譯/李京倫
After more than a month of furious, antigovernment demonstrations across France, it is easy to forget that a gasoline tax set all this off.
在全法國各地一個多月以來出現憤怒的反政府示威之後，很容易忘記這一切原是燃油稅引發的。
A few cents per liter at the pump. A pebble in the sea of the French economy. A step to address climate change, according to President Emmanuel Macron.
每公升燃油調漲個幾分錢歐元，對法國經濟而言直如滄海一粟，根據法國總統馬克宏的說法，這是處理氣候變遷問題應走的一步。
Of course, that's not how millions of workers who depend on their cars saw it.
而當然，幾百萬依靠自用車的勞工卻不這麼看。
Mobility is the story of globalization and its inequities. Mobility means more than trains, planes and automobiles, after all. It also includes social and economic mobility — being too poor to afford a car, being rich enough to transfer money out of the country. These are all inextricably linked. Weeks of protests by the Yellow Vests have made that clear.
流動性反映了全球化及其不公。畢竟，流動性不只意味著列車、飛機和汽車，還包括社會和經濟上的流動性，也就是窮到買不起車，或者富到能轉移資產到國外。這些全都緊密相關，幾周的黃背心抗議讓這件事變得清楚。
Many of these protesters, predominantly white working poor and middle class people who scrape by on their paychecks and pensions, live in what author Christophe Guilluy has called "peripheral France." The term is meant to imply both a state of being and the thousands of small, struggling cities, towns and rural districts beyond the inner-ring suburbs of places like Paris, Bordeaux, Lyon or Lille.
黃背心抗議者主要是白人窮忙族和中產階級，靠薪水和退休金餬口，其中許多人在法國作家吉里所謂的「法國邊陲」生活。這個詞既是指存在狀態，也是指超出巴黎、波爾多、里昂或里爾這類大城近郊範圍的，法國數千個奮力掙扎的小城鎮與鄉村地區。
"As small businesses have been dying in these smaller cities and towns, people find themselves forced to seek jobs elsewhere and to shop even for basic goods in malls," said Alexis Spire, a French sociologist. "They need cars to survive, because regional trains and buses have declined or no longer serve them. Once you begin to unpack the Yellow Vest phenomenon, the uprising is a lot about mobility."
法國社會學家史皮爾說：「由於這些小城鎮的小商家陸續關門，人們不得不到別處找工作，甚至到購物中心採買必需品。他們要靠汽車才能存活，因為區域列車和公車班次減少或不再提供服務。一旦你開始剖析黃背心現象，會發現這場暴動很大程度跟流動性有關。」
Experts have been drawing parallels between the Yellow Vests and the social rifts exposed by Donald Trump's election in the United States and Britain's plan to leave the European Union. But there are also larger trends at work in France, involving the evolution of cities, the effect of cars, and the geography of race and class — trends rooted in the postwar years.
專家認為，黃背心示威暴露的社會裂痕，與川普當選美國總統和英國打算脫離歐盟暴露出的相似。不過，法國還有一些更大的趨勢在起作用，包括城市的演進、汽車的影響和種族與階級的地理分布，這些都是源於戰後的趨勢。
As a handful of big cities thrived with globalization, France's regional governments, saddled with more financial burdens, became caught in a vicious cycle. Capital disappeared along with factories and jobs. Revenues shrank, debts mounted, and infrastructure declined.
就在少數幾個大城靠著全球化欣欣向榮之際，背負更多財政重擔的法國地方政府卻陷入惡性循環，資金跟著工廠和工作機會一起消失，收入減少，債務攀升，基礎設施逐漸衰敗。
Among the hardest-hit services were the regional railways, run by French rail company SNCF, which overwhelmingly invested in high-speed trains that served the big, prospering cities and is now $56 billion in debt. With service atrophying, people need their cars.
受創最嚴重的公共服務之一，是法國國營鐵路公司經營的區域鐵路，法國國鐵一面倒投資連接繁榮大城的高速鐵路，目前負債560億美元。由於鐵路服務萎縮，人們便需要自用車。
The gasoline tax "exposed a profound cultural fracture," said Olivier Galland, a director at the National Center for Scientific Research.
法國國家科學研究中心高級主管加藍說，燃油稅「暴露出很深的文化裂隙」。
