the candidates. We learned everything along the way: it’s the struggle that formed us. At first, when we tried to dismantle the airport project, there were many around us who smiled. Then they began to ask us questions to see if our arguments held water. And today, we are feared or respected. But not ignored.
– Dominique
When you go up against the choices made by deciders, being right is not enough. As soon as 2001, ACIPA began to establish the groundwork of a political relation to power. They began to oppose the legitimacy of elected officials with that of citizens, using the classical means of political expression: demonstrations (on the zone and in Nantes) and gatherings during the annual summer picnics that became a veritable tradition and were more and more frequented in the course of the decade. The yellow and red sticker with an airplane underlined with a big ‘NO’ became a fixture in the region, showing up on mailboxes, vehicles or on big banners in the fields as a rallying sign.
But the Association also made the choice of playing the game of “participating,” in 2002, in the “public debate,” the consultation that accompanied the Declaration of Public Utility. Hoping both to use the occasion as a means to get their argument heard and to benefit from an impartial government hearing, it was quickly disabused when it came to the latter goal:
I remember a big disorderly place where you couldn’t find your way. You came out with a strong sense of manipulation, a kind of big machine that you tell yourself will finish in the end by crushing you, whatever you say and whatever the strength of your arguments. It was tiring, a bit nauseating.
– Marcel, farmer on the ZAD, member of ADECA, joins ACIPA
ACIPA, what is more, chose clearly to articulate a political line that went beyond the pure interest of concerned inhabitants – something that is unfortunately not the rule in all the movements of opposition to development projects, sometimes incapable of getting beyond the famous NIMBY syndrome. The choice of ‘Neither here nor anywhere’ was not made without tension in the heart of the Association. Nevertheless, by affirming it loudly and strongly, the struggle began to move beyond its localized character and to ally itself more intensively with others.
In 2004 ACIPA participated in the creation of the Coordination of the Opponents to the Airport – a group of over fifty associations and unions, with openings to political parties. The Coordination supports ACIPA’s work and engages in, among other things, the systematic court procedures brought to bear as the project advanced. These juridical appeals slow the adversary down and force him to keep his guard up; the least legal error can and will be used. This work of undermining allowed precious time to be gained and gave the movement the possibility to become deeply anchored. But soon, the airport project managed to bypass a number of procedures designed to overturn it, and entered into an operational phase with the first construction work beginning on the zone.
2007–08: At the Time of Validation
In April 2007, the commission in charge of the investigation into public utility gave a favourable nod to the project, which was made official with the Declaration of Public Utility in February 2008. Any pretence to democratic participation ended there. During this time, the General Counsel continued to empty out the zone and decided to leave the houses he bought unoccupied. ACIPA threatened in the media to find new inhabitants itself. An old dissident farmer from Couëron proposed to a few squatters in Nantes he had met at demonstrations and in soup kitchens that they come live on the zone. The squatters were interested in putting down roots for their struggle and they moved into the Rosiers farm in August. This was the beginning of the movement of occupation. The Coordination for its part inaugurated an organizational space in the centre of the ZAD: the Vacherit barn.
In April 2008, 3,000 people demonstrated against the Declaration of Public Utility and the Coordination launched a new onslaught of legal procedures. A few months later, a citizen’s vigil was initiated in front of the General Counsel In Nantes. Every day of the week for several years, in sleet or rain, anti-airport militants, a pile of pamphlets in their hands, called out to passers-by and elected officials.
The ‘inhabitants who resist’
Renters living on the zone or nearby, whether members of ACIPA or not, shared their disappointment vis-à-vis the strategic choices made by the ‘official’ opponents, who could not imagine physical opposition on the terrain where the construction was beginning. They began to get together informally and became friends with the squatters at Rosiers. Not drawn to militant discipline, those who called themselves the ‘inhabitants who resist’ preferred organizing big banquets and getting into trouble. They punctuated their various feats with sensible diatribes against the airport, but also against the logic governing its construction. Conscious ‘that a territory emptied of its population is easy to conquer’, they had the intuition that in order to win, a new generation had to come ‘from all over Europe’ onto the zone.
On 1 May 2008, we organized a thing ourselves, it was a feast with concerts in a barn at Liminbout, we cooked, made crêpes. A party of support against the airport … I had done a photo exhibition on the Susa Valley, with translated texts, and quite a few people reacted. It was the first time that the ‘inhabitants who resist’ began to speak up and call for people to come live there. What came out of our reunions was ‘salvation will come from beyond’, it won’t come from ACIPA, with whom the rupture was complete, it won’t come from the inhabitants of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, that silent majority that doesn’t budge and that one day may or may not wake up. When we said, ‘salvation will come from beyond’, we didn’t have an example or an experience of a movement of occupation that might have inspired us. The struggles that spoke to us, that we talked about, were Plogoff, Pellerin, Carnet, the anti-nuclear battles that had been victorious in the area. When we said that salvation would come from beyond, we were thinking at first of Nantes, of the region in a broader sense.
– Jean, former occupant of Rosiers
2009–10: The Call to Occupy, Against
the Airport and its World
The year 2009 began with a big skirmish in a field. Opponents had broken into a truck and taken soil samples that had been gathered for preliminary studies. Two opponents were indicted for ‘theft of soil’, but, from that moment on, the construction machinery never came back without police reinforcement.
In the summer, several thousands of people assembled on the ZAD with a double program: ‘Climate Action Camp’ and ‘Week of Resistances’. The first marked the arrival in force into the movement of radical, anti-capitalist ecological currents, who were intent on putting into place a temporary experiment in autogestion with ‘a weak ecological footprint’, and in promoting direct action. The ‘Week of Resistances’, on the other hand, welcomed the more institutional wing of the movement and some professional politicians. The two spaces rubbed elbows without really merging. The intrusion of one hundred masked people into a nearby supermarket, who filled their sacks, escaped through the woods, and then redistributed the fruits of the pillage, either made people happy or stirred up polemics, in one camp or another. The last day of ‘Camp Climate Action’, the ‘inhabitants who resist’ relaunched their call to come live on the zone – a call appreciated differently by some farmers and by local militants afraid of stormy installations.
In the next months, new people moved in, occupying abandoned farms or building their own cabins on certain of the fallow fields. Squatters from Nantes and elsewhere arrived, anti-growth people who launched a bakery project or yet a heteroclite and polyglot band of tree-dwellers, accustomed to occupations of threatened forests, who built the first aerial houses in what was becoming the Zone to Defend (zone à defendre). They had in common the will to fight not only the airport but also ‘the world that goes along with it’, and wanted to build here and now a life in rupture with the capitalist economy and relations of domination.
The occupation movement was haphazard at first but rapidly became structured, with the building of a ‘cabin of the resistance’ at the place called the Planchettes, the installation of a dance space and of a free ‘supermarket’ stocked through scavenging in the bins of the big supermarket or, soon, the arrival of a collective canteen and a library van. An unscheduled bulletin, Concrete Harms