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The 1960s: Farmers Versus the Politics of a Void

One day at school, my friends told me: ‘There’s going to be an airport over at your place.’ That hit me, because it meant that the farm, the cows, it was all over. When you learn something like that at twelve years old and you’re already a bit of a rebel, you say ‘Well, no, not possible!’ My parents weren’t really revolutionaries, but they were asking some questions. Asking first whether it would serve anything. And then ’68 happened, even in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, with a lot of farmers supporting the workers … and from there we began to think about it and see everything that was wrong about the airport project.

– Dominique, spokesperson for ACIPA,

native of Notre-Dame-des-Landes

If we refuse the airport project, it’s because we refuse society as it is. Development 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.

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 was the first time that the ‘inhabitants who resist’ began to speak up and call for people to come live there. 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 squatters. The methods used, more or less virulent, were not always the same, but little by little complementarities were being sought out.

The occupation movement in action: in the forest with Biotope

Among the prophets of doom and gloom who began to show up on the zad and attempt to move the airport project along were a new type: environmental experts, like those from the Biotope Company, mercenaries of greenwashing, hired by Vinci.

In the beginning of 2011 we saw the Biotope experts arrive, they came serenely in a little company car, dressed like you or me: running pants, hiking shoes and jacket, a little kerchief around the neck, a walkie-talkie in their pocket, a notebook, some sample-collecting equipment: little nature lovers! Once I ran into Inga and Oscar in the Rohanne forest leading one of these guys out. I got there not knowing the situation, I give Oscar a kiss, then Inga and then the guy, I thought he was one of us … Inga gives me a dire look and whispers: ‘He’s Biotope.’ ‘What? He’s a dope?’ ‘NO, HE’S BIOTOPE!’

That time, we let him leave in his car. We knew they’d be back. We began to research Biotope and its ecological engineering companies that are supposed to ‘protect and work for the environment’, and that are in the service of the giant corporations and their rotten projects. We ran into them more than once in the following weeks and we talked with them. And we still don’t know if it was bad faith or complete candour, but they refused to acknowledge that they were there to help build an airport. They believed they were there just to observe the newts and the frogs. And, what is more, they found their jobs pretty cool: being outdoors, hiking … We decided to organize and make them understand that they were not welcome. For that, it wasn’t enough to just follow them everywhere. From that moment on, when we ran into them, we were wearing masks and we blew up their cars.

So, after several amusing incidents, the experts’ cars came back but now accompanied by a car belonging to a security firm, Securitas. So we would show up, 10 or 15 of us around the car. The rent-a-cop didn’t have time to understand what was happening when he saw 15 masked people who said: ‘If I were you, I’d do nothing.’ And he sits in his car while the Biotope car blows up in front of his eyes. And a little later the expert’s documents are stolen out from under him. After that, they came with the Biotope car, a car full of police, and more police to escort the Biotope guy, along with a Securitas car with a guard to protect the two cars … That was when they first began sending helicopters overhead too. It was pretty panicky – we weren’t used to it. At that time, too, we discovered the best tool to blow up tires. Piercing a tire with a knife is pretty dangerous, but with a metal tube ripping off the tire valve, you twist it and it pops off directly. So, we had that great thing, everyone had one in their backpack along with a headlamp: The Tube! … The cops were powerless, we could see them arriving from far away. I remember an action where we were talking with a guard who had been left behind to watch over the cars. We saw the cops coming back with the Biotope guy, but they couldn’t see us, they didn’t realize there were a lot of us. The Securitas guy was panicked, he told us he wouldn’t do anything, and we told him he’d have to do without his car, and then he told us it was his own car! He told us about his shitty work contract, the lousy schedule, the measly pay, and on top of all that they made him use his own car! So, at that point, someone said, ‘OK, let’s calm down, put the tubes away.’ Because his story sounded true. On the other hand, the cop’s car was blown up, and everyone dispersed into the countryside, with the background noise of the helicopters and our hearts beating.

