France's Yellow Vest movement is not happy with the response to the Notre Dame fire

Yellow vest protests.
(Image credit: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

Not everyone is mourning the damage done to Notre Dame.

The Yellow Vest movement, a sometimes-violent national protest based around the beliefs that ordinary French citizens have lost purchasing power and French President Emmanuel Macron's policies favor the rich, has expressed anger at the nearly $1 billion in pledges to reconstruct the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, which caught fire last week.

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The protests started out peacefully, but they eventually turned violent as the demonstrators clashed with police who used tear gas and stun grenades to subdue them.

Macron was scheduled to address the Yellow Vest movement directly in a speech on Monday when the fire struck Notre Dame, but the president postponed in order to deal with the fallout surrounding the blaze.

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Tim O'Donnell

Tim is a staff writer at The Week and has contributed to Bedford and Bowery and The New York Transatlantic. He is a graduate of Occidental College and NYU's journalism school. Tim enjoys writing about baseball, Europe, and extinct megafauna. He lives in New York City.