On 23 and 24 November, hundreds of police tried to retake the Chat-Teigne* and to evacuate the newly reconstructed tree cabins. In response to this offensive, farmers and committees blocked the major axes and bridges of the region. Demonstrations, blockades and occupations took place as well throughout France. Thousands of people joined the skirmishes in the Rohanne forest where the Nantes prefecture was converging. The police wounded a hundred or so demonstrators, but in vain: they lost the battle.
The evening of 24 November, the government announced the end of the operation and the creation of a ‘Dialogue Commission’ whose explicit purpose was not to question the validity of the project, but rather to explain it better to the crowd of troublemakers who certainly didn’t seem to understand it. That very evening, a permanent police occupation of the crossroads of the zad began that would last five months. The next day, 40 tractors came and encircled the Châtaigne to defend it. Dozens of new occupiers moved to the zone and a great period of reconstruction began.
The local committees
If some local committees were created in preceding years, largely within a radius of a few dozen miles around the zad, 200 new committees were born during Operation Caesar, everywhere in France and outside the country too. In these committees could be found the same heterogeneity that characterizes the movement: card-carrying members of left political parties, anarchists and a number of people without any precise affiliation – all carried away by the reverberations of the movement. The committees relayed what was happening on the zone and joined up with local combats.
When I went there for the first time, things were heating up in the Rohanne forest and I was super shocked. What I saw going on, the police violence, it frankly put me over the top. And it hasn’t stopped enraging me. I couldn’t imagine that it could be so violent in France just to impose on you what they want, it really shocked me, such a thing was inconceivable. This is a so-called democracy … That’s when I said to myself: ‘Have to do something’. But I didn’t know too much what, I didn’t know many people, and the people I knew didn’t share my ideas. I was a bit isolated, I had to find people, especially since my husband isn’t at all militant. So when I saw in the paper a committee was starting up in my town, I went. Because it isn’t easy when you are alone to find people who you don’t know and tell them that you want to do something.
– Anne-Claude, member of the Blain support committee
The ‘Naturalists in Struggle’
The ‘Naturalists in Struggle Against the Airport at Notre-Dame-des-Landes’, supported by certain associations to protect the environment, was created after the evacuations. By conducting inventories of the terrain, organized walks, and denunciations of the environmental good intentions of the pro-airport people, they gave material and weight to the ecological preoccupations that animate many of the opponents to the project.
When I came to the zad, I was more of a naturalist than a militant … I couldn’t help getting involved in an inventory of what could be found on the zad and making a map of it. I was by myself and didn’t talk to anyone. I tried to once during one meeting but someone yelled at me and said, ‘Why not spend your time looking for Merovingian vases!’ Then came the moment of the evictions when, because of the media attention, other better-known naturalists started to get interested in the subject … We wanted to make it known that in addition to the people who lived there, the houses, the farmers, all that, there were also beautiful plants, rare animals, with the idea that that might help out legally too. But we didn’t talk much about the legal side, we wanted to keep the surprise factor and also because we weren’t sure what we would find. And just like me when I made my first inventory, the naturalists who came found the richness of what they found incredible when they looked at it closely. In the end, we located new protected species among the plants and amphibians and showed that some of those species could endure only thanks to being on the zad … And just a few weeks after the creation of the ‘Naturalists in Struggle’, there we were, 200 of us, on a horribly foggy and frosty day, when there was absolutely nothing to be seen in the nature. But it didn’t matter, there were folks who had come from Alsace or Provence, and all the local zealots. This network has lasted, because there is an historic anchoring of naturalists in Brittany, they have some lively associations. It was just super moving for me to go from my solitary inventories to be part of that community, which came regularly on weekends bringing all the material for specimen collection, but also to be able to eat and drink together. It was all the more moving in that, before, I never dared say that I was conducting inventories, and now everyone was praising the role of the naturalists. We were ‘in’, even if we didn’t have hoods and masks … I think that for most of us, it was the first time that we were exercising our passion in the framework of a struggle, which is to say that people were coming together who elsewhere had lives and political visions that were very different.
We were very interested in the question of environmental compensation, which for us was a big issue. First, the term compensation isn’t correct: there are milieux that will be destroyed that are impossible to recreate. What is at stake with the experimental model at work in Notre-Dame-des-Landes is obtaining the rights to destroy in order to carry out their project, but it’s also just the conversion of biodiversity into a monetary value, to prepare the creation of a new world. There are all those traders who have been salivating for years about the emergence of new territories where it was forbidden up to this point to conduct the economy in that way. They will be allowed to speculate on biodiversity, to sell it or buy it, to augment the surplus value underlying it. For them it’s win-win. It’s not nothing to fight against all that. They talk around here about scientific experimentation. But to me it’s clear it isn’t about scientific experimentation – it’s social experimentation, experimenting with acceptability, with the idea that if it gets through here, it will get through elsewhere and the opposite: if we succeed in blocking them here, we can maybe neutralize them in other places as well.
In the end, what we share in the ‘naturalists in struggle’ collective is a joyous wonder at diversity and a rejection of everything that tends to make the world uniform. For me that translates politically into feeling myself ready to fight for diversity in all its forms: I can rise up against the disappearance of an animal species, a vegetal one, a culture, a people, a landscape, and even a type of architecture … It’s only capitalism that thinks making the world uniform is useful and necessary – for the rest of us, it is simply frightening.
– Jasmin, occupier from 2010–12, organizer
of botanical walks on the zad
2013: Free Zone
Winter hardened into a territory divided up by police barriers. The detours, altercations and insults, when we passed through the crossroads, punctuated daily life. Departmental Road 281 still contains the obstructions and barricades that were set up, and some of the barricades were transformed into dwelling places. Everywhere could be heard the noise of hammers: cabins were multiplying.
In early April, the ‘Dialogue Commission’ supplied its report and announced, unsurprisingly, that the airport should be built, after some minor formal changes. It was nevertheless clear that a respite period had begun and the government, smarting, would let some time go by before trying anew to evacuate the zone. On 13 April 2013, the police occupation drew to an end and several thousand people came to the aid of initiating a dozen new agricultural projects with an operation called ‘Sow your zad’. Other mass events – festizad, human chain, and summer picnic – succeeded each other on the zone the rest of the year, with sometimes tens of thousands of participants. The zad, as a form reuniting struggle and life, began to spread: in the Morvan and in Avignon, on a vegetable market threatened by the construction of a motorway.
In a few months, the number of zad inhabitants had tripled and the transformation was permanent. Life on the terrain and its links to the neighbourhood were reconfigured, with their moments of incomprehension, but also of beautiful encounters. In the seething, political laboratory of 1,650 hectares that had opened up, everything could be questioned and everything, too, could turn into a violent conflict: agriculture and the use of machines, the conception of nature, reunions and forms of organization, gender relations or differences in economic and social baggage, the opening