It's illegal to drive a car in France without the exact outfit protesters are wearing in Paris tonight. If a cop pulls you over and you don't have one, that's a €135 fine. I'm serious. Look at the guy in the yellow vest sprinting past that police car with sparks flying off its wheel. That vest is sitting in the glovebox of pretty much every one of France's 40 million cars, because back in 2008 Nicolas Sarkozy's government made it mandatory. The idea was simple. If you break down on the highway at night, you throw it on so nobody runs you over. They even put Karl Lagerfeld on billboards to get people to go buy one. Sarkozy's people were thinking about highway safety. Without meaning to, they'd also solved one of the hardest problems in organizing a protest. Getting a few hundred thousand strangers to show up dressed alike is a nightmare. Unions spend real money printing shirts, and someone still has to drive the boxes out to every march. On November 17, 2018, about 300,000 people blocked roads across France over a fuel tax hike, and not one of them had to buy anything. The uniform was already in the car, paid for and advertised by the government a decade earlier. Cops couldn't even hassle you for carrying one, since the law said you had to. And it told everyone exactly who you were, somebody who drives to work and feels every cent at the pump. That vest pulled about 3 million people into the movement before it fizzled out in 2020. Within a month of that first Saturday, Macron had killed the fuel tax and put roughly €10 billion on the table, including a €100 a month raise for minimum wage workers. So you can imagine how the French government felt watching those vests come back out of gloveboxes this week. High school kids have been marching over crumbling schools since mid-September, and today a cost-of-living protest landed right on top of them. The interior minister counted 550,000 people across the country. The prime minister says 1,200 people were arrested and 150 officers got hurt. That 2008 law is still on the books. Every driver in France still has to keep one within arm's reach, which means the government is still making sure the uniform sits in 40 million cars, ready for next time.