consists in expanding the units of production, as much in agriculture as in industry. Personally, I can’t conceive of fighting against the airport if we let the agricultural world evolve toward bigger and bigger cultivations.
– Julien, ACIPA spokesperson, retired farmer,
zad neighbour, interview 1976
You are living somewhere and learn one day that others, somewhere else, have decided it’s no longer possible, that other interests come first. That is how, with the stroke of a pen, 1,650 hectares (4,077 acres) of countryside, 20 kilometres from Nantes, were destined to disappear from the map. The justifications for the airport project at Notre-Dame-des-Landes would change over the years: the Atlantic coast landing place for the prestigious Concorde in the 1960s; to allow the growth of air freight and regional demography in the 1970s; the accompaniment to the development of the Nantes-Saint-Nazaire metropolis in the 2000s. Somewhere between political megalomania and a lockstep march toward ‘progress’, the management of the territory ended up generally being imposed. But in the bocage of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, from the outset, the concerned residents and farmers, supported by other farmers in the region, organized themselves to avoid eviction.
L’ADECA, Farmers in struggle and action committees
The Association to Defend the Farms Threatened by the Airport (ADECA) was created in 1972, born of the rupture between local farm unions and the Chamber of Agriculture that was promoting the airport, hand in hand with the local government. ADECA brought together the farmers working the land that became, in 1974, the Zone of Deferred Management (ZAD) which was to be entirely subsumed by the project. That summer, during the corn harvest, a first march was organized on the ZAD, posters were hung along the roads and slogans painted on the town hall walls. In the following years, ADECA, bolstered by the action committees that sprang up in neighbouring towns, began a long labour of counterinvestigation in order to refute the arguments of the developers:
At that time we had no information, so we went fishing around trying to find out. The local media had presented the airport project as happening on what they called fallow land where there was practically nobody. That created an intellectual revolt among us, the feeling that they considered us to be pathetic rubes. We spent the winter in meetings. There was a split with artisans and shop-keepers who hoped to make a profit from the fall-out of the airport. The hardest was with the café/tobacconist: he really believed it, we didn’t. But we realized we didn’t know much of anything, so we decided to spend three or four days at Roissy (Charles de Gaulle Airport). We recorded the airplane noise, interviewed the folks in the neighbourhood. And then all winter, with the action committee, we made presentations in the farms, and woke everyone up as to the harmfulness of the airport. We were able to show that the corner café had closed because passengers went to the airport café and the village was dead. We said: ‘You think you’ll have Eldorado but you are dreaming—with the airport, Notre-Dame-des-Landes will be an empty hole.’ We succeeded in spreading doubt even among the population in the bigger towns. And ADECA made a minute study evaluating the impact of the airport on the farms and that study was very useful afterwards.
– Julien
The region was at that time one of the bastions of the Farmer/Worker movement that was shaking up rural conservatism in a revolutionary way. Heir to the alliance between workers and farmers in the Loire-Atlantique during the ’68 years, the movement was largely inspired by Bernard Lambert’s book, Les Paysans dans la lutte des classes. Later, it would give rise to the Confédération paysanne.* In a world of sharecroppers and agricultural workers without land, the access to land and the priority given to working the land over private property were fiercely disputed. Methods of action were at the level of ambitions: occupations of fields and farms, blockading roads or railway lines. These underlying frictions and impulses could be found everywhere in the region, nourishing that phase of the resistance to the airport whose aim was to make sure that the lands of the ZAD remained cultivated.
At the time, many of us still went to mass, so pamphlets were distributed on the church steps, not in the supermarket parking lot. In other words, there were shouting matches leaving church that continued on into the café. At the peak of these fights about land access, there were two rooms in the café, one for owners and the other for renter farmers. When the airport happened, it was a little different – given that everyone had a knife at their throat and risked losing the tools of the trade, we all felt attacked. ADECA was born at that moment, trying to get beyond those tensions. That said, our idea nevertheless was about defending the tools of the trade and not private property as such. That’s why at that time we didn’t create an association of property owners against the airport.
The general counsel had pre-emptive right to buy properties on the ZAD, even when the project went into abeyance during the 1980s. And it was a period of rural exodus, when farmers reached retirement age and their children tended to not take up the work and were willing to sell. That’s how the general counsel little by little acquired 850 hectares (2,100 acres). We were fighting to keep the zone going and have it not become a desert.
– Julien
With the help of the oil crisis, the airport project was put on the back burner throughout the 1980s and 1990s. This gave local and national authorities the opportunity to spare themselves a potential new battle at a moment when the Larzac struggle had consumed the whole decade of the 1970s and the region was enflamed by several other battles: the movement against the management of the river-banks of the Erdre or against the nuclear centres of Plogoff and Pellerin.
Yet the General Counsel continued to buy up land and houses, using his pre-emptive right for each sale, in the wake of deaths and departures. In the buildings he acquired he installed people whom he hoped would not make waves when told they would have to move.
In that suspended space, where no one any longer was supposed to make a future, the course of progress in which the rest of the world was engulfed slowed for a time, before the moment came for it, too, to make the great leap forward. This is the paradox of territory management – what was meant to destroy the bocage in fact stabilized it throughout several decades, preventing redistricting and in that way preserving the hedges, swamps, paths and forests from the imprint of a more and more industrialized agriculture. Thus, the riches that the zone still possesses are the secondary gains from the illness of the airport planning.
The Beginning of the 2000s: Neither Here Nor Anywhere!
In 2000, the government officially relaunched the project: the first airplane would take off in 2010. Nothing had changed in forty years: a new infrastructure is always a synonym for the future and economic development. A new argument was added that resounded pleasurably in the ears of the local leaders: competition between territories. Nantes must affirm its domination over the ‘Great Western’ region and welcome a ‘central’ airport. But a new protagonist had arisen to throw a wrench into these ambitious plans.
L’ACIPA
When the project started up again, I realized that it was only opposed by ADECA, which represented the agricultural world alone. In November 2000, nine ordinary people called a meeting to found the Intercommunal Citizen’s Association of People concerned by the airport project at Notre-Dame-des-Landes. There were 500 people in a room that held 200! And everyone wanted to join. Two years later there were 1,500 people, and we were launched. We wanted to both group people together into a citizen’s association that was distinct from political parties, and to bring together the various communes.
– Dominique
For ACIPA, the thrust of the struggle first took the form of a detailed labour of investigation and counter-information. Many of its members spent most of their time buried in dry dossiers belonging to those promoting the airport, trying to extract errors, contradictions and lies. The Association in this way amassed a set of technical data that enabled them to take the project apart, piece by piece. At the same time, using public meetings and information circulars, its members turned themselves into vulgarizers of the stakes involved and became capable of taking on any of the airport promoters. In the surrounding villages, and then farther and farther away, a profane knowledge spread out, and with it, the unpopularity of the project.
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