zucman, billionaires pay virtually no income tax in France, and their wealth has grown especially fast over the last 15 years.  How? They park their fortunes in holding companies, where the money just sits there getting taxed at the corporate rate, which Macron cut. The result is that the oligarchs pay an effective rate of about 25 percent, roughly half of what the average French person pays.  The billionaire pays half your rate. The billionaire! Somewhere a nurse in Lyon is paying a bigger share of her income than the guy who owns Louis Vuitton. And then the Louis Vuitton guy goes on TV and says the country needs to tighten its belt. Sir, your belt costs more than her car.
So Zucman came up with a modest idea. A 2 percent tax on personal fortunes over 100 million euros, hitting about four thousand taxpayers, the richest 0.01 percent, and raising somewhere between 15 and 25 billion euros a year.  Two percent. On fortunes over a hundred million. That’s like asking a guy with a hundred pizzas for two slices. And what happened? Parliament voted it down on October 31 last year,  with Macron’s centrists and the right opposed. Meanwhile, the original austerity plan aimed to cut 43.8 billion euros from public spending.  So let’s get this straight. Asking four thousand people for 15 to 25 billion is unthinkable, but taking 43.8 billion from 68 million people is “responsible budgeting." Not reasonable economics either, but rather a mugging with a spreadsheet.
And you might wonder why you never hear this framed this way on French TV. Well, men like Arnault, Bouygues, and Bolloré own much of the French media and have direct access to every president.  So when the news tells you the Zucman tax would cause capital flight and economic ruin, just remember that the news is owned by the capital that would be flying. That’s like letting the fox write the henhouse’s security assessment. “After careful review, the hens are fine. Also, the hens should be smaller.” One protester told CNN today that there’s less democracy now, with power concentrated and billionaires controlling the media.  She’s 38. She figured it out. It’s not that complicated.
Now compare this to America. In America, when billionaires double their wealth, we put them on magazine covers. When the government cuts your healthcare, you write a strongly worded post and then go to work, because if you skip work you lose your healthcare. When we do protest, we get a permit, march in a designated free-speech zone roughly the size of a parking space, and go home by six so we don’t get towed. The French look at a designated free-speech zone and say, “Ah, you mean France?”
And yes, things get messy over there. Today rioting broke out in some cities, with luxury boutiques and supermarkets looted and public buildings set on fire.  Nobody’s saying torch the tourism office. But notice which part of the story gets the headline. Broken windows at a boutique are a crime. A fifteenfold explosion in dynastic wealth while classrooms bake in the heat is just “the economy.” When poor people take a handbag, it’s looting. When rich people take 42 percent of GDP, it’s a growth story in Forbes.
Which brings us back to our hero, the pink cat. Because there’s something perfect about that image. On one side, the full might of the French state: a riot-control truck, flashing lights, a pressurized cannon designed to knock grown men off their feet. On the other side, one person in a pink felt costume who has decided that if he’s going to be hosed by the government, he’s going to do it with style. That’s the whole French tradition in one frame. The state has the water cannon. The people have numbers, stamina, absurdity, and a 237-year track record. And historically, the side with the cartoon cat keeps winning.
Because here’s what the billionaires and their governments have never figured out. You can own the media, you can own the parliament, you can own the bond rating. But you can’t own the street. Every right the French enjoy, from the weekend to the vacation to the minimum wage to the pension, was not given to them. It was taken, by people who stopped asking nicely. And as long as one guy is willing to run through a water cannon dressed as a pink cartoon cat, the four thousand richest people in France should be very, very nervous. Two percent, guys. It’s two percent. Just pay it, before the cat comes back.
Meanwhile MAGA shrieks about Muslims and Democrats
Here’s what Americans don’t understand about the French.
We think of them as wine-sipping, beret-wearing, croissant-nibbling surrender monkeys. Meanwhile, the French have spent 237 years forcing their rulers to give them things. And it works. Let’s go to the scoreboard.
1789: they stormed the Bastille, toppled a king, and put the aristocracy on a strict no-head diet. 1936: around two million workers went on strike and occupied their factories, and within weeks the government handed them two weeks of paid vacation, a 40-hour workweek, and collective bargaining. Two weeks of paid vacation, in 1936! Today, in 2026, the United States still has no federal law guaranteeing you a single paid day off. The French have had five weeks by law since 1982. The French were sunbathing on the Riviera while your grandfather was asking his foreman if he could leave early for his own wedding.
1968: roughly ten million workers struck, about two-thirds of the entire French workforce, and the government raised the minimum wage by 35 percent. Thirty-five percent! The U.S. federal minimum wage has been $7.25 since 2009. That’s seventeen years. There are kids in high school who have never lived in an America where the minimum wage went up. In 1995, strikes shut down trains for weeks and the government pulled back its pension cuts. In 2006, millions marched against a law letting employers fire young workers without cause, and the government withdrew it. In 2018, the Yellow Vests blocked traffic circles across the country over a fuel tax, and Macron scrapped the tax and coughed up roughly ten billion euros in concessions, including a hundred-euro monthly boost for minimum-wage workers. In 2023, Macron forced through a pension reform raising the retirement age without a final vote, despite more than a million people in the streets. The French didn’t stop. Two years later, a government fighting to survive suspended that reform until after the next election. Even when they lose, they win on appeal.