– Shoyu, occupier since 2010, member of a vegan cooking collective

In the spring of 2012, trials against the occupiers and their habitats occurred one after the other. The state was preparing to intervene, and media campaigns about the ‘ultras’ and the ‘riff-raff’ on the zad intensified their attempt to divide opinion, sometimes with the help of spokespersons from the Green Party, despite its being officially engaged in the anti-airport movement. At the same time, pressures, financial offers, and expropriation measures multiplied vis-à-vis the property owners, renters and farmers. Some of them cracked under pressure and accepted expropriation – others held firm and refused the AGO check.

In response, for the first time, a demonstration was organized in common between the occupiers and the associations. On 24 March 2012, more than 10,000 people accompanied by 200 tractors marched through Nantes, bringing with them a bit of the bocage and gallons of paint to decorate the walls. A few weeks later, the opponents, farmers from the zad, ACIPA militants and elected officials began a hunger strike that lasted 28 days, up until the presidential election. They extracted from the new government the promise not to evict the legal inhabitants and farmers before a certain number of legal appeals had been tried.

As for the squatters, they were expecting for several months to be evicted, without knowing what they could do to prevent it. Training and tools nevertheless began to be put into place in preparation for D-Day: pirate radio, a network of walkie-talkies, medical equipment, canteen, resting places … And then, pretty much everywhere, posters and pamphlets already began to announce a meeting to be held on an as-yet-unknown date: whatever happens, four weeks after evictions begin, reoccupations in great number of the Zone to be Defended would ensue. The movement was trying to get a head start.

Autumn–Winter 2012: Facing Eviction

On 16 October 2012, the Loire-Atlantique prefecture took up the offensive and launched what it officially called ‘Operation Caesar’, in a brilliant excess of arrogance in the country of Asterix. The forces of order were to expel the occupiers from the zone and destroy the houses that could legally be destroyed, in order to permit construction to begin. The operation was supposed to remain secret right up until it began and last just a few days. Certain of its outcome, the subprefect even declared that ‘when there are 150 of them hiding in a barn, they won’t last long’. This strategy had been envisioned by the occupiers for some time, and various ideas and tactics had been imagined in order to resist as long as possible.

Additionally, in the previous week, a concordance of convincing leaks and hints made it certain that an important operation was being prepared: for one group of inhabitants, occupiers, and collectives fighting the airport, this was an undreamed-of godsend: there was time to alert the networks of supporters to prepare for police invasion.

‘So Caesar, caught in the mire?’

Even though expected, the attack was confusing because of its size and rapidity. 1,200 police mobilized, so that 600 were there permanently during the day, while the number of occupiers was estimated to be less than a hundred. In the first two days, a dozen living spaces were emptied of occupants and destroyed; vegetable gardens were ravaged. But the military had not yet gotten as far as the Rohanne forest to dislodge the cabins perched in the trees. Other habitations targeted by the operation were still standing, like the Sabot and the Cent Chênes. The barricades, the harassment of the forces of order, but also the daily departure of the police at the end of the work day, allowed the resistance on the terrain to manifestly disrupt operations. Every evening at 6 p.m., the police convoys would leave to the sound of electric saws preparing new barricades and pickaxes digging new trenches into the roads. The nights were awake with a thousand gestures, large and tiny, designed to throw a wrench in the works the next day.

It was also the first confrontations with the cops here, where we had shields and where we could move through fields and stick low to the ground. ‘Over here!’ we would call out to each one, to provoke them, it became almost a ritual. One time there were four barricades in the Sabot field where most of the conflict took place, where there was a tent with coffee-making equipment. You could rest for a moment there, eat a sandwich, drink a coffee while everything was blowing up 50 yards away. At the beginning, I wondered: ‘Where are the tractors? Where are the folks who were supposed to show up?’ Little by little I saw them coming, taking up the cops’ time along the roads, then the Vacherit was opened up continuously and became a logistical centre for injuries, it was surreal. I remember saying to myself: ‘At last. It’s good, we aren’t alone.’

