Sounds like about the time they stopped listening to us too so France is not alone. I'm glad to see the great awakening. It's political, it's spiritual and try as they may there is no stopping it because that's the direction the world is headed in. It began in 1987 and continued forward.

France In A Nutshell: "The Government Stopped Listening To The People 20 Years Ago"

"....It would be difficult to deny the generalization of this: many if not most governments stopped listening to their people decades ago, preferring instead to listen to financial and political elites and entrenched cultural elites  who view commoners with disdain. ...." (Deplorables maybe??? [my comment])

".... The ruling class has counted on the cultural elites to marginalize and suppress the politically invisible by dismissing any working-class dissent as racist, fascist, nationalistic and other words expressly intended to push dissent into the political wilderness...."

"Now that this strategy has failed to silence gilets jaunes, France's ruling class realizes the situation is serious. And as we all know, the ruling class everywhere follows this dictum: when it gets serious, you have to lie.

The lies are now continuous, hence the explosion of elite concern over fake news. The spark that lit the fuse of the current protests was a lie, of course; the fuel tax wasn't intended to "save the planet", it was intended to raise revenue so the elites could continue to extract their skim without endangering the economic order.  (We smelled the BS and  saw through the lie [my comment])

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-12-12/france-nutshell-government-stopped-listening-people-20-years-ago