ON Saturday, during the “gilets jaunes” protest in Paris against higher fuel taxes, many of us saw and heard nothing. Like other tourists on the Left Bank, I spent the day flaneuring, wandering between coffee shops and galleries, down winding medieval streets unchanged since Balzac’s day, and watching chestnut roasters, joggers and mittened toddlers in the park. But while the scene in these parts was like a Sempe cartoon, near the Champs Elysees raged a Delacroix battle.

The protest, in which drivers wore their high-vis yellow jackets (and is set to return to this weekend), has been the lead story for days. Erupting in 2,000 locations across the country, the scale of the co-ordinated fight-back and the fury of the crowds is indicative less of people’s disregard for a greener way of life – though by arguing against this tariff, they are promoting dangerous levels of city pollution – and more a measure of how hard-up and oppressed they are feeling. Not to mention how angry with the government.

After a week in Paris, my sympathies are torn. On the one hand there’s no denying the need for all of us to make radical changes to the way we travel. The petrol vehicle’s days are numbered, and no amount of blockading and placard-waving and mass resistance will alter that fact. For those who must travel any distance for work, however, green alternatives are extortionately expensive, and public transport often not even an option, especially in rural areas.

Not just on this issue, but in every aspect of life, the French capital reflects the rest of France, multiplied to the power of 10. Within Europe, I’ve never seen anywhere where the gulf between the haves and have nots is quite so pronounced. To see the luxury goods in the shops you’d think there had never been a French Revolution. Cars purring down the Place de la Concorde, costing more than many people’s homes, make you wonder if Madame Guillotine will one day return, as do the estate agents selling garrets for upwards of two and three million euros, places so small there’s no room for a washing machine. Even a croissant in a city centre cafe is pricey, as are essentials in supermarkets.

Thanks to the falling exchange rate, British travellers in Europe have already begun paying for Brexit through the nose. One fears that will only get worse. But for ordinary Parisians, who have no choice but to stump up– and this is echoed throughout France – life is hard. No wonder the thought of forking out three per cent more for petrol makes them yell.

Yet although it might not feel like it, they are the relatively lucky ones. The flip side of the city, the one nobody speaks of, is found in gutters and doorways. A homeless woman, her six-inch heels lying by the sleeping bag in which she is cocooned; beggars without arms or legs; a tramp rummaging through a bin, undeterred by the stench in the hunt for breakfast. Everywhere, there is destitution and despair. Everywhere, wealth flaunted. Everywhere, visitors gawping in wonder at one of the most magnificent, enchanting cities in the world where today, as in the middle ages, and the days of Marie Antoinette, the canyon between the rich and the poor is eye-watering. Truly, it is the best of times, it is the worst of times.

If only it was just in Paris that this divide was so obvious. But of course, widening social chasms are evident all over the world, be it London or Los Angeles, Glasgow or Grozny. What is also growing, as the fuel protests suggest, is resentment, and not merely among the less affluent, of those running the country. In the same way as Rome’s voters are in revolt at the populist Five Star party over the appalling lack of civic sanitation, allowing wild boar and sewer rats to forage among uncollected rubbish bins and refuse, so Paris’s, and Arras’s and countless other provincial French towns are defying the established political class. So too in flashpoints across the United States.

Meanwhile here in Britain, should Brexit turn out as calamitously as some predict, disgust with our leaders might also explode. It’s not the threatened scarcity of Mars bars that’s worrying, but the prospect of the army on stand-by to fly in medicines or quell public disorder when supermarket shelves empty, or jobs are lost.

Given the depth of disparities, it’s remarkable Paris is as peaceable. Of course, as in Italy, there are frequent strikes and noisy protests over one problem or another. Fuel is only the latest. The gilets jaunes are focused, however, on maintaining the status quo. They are not in open revolt against the whole system. That mindset, for the time being, is largely confined to the outskirts and its disenfranchised suburbs. These bastions of fury and fear are far from tourists’ haunts. They are distant, also, from the beat of politicians, in the chic districts near their government offices. Doubtless they pray every night that the rabble cannot afford to reach the city centre and make serious trouble.