– Ludo, in his 30s, occupier since 2011

And so, Operation Caesar did not end on 16 October at 10 a.m., unlike what was announced on the media by a somewhat harried prefect. The operation was bemired to such a point that the resistance continued for several weeks, in a common impetus uniting all the groups and their numerous supporters. Farmers’ agricultural machinery from around the region reinforced barricades made of heavy telegraph poles and imposing bales of hay, when they didn’t themselves serve as obstacles to the police convoys.

I remember one General Assembly where there were quite a few people from outside along with people from the zad. It was chaotic, but we began to put together the structure for a long-term resistance to the evictions. With Julien, for example, the ACIPA office in Notre-Dame-des-Landes was used, so that food supplies could be taken there before being moved to the zad, finding ways to not be blocked by the police barriers. I was getting around in my van in which I could carry everything I could to the inhabitants of the zad – there they loaded things onto tractors and drove them across the fields to make deliveries. We were able to get through the police lines.

– Cyril, in his 30s, farmer, joined struggle at time of the

tractor–bicycle march organized by ACIPA in 2011

The houses and buildings that could not be cleared out, of which most belonged to inhabitants opposed to the project, became so many spaces of welcome, places to sleep and regather strength. Radio Klaxon was going full force, on airwaves pirated from Radio Vinci Autoroutes, its news bulletins enabling the coordination of actions and copious insulting of the police, who were listening. At the same time, the ‘external committee’ group put into place its newsflashes on the website zad.nadir.org, which made it possible for thousands of people outside the zone to keep abreast of events almost in real time.

If the resistance on the ground could not prevent the early destructions, its tenacity managed to arouse considerable sympathy. While the prefecture looked ridiculous trying to check the movement with a series of arrests, the supporters from outside the zad came in great number, populating the muddy fields with tents and caravans, or bringing dry clothes and food. Those circles close to the occupiers had begun to arrive with the first alert, soon to be joined by farmers and members of the opposition collectives, who made their way, more and more, onto the terrain. Dozens of people outside of any militant network arrived to take part in the battle.

The police checkpoints set up at the principle crossroads of the zone to keep control of the territory while waiting for the end of the legal pause accorded by the justice before the Rosiers could be evacuated (sometime in November) were harassed by some and bypassed by others. Galvanized by its own determination, the common resistance became organized for the long run. Soon the cabin at Vrais Rouges was draped with an amusing banner: ‘And so, Caesar, stuck in the mire?’

During the physical confrontations, the antagonisms internal to the movement were momentarily overcome and the relation to what was considered legitimate, possible, or violent was shaken up. Everyone, each in his or her way was taken up, body and soul, with the effort to defeat the enemy: in the media, logistically, legally, physically. An insolent hope rose up, the idea that we were not destined to be crushed by the backhoes of territorial development.

That hope took on a real shape on 17 November, when, on the date set by the preventative call of the occupiers, the demonstration of reoccupation attracted more than 40,000 people onto the zad and resulted in the collective construction all day long of a new hamlet: the Châtaigne. All those who were fighting against the airport, whether it was for a few months or for decades, knew that a decisive moment had been reached. But the prefecture believed that it was still possible to destroy the symbol and rid itself of the ‘cyst’.

On 23 and 24 November, hundreds of police tried to retake the Chat-Teigne* and to evacuate the newly reconstructed tree cabins. In response to this offensive, farmers and committees blocked the major axes and bridges of the region. Demonstrations, blockades and occupations took place as well throughout France. Thousands of people joined the skirmishes in the Rohanne forest where the Nantes prefecture was converging. The police wounded a hundred or so demonstrators, but in vain: they lost the battle.

