Bonnets Rouges

This tax was to be enforced in part by gantries set up on highways to detect vehicles carrying heavy loads and the presence of the required billing apparatuses.

[4] By late November, 46 tax radars and gantries had been destroyed and other anti-tax groups were beginning their own direct action, including farmers and equestrians who disrupted traffic in Paris with their tractors and horses.

[6] At one point the demonstrators held an auction at which they sold off bits and pieces of previously destroyed road tax gantries as souvenirs.

[7] In an amusing moment, a hundred employees of Ecomouv, the quasi-private company responsible for collecting the new tax, held a holiday party in Metz.

Posing for a group photo in front of the company offices in their Santa Claus hats, police mistook them for a demonstration of the bonnets rouges, and they quickly intervened.

In 2013, for the first time since ticket-giving radar cameras had been installed in France, the number of tickets issued by the machines declined.