Clément Viktorovitch returns each week to the debates and political issues. Sunday, June 25: the dissolution of the Uprisings of the Earth, pronounced Wednesday in the Council of Ministers.
So it’s done: three months after Gérald Darmanin announced it with great fanfare, the Earth Uprisings (SLT) were finally dissolved by decree during the last Council of Ministers. Three months of procrastination, because the file was legally complicated. The Uprisings of the Earth is not an association, with statutes, an office, a social object. It is a gaseous movement, a horizontal structure, without a leader, but with spokespersons. Without legal existence, but with its own identity.
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The Uprisings of the Earth is not only a network of associations, it is also a real organization, which many people have chosen to join, which has spread locally in multiple relays. All of this can be dissolved. But is this really the end of the experience initiated by the Earth Uprisings? Will we see the movement reconstitute itself in one form or another? Will some of the activists choose, on the contrary, to switch to more underground, and potentially more illegal, forms of protest? Past examples show us, in any case, that an administrative dissolution rarely manages to stifle the expression of the deep aspirations of a part of the population.
“Ecoterrorism”, a semantics with legal consequences
It is therefore difficult to know whether this dissolution will be effective. But is it legit? Gérald Darmanin highlights the violence of the Earth Uprisings, which he accuses “ecoterrorism” . The Minister of the Interior used this term after the mobilization against the project of “mega-basins” in Sainte-Soline (Deux-Sèvres). A totally outrageous term. This is not a personal opinion, all the academics who have worked on the issue – Isabelle Sommier, professor at the University of Paris 1, specialist in political violence, Sylvie Ollitrault, research director at the CNRS, specialist in ecological activism, or even Cyrille Bret, author of the book What is terrorism? – believe that no serious legal definition of terrorism applies, remotely or indirectly, to the Earth Uprisings. We are in the pure abuse of language. The use of the most abominable accusation there is, for the sole purpose of stigmatizing a political movement.
It’s part of the political game. But this semantics now has legal consequences. Monday, June 5, fifteen people close to the Earth Uprisings were taken into custody. They are suspected of having participated, last December, in an action against the Lafarge cement factory in Bouc-Bel-Air (Bouches-du-Rhône). They were arrested by the anti-terrorist sub-directorate (SDAT). All came out free, but some police custody lasted 96 hours, instead of the usual 24 or 48 hours. Four days of police custody: the same scenario repeated itself on Tuesday, June 20, seven other activists were arrested by the anti-terrorism.
Anti-terrorism legislation in the face of the environmental struggle
The semantic drift of the Minister of the Interior was not insignificant: it was, on the contrary, the prerequisite for the criminalization of environmental struggles. The word is strong but I am far from being the only one to use it. For example, the anthropologist Philippe Descola, professor at the College de France also assumes it. The anthropologist is the author of the column “I am the uprisings of the earth” in The Obs.
This is not the first time that provisions designed to fight terrorism have been used against the environmental movement. In November 2015, a few weeks after a state of emergency was declared following the attacks, the same state of emergency was used by the government to place environmental activists under house arrest so that they did not come to disturb the negotiations at the United Nations climate change conference in Paris. “It’s true, the state of emergency helped us to secure COP21”, acknowledged former head of state François Hollande in the book A president shouldn’t say that… co-written by the journalists of the World Gerard Davet and Fabrice Lhomme.
In 2017, six researchers, in collaboration with the Defender of Rights – Jacques Toubon at the time – studied the measures taken within the framework of the state of emergency. They show not only that environmental activists have been particularly targeted, but above all that, in most cases, the administrative judge has not been able to control that public freedoms are well respected. Their conclusions are terrible: the state of emergency is “of such a nature as to encourage the development of a police state”. And make no mistake about it: since then, these exceptional devices have since been reinforced by three new anti-terrorist laws.
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That we, citizens, accept to concede part of our guarantees of freedoms to fight against terrorism, barbarism, we could already discuss it. But that the same devices are used to criminalize political struggles is a drift which, I believe, should alert us all.