The evening of 24 November, the government announced the end of the operation and the creation of a ‘Dialogue Commission’ whose explicit purpose was not to question the validity of the project, but rather to explain it better to the crowd of troublemakers who certainly didn’t seem to understand it. That very evening, a permanent police occupation of the crossroads of the zad began that would last five months. The next day, 40 tractors came and encircled the Châtaigne to defend it. Dozens of new occupiers moved to the zone and a great period of reconstruction began.

The local committees

If some local committees were created in preceding years, largely within a radius of a few dozen miles around the zad, 200 new committees were born during Operation Caesar, everywhere in France and outside the country too. In these committees could be found the same heterogeneity that characterizes the movement: card-carrying members of left political parties, anarchists and a number of people without any precise affiliation – all carried away by the reverberations of the movement. The committees relayed what was happening on the zone and joined up with local combats.

When I went there for the first time, things were heating up in the Rohanne forest and I was super shocked. What I saw going on, the police violence, it frankly put me over the top. And it hasn’t stopped enraging me. I couldn’t imagine that it could be so violent in France just to impose on you what they want, it really shocked me, such a thing was inconceivable. This is a so-called democracy … That’s when I said to myself: ‘Have to do something’. But I didn’t know too much what, I didn’t know many people, and the people I knew didn’t share my ideas. I was a bit isolated, I had to find people, especially since my husband isn’t at all militant. So when I saw in the paper a committee was starting up in my town, I went. Because it isn’t easy when you are alone to find people who you don’t know and tell them that you want to do something.

– Anne-Claude, member of the Blain support committee

The ‘Naturalists in Struggle’

The ‘Naturalists in Struggle Against the Airport at Notre-Dame-des-Landes’, supported by certain associations to protect the environment, was created after the evacuations. By conducting inventories of the terrain, organized walks, and denunciations of the environmental good intentions of the pro-airport people, they gave material and weight to the ecological preoccupations that animate many of the opponents to the project.

When I came to the zad, I was more of a naturalist than a militant … I couldn’t help getting involved in an inventory of what could be found on the zad and making a map of it. I was by myself and didn’t talk to anyone. I tried to once during one meeting but someone yelled at me and said, ‘Why not spend your time looking for Merovingian vases!’ Then came the moment of the evictions when, because of the media attention, other better-known naturalists started to get interested in the subject … We wanted to make it known that in addition to the people who lived there, the houses, the farmers, all that, there were also beautiful plants, rare animals, with the idea that that might help out legally too. But we didn’t talk much about the legal side, we wanted to keep the surprise factor and also because we weren’t sure what we would find. And just like me when I made my first inventory, the naturalists who came found the richness of what they found incredible when they looked at it closely. In the end, we located new protected species among the plants and amphibians and showed that some of those species could endure only thanks to being on the zad … And just a few weeks after the creation of the ‘Naturalists in Struggle’, there we were, 200 of us, on a horribly foggy and frosty day, when there was absolutely nothing to be seen in the nature. But it didn’t matter, there were folks who had come from Alsace or Provence, and all the local zealots. This network has lasted, because there is an historic anchoring of naturalists in Brittany, they 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 for several weeks, notably in Nantes and Toulouse. The ‘zadists’ were now on everybody’s lips, all over the newspapers, to the point of entering the dictionary. Two days after the inauguration of the Roybon zad (Isère), the construction on the amusement park there was halted.

The developers could not allow this intolerable revolt against the market capture of territory and existences to spread. The state got to work curbing the epidemic by delimiting and extracting the sources of the plague, duly named and given folkloric dimensions: ‘zadists’, ‘black bloc’, or ‘violent youth’. So many summary categories that threatened to paralyze the movements who set out to go beyond them. In the security context of the post-terrorist attack of January 2015, the intelligence law made use of the terrorist threat to gag opposition, and the Macron law freed entrepreneurs from a host of legal constraints susceptible of slowing down development projects.* At Testet, the productivist farmers of the FNSEA organized to encircle the zad and enable the police to evacuate it.