And now they’re back. Today, around 550,000 people demonstrated across France, according to the Interior Minister himself.  When the guy in charge of the riot police says half a million, you know the real number is “everyone’s cousin.” The protests have spread to 140 cities.  It started with high school and college students. Students spent two weeks blockading schools before major labor unions joined in, with rallies in Paris, Lille, Lyon, Marseille, and Toulouse, and thousands have been detained.  Teenagers! French teenagers are shutting down the government. American teenagers are shutting down their camera on Zoom class. What are the French kids demanding? Fixed classrooms, enough teachers, and school buildings that can handle rising heat, after years of underinvestment in public education.  That’s it. Classrooms that aren’t falling apart. They’re so radical.
Then the adults showed up. On top of the school cuts, fuel prices are spiking because of the US-Israeli war on Iran, and the government is trying to push an austerity budget through a hung parliament.  And here’s where the bond market starts sweating. France’s borrowing costs have hit their highest level in 24 years, a warning sign not seen since the eurozone debt crisis of 2011.  So the government says, “We’re broke, we have to cut.” And the people say, “Okay, cut from who?”
Great question. Let’s talk about who.
In 1996, France’s 500 richest families held about 80 billion euros, roughly 6 percent of GDP. By 2024, that had multiplied fifteenfold to 1.228 trillion euros, about 42 percent of GDP.  Six percent to forty-two percent. If your kid’s math homework showed growth like that, you’d assume they cheated, and you’d be right. Meanwhile, according to economist Gabriel Zucman, billionaires pay virtually no income tax in France, and their wealth has grown especially fast over the last 15 years.  How? They park their fortunes in holding companies, where the money just sits there getting taxed at the corporate rate, which Macron cut. The result is that the oligarchs pay an effective rate of about 25 percent, roughly half of what the average French person pays.  The billionaire pays half your rate. The billionaire! Somewhere a nurse in Lyon is paying a bigger share of her income than the guy who owns Louis Vuitton. And then the Louis Vuitton guy goes on TV and says the country needs to tighten its belt. Sir, your belt costs more than her car.
So Zucman came up with a modest idea. A 2 percent tax on personal fortunes over 100 million euros, hitting about four thousand taxpayers, the richest 0.01 percent, and raising somewhere between 15 and 25 billion euros a year.  Two percent. On fortunes over a hundred million. That’s like asking a guy with a hundred pizzas for two slices. And what happened? Parliament voted it down on October 31 last year,  with Macron’s centrists and the right opposed. Meanwhile, the original austerity plan aimed to cut 43.8 billion euros from public spending.  So let’s get this straight. Asking four thousand people for 15 to 25 billion is unthinkable, but taking 43.8 billion from 68 million people is “responsible budgeting." Not reasonable economics either, but rather a mugging with a spreadsheet.
And you might wonder why you never hear this framed this way on French TV. Well, men like Arnault, Bouygues, and Bolloré own much of the French media and have direct access to every president.  So when the news tells you the Zucman tax would cause capital flight and economic ruin, just remember that the news is owned by the capital that would be flying. That’s like letting the fox write the henhouse’s security assessment. “After careful review, the hens are fine. Also, the hens should be smaller.” One protester told CNN today that there’s less democracy now, with power concentrated and billionaires controlling the media.  She’s 38. She figured it out. It’s not that complicated.
Now compare this to America. In America, when billionaires double their wealth, we put them on magazine covers. When the government cuts your healthcare, you write a strongly worded post and then go to work, because if you skip work you lose your healthcare. When we do protest, we get a permit, march in a designated free-speech zone roughly the size of a parking space, and go home by six so we don’t get towed. The French look at a designated free-speech zone and say, “Ah, you mean France?”
And yes, things get messy over there. Today rioting broke out in some cities, with luxury boutiques and supermarkets looted and public buildings set on fire.  Nobody’s saying torch the tourism office. But notice which part of the story gets the headline. Broken windows at a boutique are a crime. A fifteenfold explosion in dynastic wealth while classrooms bake in the heat is just “the economy.” When poor people take a handbag, it’s looting. When rich people take 42 percent of GDP, it’s a growth story in Forbes.
Which brings us back to our hero, the pink cat. Because there’s something perfect about that image. On one side, the full might of the French state: a riot-control truck, flashing lights, a pressurized cannon designed to knock grown men off their feet. On the other side, one person in a pink felt costume who has decided that if he’s going to be hosed by the government, he’s going to do it with style. That’s the whole French tradition in one frame. The state has the water cannon. The people have numbers, stamina, absurdity, and a 237-year track record. And historically, the side with the cartoon cat keeps winning.
Because here’s what the billionaires and their governments have never figured out. You can own the media, you can own the parliament, you can own the bond rating. But you can’t own the street. Every right the French enjoy, from the weekend to the vacation to the minimum wage to the pension, was not given to them. It was taken, by people who stopped asking nicely. And as long as one guy is willing to run through a water cannon dressed as a pink cartoon cat, the four thousand richest people in France should be very, very nervous. Two percent, guys. It’s two percent. Just pay it, before the cat comes back.
Meanwhile MAGA shrieks about Muslims and Democrats
