a blockade of burning tires … the fire lit up the whole mountainside’. Farther along: ‘We made a blockade here, and when the police forced us to move and chased us into the village, the villagers opened their doors to hide us.’ The sad concrete of the motorway is transformed into intoxicating décor, the overpass pilings become the crucible for shared gestures and acts.
At Notre-Dame-des-Landes, there is, as of now, no motorway. And yet the motorway-plan designed to serve the future airport is of very high priority on the schedule of construction, this winter of 2016. The motorway is supposed to join up the national roads that, from Nantes, extend to Saint-Nazaire and Rennes: eleven kilometres of road, one going through the zone. Opening up arteries in a hostile territory is as much about getting construction underway as it is a military operation, and the different groups in the movement make no mistake about it. These last months, they have thrown themselves into battle together, breathlessly: pursuing legal judgments, demonstrations, information dissemination, occupations, blockades to assure that none of the announced machinery shows even the tip of its hood in the area. At the same time, all of the anti-airport forces unite behind the so-called ‘historic’ inhabitants threatened with eviction, just as they united in the autumn of 2012 behind squatters who had come to defend the zone. The greater the battle stakes, the greater the solidarity and collective intelligence. The forms, presences and modes of action of the different sensibilities and political lines of the struggle learn to act together, and, in so doing, are themselves transformed. All this is a sketch in what we might call an art of composition.
To Make a Movement
Out of edifying victories in demonstrating strength, came a general desire to make a bit of these struggles come to life elsewhere. A little of these struggles – that is, especially the practices, tactics, and a frank and direct manner of taking on the task of the conflict, making it last, living it. This is also a political leaning, that of seeing in the opposition to infrastructures a space for thwarting the inexorable expansion of a nightmarish world. For this we certainly need more than a slogan like ‘zads everywhere’ or ‘fermarci è impossibile’ (‘we cannot be stopped’). If the myth and the media images sometimes speed up our progress and bring about promising encounters, it is always perilous to try and copy elsewhere a method or a recipe that was elaborated in a specific context. What does it mean to spread combats whose particularity lies precisely in their being anchored somewhere specific? In the Tarn, the Ligure, in l’Isère, in Sicily, the Morvan, Trentin or in Aveyron, some people have not waited to formulate a clear response to that question to seize opportunities. This has led to striking successes and to severe disappointments. There again, the need to understand the long histories of the zad and of NoTAV made itself felt. Not in order to imitate them more scrupulously, but to sharpen our analyses and to understand the powers at work, to learn to ward off foreseeable blows and to make our gestures more certain.
Before we can elaborate these four structuring themes of the book, we need to introduce the two infrastructural projects and devote the first chapter to a narrative of the two epic struggles against them. It will then be easier to find our way and understand the befores and afters that mark the two movements. There are points of transition and of rupture, merry-making and long tranquil years, twenty-five days of battle on one side, forty on the other. Certain accelerations made us lose our breath, others gave us inspiration:
The first day, the old lady brought coffee and cakes to the policemen. She said: ‘Poor souls, they must be freezing, they are so young …’ After the night raid against the cabin with its dozens of wounded, no one in the valley ever again had the idea of feeding the police. Never again!
There is the tempo brought on by modifications in the projects or by political deadlines, there is the rhythm which, despite all that, each movement manages to make for itself, and there are strategies and dreams: ‘We are already together in the post-project’, says someone who lives near Notre-Dame-des-Landes. Nothing is finished and yet we had to stop writing. The adventure continues beyond the final period.
The Two Projects
At first glance, what is striking is the absurdity of the projects: why in hell pour tons of cement and asphalt on a wetland in order to move a perfectly functional airport? Why insist on building a high-speed train line between Turin and Lyon when the two cities are separated by mountain summits over 4,000 metres high and when a railway line already links them? And why these huge projects, when we are bombarded every day with the news that our world is in a state of aggravated crisis – ecological and economic, among others? How can we not notice the blaring contradiction between promoting the construction of a new airport while at the same time bragging about hosting the world-wide climate summit, or between pouring millions of euros into a destructive infrastructure all the while preaching the need to reduce public expenditures?
One need only ask who profits from the crime. And who will be made richer by the destroyed lives of the people living nearby, or by the annihilation of the flora and fauna. It is certainly neither in the ‘public utility’ that is supposed to legitimate these projects, nor in the ‘inutility’ with which they can be accused, that the answer lies. It lies in a certain logic which, however absurd it is, nevertheless reigns over most of the globe. Capitalism quite openly depends on the fantasy of infinite economic growth. Yet, the limits of the resources on which that growth is based having well been reached, a critical phase presents itself – one that torments the managers of the world economy. Never mind! As worthy inheritors of western modernity, rather than working with the world, they will work against it: as long as our environment is a resource, it must be exploited, and if it becomes an obstacle, it need only disappear. And that is the real meaning of large transportation infrastructures: abolishing space.
Ignore the rivers, the dwelling places, the hills, the forests that slow down the circulation of human and non-human merchandise. Thus, the swamps, hedges, fields and those who cultivate them at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, the mountains, valleys and those who live in the Susa Valley are so many obstacles, seen from the very particular perspective of a territory-management plan. Exactly in the same way that salaried workers are one burden among others from the point of view of an economic restructuration plan. The logic is implacable, and can assure its own renewal even after the mere ‘crisis’ has become a veritable catastrophe. The more the economy and governmental planning prove destructive of the world that they claim to care for, the more the recipes provided by the economy and planning are mobilized to carve out habitable enclaves. Those who claim to act upon reality free from all its constraints are in fact working to sacrifice the largest part of it, and are always standing by to put a price tag on the non-ravaged areas for the benefit of tourists and the wealthy.
The Airport
Big businessmen from Brittany announced the reasons for ‘displacing’ the Nantes airport in the summer of 2014, at a moment when the construction at Notre-Dame seemed more and more imminent.
Today, it is airplanes that are the vectors of economic development … In today’s economy, we can’t let ourselves slow down. We must always take the lead. I’m not asking for lines that go to the four corners of the earth, but which at least open the doors to all of Europe and connect us easily with all the big hubs.
– Louis Le Duff, founder of Le Duff group
(Ouest-France, April 3, 2014)
We are certain of territorial development and we are working for our children and grandchildren. We need this supra-regional equipment that will allow us to take roundtrips to all the big European cities for our business affairs.
– Patrick Gruau, director of Gruau group
(Ouest-France, April 4, 2014)
So, clearly there are people in this world who are awaiting impatiently a new airport that would respond to their ‘need’ to regularly traverse the continent both ways in a single day. The project has the support of local leaders, on the left as well as the right, who share the same vision of progress, as grey and unbreathable as it may be for lowly mortals. The ‘citizen’s association’, ‘Wings for the West’, in charge of propaganda for the ‘yes’, has its offices in the regional chamber of commerce and industry. At its head reigns an opulent automobile dealership and a band of real estate developers avid to construct