Almost nothing is known of Saint Soline, except that in the IIe century, this young virgin would have left her native Aquitaine to go on pilgrimage to Chartres. It is there that she died as a martyr, says the legend, and that her ashes were buried at the foot of the hill where the most beautiful cathedral in France now stands.
There is no doubt that the 6,000 demonstrators who went to Sainte-Soline last weekend, a town in Deux-Sèvres to which she gave her name, did not intend to suffer the same fate. This is why these bucolic nature lovers had not forgotten to bring 62 knives, 67 petanque balls, 13 axes or machetes, 7 fireworks and 5 truncheons or baseball bats. To name only the weapons that may have been seized.
Knowing that demonstrators known for their commando actions came from all over Europe, the prefect had declared the demonstration illegal. This did not prevent the most determined, who had come especially to do battle, from going up to the front. Result: 200 wounded among the demonstrators and 40 among the gendarmes. At times, you would have thought you were in Ukraine!
At the heart of this controversy is the construction of 16 water retention basins. The principle applied in many countries consists in pumping water from the water table in the winter to release it in the spring in order to irrigate the crops. Proponents of this practice argue that it does not damage groundwater and allows less water to be pumped from rivers in summer. To have access to it, farmers agree to reduce their consumption and plant hedges. Opponents argue that some of this water evaporates and that these ponds promote the proliferation of invasive alien species.
How could such a banal debate, which should be the responsibility of a municipal council, degenerate into confrontations of such violence? Quite simply because a handful of ecologists have chosen to make it a battleground.
The case illustrates the radicalization of part of the environmental movement. Like the Black Blocks which, in France, have held all trade union demonstrations hostage for 10 years, organizations such as the uprisings of the earth apply proven guerrilla techniques in order to carry out such punchy actions.
These environmental activists “assume more and more their rapprochement with the ultra-left”, declared to the Figaro freelance journalist Sébastien Leurquin, co-author with Anthony Cortes of The coming confrontation. From eco-resistance to eco-terrorism?A book that traces the rise in violence of what was still described yesterday as simple “civil disobedience”.
Nothing spontaneous, in fact, in what happened at Sainte-Soline. These movements also claim political theories that are like two drops of water to those that inspired paramilitary groups in the 1960s and 1970s such as Direct Action in France, the Red Brigades in Italy or the Black Panthers in the United States. .
Partisan of “ecological Leninism” and author of a book with an eloquent title, How to sabotage a pipeline, Andreas Malm was recently in Paris. The Swedish geographer, inventor of the concept of “capitalocene” (capital + anthropocene) came to defend the alliance between radical and moderate militants, between violent and non-violent actions. The former allowing the latter, he says, to make gains.
If he rejects (for the moment, he specifies) any form of terrorism, Malm is nevertheless pleased that “the level of receptivity, of acceptance of violence evolves over time and with the rise awareness of environmental danger. The interest of these new militias would therefore be to gradually increase this level. According to Olivier Vial, a specialist in radical movements, this orthodox Marxist has “contributed to relegitimizing the usefulness of violence in the minds of militants”.
The reasoning is known. Marxist thought indeed makes it possible to miraculously transform these guerrilla actions into reactions of “legitimate defense”. In the purest tradition of the class struggle, everything becomes permitted against a police, a democracy and a state that is said to be “bourgeois”. Or polluters, which amounts to the same thing.
It is under the influence of such theories that groups such as Extinction Rebellion are outwitted by small groups which, rather than simply occupying public space, prefer various forms of vandalism, such as paint spraying (Just Stop Oil), or real sabotage, like that of these militants who tried to saw off a high voltage line pylon in the Gard on December 18th.
“We only do evil for good,” says the philosopher André Comte-Sponville. And we will allow ourselves all the more evil as the good seems greater. Far from being mere slippages, these actions seek to imperceptibly accustom society to more violence, as in other eras right and left militias systematically organized the rise to extremes.
They sign the return of a left which has still not understood that it could be totalitarian. When are the Green Brigades?