Who are the Yellow Vests and their supporters?

Summary This work proposes for the first time to study the hidden cleavages of support for the Yellow Vests using data from the CEVIPOF Confidence Barometer survey. We show that support for the movement ratifies the erasure of the traditional right-left axis. The Yellow Vests bring together people whose life satisfaction rates are very low, regardless of their agreement on the means to respond. They are mostly former voters of Marine Le Pen, Jean-Luc Mélenchon or abstentionists (in that order). They share a more radical critique of the state and the government than either of these electorates, while having more middle-of-the-road positions on moral issues such as tolerance of minorities. The analysis of the geography of the traffic circles confirms the original character of this movement. The North-East and the South-West are the strong points of the mobilization, that is to say the two regions where Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon made their best scores in 2017.