It's painfully obvious that the Yellow Vests' grievances are largely based on regional inequalities between the Parisians who control every aspect of French life and the comparatively immiserated inhabitants of the rest of the country, but both rational choice theorists and the woketariat see the idea of talking seriously about regional inequality as a threat so I'm not surprised it's not being discussed in this thread.
Yeah, the old divisions between town and country and between Paris and the provinces are a big part of this. But actually there's something else as well, and that's why it's even more serious than usual. Essentially, a large slice of the population lives in the strange twilight zone
between the town and the country: the French jargon is
periurban, and much as we should use
banlieue rather than suburb to describe a certain sort of outer/middle metropolitan hellhole, which should use this term rather than the American 'exurb' or (especially not!) English expressions such as 'commuterland'. These big belts are a product of what might be thought of as longterm loopholes in French planning policy and surround all substantial French urban centres now. They are basically places where people to move to because the cost of housing is lower. The trouble is, communication and transport links back into the central city from the
periurban areas is uniformly terrible. Public transport, in particular, is a joke. Which means that people in these places are extremely car dependent, even more so than people who live in the countryside proper. And are thus terribly sensitive to fuel prices: after all, the whole point of living Out There is because it is cheaper...