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 began to show up in the mailboxes of the villages in an attempt to connect with neighbours, all the while avoiding touchy subjects: elections, work, or sabotage as a usable practice.
The movement in Nantes and the NantesCollective Against the Airport (CNCA)
The airport was at first protested by people in the places it threatened. But its planning and development was taking place in the heart of the Nantes metropolis. At the end of the 2000s, militant networks began to organize informally, then regrouped as the CNCA, designed to support the movement from within the city.
At the beginning of the occupation movement we went regularly to the ZAD with friends. There were only really a dozen people actually living there, but there was lots of circulation with nearby cities. Everyone was asking themselves whether to move there. Among us, there was a group that moved there, one that went back and forth, and another that stayed in Nantes. At Nantes, we quickly thought of a collective. We wanted to bring the struggle to the city, because that’s where power is concentrated and decisions are made. The question of the loss of agricultural land is not necessarily relevant to city people, but these were the people we wanted to reach. We wanted to get them to understand that the logic of the airport didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s connected to a whole process of the extension of the urban fabric and the concentration of powers – ‘metropolitization’ that touches our neighbourhoods as well as our daily life. The airport seemed to us to be the cornerstone of a Nantes-Saint-Nazaire metropolis, with an “attracting” pole of almost 600,000 people. It’s crazy, hallucinating, the speed with which Nantes is getting paved over and redeveloped: neighbourhoods are savaged, and the connections that existed before between inhabitants disappear. Construction is turning a whole part of the population into outcasts. We also wanted to question the relation to power and the local elites, the complicities between elected officials and entrepreneurs, and then the whole idea of participative democracy with which they want to make you think you have your say about what’s actually a project that’s already locked up. So we created CNCA.
– Arnaud, member of CNCA
2011–12: Vinci Get Out, Resistance and Sabotage
In winter 2010–11, the occupiers of the zad toured a string of collectives, urban squats and other self-managed spaces to disseminate information in view of building strength. The encounter with the members of the network Reclaim the Fields was fruitful: some of them were in the midst of launching a campaign to occupy land with future farmers and were seduced by the potentiality of the zad. On their side, the occupiers now wanted to collectively assume responsibility for squatting as a strength in the struggle and were trying to build bridges with local farmers. A group was formed that invited people to demonstrate ‘pitchfork in hand’ to inaugurate the project of a garden market in Sabot. In May 2011, one thousand people responded to the call, marched through the zone, and prepared a one-hectare parcel of land for cultivation. Sabot invited the inhabitants of the zad and the neighbourhood to come by twice a week to get bread and vegetables and meet for a drink.
The following winter, anti-globalization activists, attempting to go beyond their spectacular and non-rooted mode of action, decided to not go to Deauville for the G8, nor to Nice for the G20, but rather to reinforce a local struggle by having a ‘No-G’ camp on the zad. A few dozen participants chose to remain on site after the event and allied themselves permanently with the movement.
On 1 January 2011, the airport undertaking was awarded to the Vinci corporation via its subsidiary, Aéroport du Grand Ouest (AGO). Along with the contract came the permanent presence of occupiers, sabotage, and physical oppositions that proliferated in response to the preliminary construction and the companies handling it. A campaign of action against Vinci and its subcontractors was initiated outside the zone. The occupiers and their friends, an opaque and mobile threat always ready to emerge from the woods, adopted the habit of refusing to give their identities during the inspections and arrests by local police. With some losses and a lot of noise, they also performed actions in metropolitan Nantes – attacking an information van belonging to the Socialist Party in the midst of an electoral campaign, and occupying the Nantes Atlantique airport and the trees in Mercœur Park in the middle of the city. The strategy of open confrontation with elected officials, initiated by the ‘inhabitants who resist’, was in relative contradiction with that of ACIPA, which was betting rather on the possibility, with the support of the Green Party, of a return of a left majority in Nantes and the regional council. A Collective of Elected Officials Doubting the Pertinence of the Airport at Notre-Dame-des-Landes (CéDpa), established in 2009, went about trying to make heard the voices of a few dissident officials in institutional politics, when the major party apparatuses, whether on the left or right, had made a common front in favour of the project.
During this whole period, archaeological digs, drilling, public investigations, and visits by judges regarding expropriations were systematically disrupted and sometimes blocked by the militants of ACIPA, farmers and
