Sainte-Soline, the Government Effort to Disband a Movement in France, and the Radical Solidarity of the Earth Uprisings

This episode contains depictions of police violence, explosions and injuries. There is also some medical content. Please take care as you listen.

Nathalie Duval: Ouais qui je suis? Ben Nathalie Duval, Hein? Hein,

Anna Pujol-Mazzini: In 2018, Nathalie Duval was living in a small town near the Loire Valley in central France. It’s known for its rich history and landscape… Its picturesque vineyards and castles. Nathalie and her town are working class. She’s a mother of five and a grandmother, and at the time she was working a temp job at the post office, sorting the mail. Things were always tight. She never seemed to have enough money to take care of everyone.

Nathalie Duval: ma ma vie ressemblait comme tout le monde, hein? hein?

My life was like that of everyone, right?

Anna Pujol-Mazzini: This is Nathalie – speaking through a voice actor.

Nathalie Duval: Euh, à un peuple lambda, tout simplement hein, je travaille, j'élève mes enfants.

en fin de compte c'est travaille, consomme et ferme ta gueule.

Like the average person, I simply work and raise my kids. At the end of the day, you just have to work, consume and shut your mouth.

Anna Pujol-Mazzini: The working class is always struggling, but this particular moment was especially hard.

French president Emmanuel Macron was newly elected at the time. And while so many people were struggling to make ends meet…he told people that it was their fault they couldn’t make it work. That if someone really wanted to find a job…all they had to do was cross the street and go look for one. And that he could find one in a heartbeat.

At the same time…the price of everything was going up…food, clothes…and gas. Which Nathalie needed to get to work everyday. It was more than living paycheck to paycheck…it was shift to shift. She could only afford to get 10 or 20 euros worth of gas – or petrol – at a time.

So when Nathalie heard that there was going to be a new tax on fuel? She was furious. She was worried about climate change — but she also wanted to be able to pay her bills. So she decided to go to a protest in her town.

Nathalie Duval: j'allais dans des manifs. Mais voilà, c'était pas c'est pas des des manifs qui me touchaient réellement. donc euh, là là, quand je suis sorti, oui, c'était pour le carburant, parce que là, ça touchait tout le monde. C'était pas trois, quatre personnes dehors, c'étaient des milliers de dehors c'est ça qui était beau.

I was going to protests — but they weren’t protests that really affected me. So that time, when I went out, yes, it was for the petrol, because it affected everyone. It wasn’t three or four people out, it was thousands. That’s what was beautiful

Anna Pujol-Mazzini: Nathalie was going with her son, Mickael, who is in his thirties and also had a temp job as a postal worker. Together, they’d suit up in these – bright – yellow – vests – and head to the streets – where they’d meet up with a sea of protestors…ALL wearing – bright – yellow – vests -.

They’re the kind you might see construction workers wearing. In France, everyone has to keep one in their car. If they break down, or if they have some kind of emergency, they put it on.

And in a symbolic sign of collective distress…the yellow vest has become the distinctive uniform for this ragtag group of protesters. In fact they’re now simply known as: The Yellow Vests. Les Gilets Jaunes.

Nathalie Duval: Nous les gilets jaunes, on se battait pour le carburant sans carburant, on ne peut pas travailler, on ne travailler, on n'a pas d'argent. on d'argent, on fait comment pour faire vivre les enfants? on fait comment pour payer nos factures?

Us Yellow Vests, we were fighting for petrol, because without petrol you can’t go to work, and without work you don’t have money. Without money, how do you provide for the kids? How do you pay your bills?

Anna Pujol-Mazzini: The Yellow vest protests started as a reaction to a rise in fuel prices. So at the beginning…they were supported by notorious climate deniers… like Donald Trump. And they got a reputation for being opposed to climate action. But in fact, most of the Yellow Vests actually wanted better climate policies… they just didn’t want to do it at the expense of the working class.

And quickly, their demands came to be about much more: social justice… taxing the rich, environmental policies that don’t leave workers behind…  and… ultimately, getting the President to resign.

The movement is made up of mostly working class people, who live away from large urban centres. People who bear the brunt of the cost of living crisis and rely heavily on their cars. So…they protest by occupying roundabouts. There, you can see people from all over the political spectrum — far-right, far-left, and people who refused to vote at all. And a lot of these protesters were women. Women like Nathalie.

At first, when Nathalie and Mickael went to all of these demonstrations… for higher wages… against pension reform… for workers rights… they expected pushback from the police. That’s because they were seeing so many officers, in riot gear, deployed for the protests. They’d brought single-doses of saline solution in their bags to wash tear gas away from their eyes — just in case.

Instead, the police seemed indifferent, even benevolent at times. It almost seemed like they were on the side of the protesters.

Nathalie Duval: j'avais été une manif à Paris je sais plus laquelle c'est et sur une manif à Paris. Il y d'un côté tous les tous les CRS et de l'autre côté il y avait aussi des CRS et tout côté droit. Je me rappelle les CRS, ils avaient enlevé leurs casques et ils nous souriaient, ils faisaient rien du tout, rien du tout, quoi. ils étaient là, ils ne bougeaient pas, ils nous surveillaient quoi

I went to a protest in Paris – I can’t remember which one anymore. At this protest in Paris, on one side you had all of the riot police, and they had taken off their helmets, and they were smiling at us. They weren’t doing anything, they weren’t moving, they were just watching us.

Ils avaient le bouclier à la main, leur casque dans les mains. J’ai dit bravo à vous, pour une fois, ça fait plaisir. On s'est dit tiens, ils ne sont pas tous pareils.

They had their shield in one hand, their helmet in the other. I said well done to you, for once, that was nice. We thought — huh, maybe they’re not all the same

Anna Pujol-Mazzini: ils avaient enlevé leur casque comme pour vous dire, vous n'avez pas à avoir peur de nous?

