Paris is burning!

The protests that first emerged in the suburbs of France and then spread across all of France, gradually turning into a revolt, have completed three weeks. Although the most important thing reflected to the world in these three weeks is that this revolt is being almost covered up and made invisible, the picture of Paris as a place on fire can ultimately no longer be hidden.

Although it is on a more comprehensive and more sustained scale than the Gezi event that took place in Turkey five and a half years ago, the events in France do not take up as much space in world media as the Gezi events did. This is in itself interesting enough.

Is the interesting thing that Gezi stayed among the top items on the world agenda for days, and even for a long time after the events ended, or that the revolt in France gets less space in world media? Which of these two situations is the normal one?

On this occasion we remember once again that France has in fact always been a country of demonstrations, protests, revolts and revolutions. Looking at this past, it is possible to see what is happening as part of a historical tradition.

But this latest event has dimensions that differ considerably from those of the past. There is a movement, but this movement has as yet no message, no leader and no direction. The revolt itself has turned into a purpose.

People from all walks of life are joining the movement, which began above all to protest the fuel price hike. The "yellow vests" movement, which brings together everyone from the extreme right to the extreme left and which, according to polls, has won the support of 72 percent of the public, has turned into a full-scale popular revolt (the same poll said 85 percent were against violent incidents). But it is a movement with no leader, whose final goal shows no political vision beyond "calling on Macron to resign."

They have no common slogan, no common goal. The "yellow vest" they wear, which has become their distinguishing symbol, is something everyone is legally required to keep in their motor vehicle, and so it inherently has the quality of uniting nearly the entire French people equally.

Egalitarian, because the motor vehicle does not need to be cheap or expensive, and it does not matter which ethnic or occupational group one belongs to. Everyone has that vest. Joining the revolt movement is this easy, and leaving it is as simple as taking off the vest. Thus the revolt has no class or ideological character whatsoever.

Macron sharply criticized the protests from Argentina, where he was for the G20 Summit, but he has no narrow group in front of him that he can single out as an interlocutor. What he faces is a mass that would require him to take on nearly the entire French people. Moreover, when he goes looking for an interlocutor in order to understand their troubles and demands and to calm the masses, no one appears before him, no one can. Because there is no one leading the movement. What is more, the movement is now surpassing France and knocking on the doors of Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. With the vandalism and violence displayed wherever it goes, it turns the place into a scene of fire. What is this violence, what is this fury?

It is a strange situation from whichever side you look at it. In recent years sociologists opened a heading called "new social movements" and tried to distinguish features, not seen before, in the movements that try to voice their demands in society through peaceful or non-peaceful means.

The old social movements were movements that tried to change the world in a totalizing, revolutionary call in line with a certain utopia. We have left far behind the era of socialist or nationalist, independence movements. The women's movement, the environmental movement, initiatives for a better city were counted among such movements.

The Arab Spring process presented us with an entirely different process. People moved with no big-lettered ideological goal, only for dignity, bread and freedom. A spring that lasted for a while perhaps formed a hope for the real spring movement, but now the counter-revolution process is a wintry oppression that it has made the Arab societies live through.

In Paris, on the other hand, I think we are going beyond even new social movements. There is a situation that requires us to review all the rote formulas we know in the name of sociology. At first glance and in many analyses, there appears to be no reason for masses whose necessary needs have all been met to attempt such a revolt.

Fine, opposition, demonstration, protest, but what is there that requires taking this much violence and vandalism to the scale of a revolt?

Or do we still think that, in order to revolt, one should have nothing to lose but one's chains?

Was it not also the first great disappointment of the Marxists that the expected revolts never came in despotic societies that had reached that level, whereas societies whose every need was met could be more prone to revolt?

When it comes to human beings and society, as long as we keep on constructing them one-sidedly as the "educated" and docile subjects of our grand plans and utopias, they will keep shattering those dreams.

Let us see where the waves of the France 2018 revolt will strike, the winds of what kind of season they will carry and to where, whose dreams they will bring down and what kinds of hopes they will stir in whom.