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 up of roads and maintaining of barricades, drug usage, the welcome extended to people habitually rejected by the rest of society. After having defeated Caesar, the zad was threatened for a time with imploding under the weight of its own internal contradictions. All the more so in that the pro-airporters did everything they could to support division and to push surrounding communities to reject the so-called ‘zadists’. In vain! The movement took on the challenge and little by little built the possibility of shared lives lived in a partially liberated zone.
The powerlessness of the prefecture and of Vinci on the zone was patently obvious: legal decisions were systematically being transgressed and construction attempts sabotaged. The police now stayed out of an area that those in power had begun to call a ‘lawless zone’. In autumn, ignoring a prefectural ban of any sowing or planting on that day, the ‘Sow your zad’ assembly, along with COPAIN and ADECA, organized a collective sowing of a 24-hectare area that Vinci had designated as the place where work crews would begin.
The COPAIN farmers
The Collective of Professional Agricultural Organizations Indignant about the Airport Project (COPAIN) started up in June 2011. With this collective, farmers outside the zad took on a role in the struggle, especially during the period of the evictions and afterwards. In January 2013, COPAIN took a new step by occupying the farm at Bellevue and its lands.
Taking Bellevue, we were talking especially about seizing buildings. For a month, we asked ourselves if they were going to throw us out one week or the next … then finally we said, ‘Shit, there’s land there. We have to do something with that land.’ It made us start thinking about land redistribution, taking care of land collectively. And all that was tied in directly to the agricultural projects of the occupiers.
– Marcel
The question of food production and land usage was taking on a bigger place in the movement. ‘Sow your zad’ in 2013, which COPAIN participated in, took up the task of discussing and collectively organizing the agricultural problematics of the zone. In the following months, land was taken from farmers who had collaborated with Vinci and numerous collective cultivations were started. What was happening on the zad in turn breathed new life into the region, the farm networks shaking up the corporatism and the classical union demands.
2014–16: Future Zad and Zads Everywhere!
In 2013, the developers began to rebound and announced ‘the removal of protected species’ from the bocage, as a preliminary to construction getting underway. In January 2014, on the occasion of a meeting of the local committees, the movement decided to block the region in case of an intervention in the zone, to prevent any preliminary work beginning and then to return to demonstrate in Nantes.
A wager that succeeded: on 22 February more than 60,000 people and 500 tractors submerged the city. If the forbidding of any demonstration in the centre of the city gave rise to intense confrontations with the police, the demonstration did not break down and the crowd stuck together. Despite media hysteria, the condemnations by political leaders, and the internal tensions exacerbated by the demonstration, the movement did not give way under attempts to divide it. The government retreated once again and postponed the beginning of construction until ‘all legal appeals underway have been exhausted’.
Nevertheless, new areas of repression sprung up in the course of the year with a wave of arrests based on matching police and intelligence service files with fine-combed examinations of videos of the 22 February demonstration. People began to gather regularly outside the Nantes courthouse. Several people spent several months behind bars, supported by the movement’s solidarity funds.
On 25 October 2014, the murder of Rémi Fraisse by the police during confrontations on the Testet zad led to a wave of demonstrations, heavily repressed and largely ignored by left organizations. Marches against police violence proliferated
