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.
We went to all the different associations that would have us in France, at every election we interrogated 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
