Depending on whom you ask, France is embroiled in its worst unrest in a decade or perhaps even 50 years. President Emmanuel Macron returned to France from the G20 summit on Sunday to find Paris burning, and protests in several other cities to boot. Here's a ready reckoner on the ongoing turmoil that has lakhs of French citizens taking to the streets..

On The Margins The "Yellow Vests" protests are spreading across France, but the news coverage is paper thin about what is happening. The protests began on November 17th , when hundreds of thousands of people across France turned out to protest against fuel taxes that Macron imposed as part of a plan to reduce energy consumption and tackle climate change.

The Yellow Vests movement originated in May when a woman named Priscillia Ludosky, who has an internet cosmetics business and lives in the suburbs southeast of Paris, launched a petition on social media calling for a drop in gas prices.

She broke down the price of gas into its components, noting that taxes made up more than half the cost in France. Per liter, lead-free gas was 1.41 euros on Sunday, or about $6.00 per gallon. Also The petition went mostly unnoticed until October, when Éric Drouet, a truck driver from the same area as Ms. Ludosky, ran across it and circulated it among his friends on Facebook. Newspapers began writing about the petition.The number of signatures on the petition skyrocketed from an initial 700 to 200,000. Today, it has more than 1.15 million signatures and counting. Also Read - New COVID-19 therapy in Peru shows promise against future variants When Mr. Drouet decided to hold a car rally cum protest on Nov 17 to demand lower gas prices, word spread on social media. Soon, autonomous groups formed in many French departments — subdivisions of the country's 13 regions — and they decided to hold their own protests.