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