They had taken their helmets off as if to say — you don’t have to be scared of us?

Anna Pujol-Mazzini: Over the next few months, the protests kept getting bigger. Until eventually it wasn’t just thousands…but hundreds of thousands of people descending on the streets every weekend. [beat]

And the police were not as supportive as that first experience Nathalie described. At all.

The French police were systematically using force, and illegally corRAHling protesters. Dozens of people were blinded by rubber bullets and at least five had their hands ripped off by tear gas grenades. But this didn't deter Mickael and Nathalie.

Over the years, the protests became a way of life for them. They made lots of friends in the Yellow Vests. By March 2023, they’d been to dozens of these demonstrations. So when they found out about one against the privatisation of water in this small town called Sainte-Soline…it made sense that they’d go.

Mickael got out of his night shift, he took a power nap, and then a friend picked him up to go meet the rest of their group. Nathalie had her own late shift the night before, and she was exhausted. So before Mickael walked out the door, she said the thing that any parent would say to their kid…

Nathalie Duval: fais attention

Anna Pujol-Mazzini: be careful.

Mickael and his friends drove two hours to Sainte-Soline. When they got there, the police stopped them and checked their car. Then they let them through to this big, open field where the protest was taking place.

At home, Nathalie was easing into her morning after her long night shift. She was drinking her cappuccino and had the TV on in the background. And then out of the corner of her eye…she noticed something unsettling… Clashes between the police and protesters. [beat/pause] There was tear gas and people in gas masks and smoke billowing from torched police cars

She tried calling Mickael… but he didn't answer. Which isn’t that unusual for him…

Nathalie Duval: Mickaël et son téléphone, c'est tout un art, il en perd tout le temps, à chaque fois qu'il va manifester

Mickael and his phone… it’s a whole thing. He always loses one, every time he goes to a protest

Anna Pujol-Mazzini: Eventually she managed to get through to one of his friends. When she talked to Mickael, he said they'd just parked the car. They could see protesters in the distance, but they were still far from the reservoirs. They decided to go in anyway. From where they stood, it didn't look that bad, and they had come all this way. So Nathalie told him again, just in case…

Nathalie Duval: tu fais attention, il me fait je fais attention maman promis OK, d'accord

I said be careful, he said yes mum, I promise I’ll be careful, I said ok, fine

Mickael and his friends start walking towards the crowd. It’s a big field, and there are cars parked all around them. New groups of demonstrators are still arriving from all sides in their rain boots. They can see different convoys making their way to the reservoir, and they decide to follow one of them.

And then, as they get closer, they start seeing what Nathalie just saw…

[beat/pause + news clip as a transition?]

Around 1PM, a national news network announced that two protesters were in critical condition.

Nathalie immediately thought of Mickael.

And under her breath, she started repeating to herself, like a slow, soft prayer :

pourvu qu'il n'y ait pas mon fils, pourvu qu'il n'y ait pas mon fils, pourvu qu'il n'y a mon fils

Please let it not be my son. Let it not be Mickael.

INTRO

I’m Anna Pujol-Mazzini and this is Drilled: The Real Free Speech Threat.

France prides itself on being a country of protest. After all — that’s how we got rid of the monarchy and why we have workers’ rights — and it wasn’t always peaceful. But over the years, protest has gotten more dangerous, and the government started using anti-terror laws to target climate activists. Then, everything came to a head over one bloody weekend, in March 2023.

That story, after the break

[ad break]

Anna:At the same time that Nathalie and Mickael and the yellow vests were taking to the streets … there was another movement rising up in Europe. One that was staging dramatic climate protests in London – blocking bridges, jumping onto trains during rush hour and glueing themselves to the gates of Buckingham Palace – all in an attempt to force the government to take action on climate policy. Their name:

[news montage of reporters saying “Extinction Rebellion”]

While the yellow vests were mostly working class people from rural areas… Extinction Rebellion was largely middle class, college-educated activists in cities – people who could get away with taking big risks.

“Face à l’extinction — la rebellion! Face à l’extinction — la rebellion!”

This is Alice. Well – I’m going to call her Alice, for her own protection.

Alice spent her childhood moving around, mostly in France. But wherever they settled, Alice and her family would take long nature walks, trying to guess the names of the birds, or taking pictures of the landscape.

Now she’s in her mid-thirties, she’s an engineer with a master’s degree, and she’s been a climate activist for much of her life. She spent years signing petitionS, handing out flyers, going to protests and volunteering abroad. But she got frustrated : the climate crisis was looming, and she felt like she was doing too little… that things weren’t moving fast enough.

So in late 2018, when she heard about Extinction Rebellion…she decided she wanted to bring their tactics to France. And she wasn’t alone. With about a hundred other people, she started a chapter in Paris. And pretty soon…

Alice: We started occupying for more than a week one of the sort of central public square in Paris, and it just happened really smoothly.

And the authorities weren’t sure how to respond. They’d basically never seen this sort of protest before… One that was so big, and flashy, and so ripe for media coverage.

Alice: And what we knew at the time, um, is that there was a conflict between the socialist mayor of Paris, and then the head of the police department in, in Paris, and, um, where the mayor wasn't going to Um, actively say that she was against, uh, uh, climate, uh, militants and the climate movement.

So that was kind of the first time where you could really feel that there was going to be a fracture between police and then, uh, a mayor or president or prime minister.

Anna Pujol-Mazzini: The movement grew quickly to dozens of local chapters with thousands of members. They weren’t just in Paris, but also in smaller cities like Strasbourg and Bordeaux and Annecy. And lots of people were taking notice. Including… the police…

Alice: the more… Occupation and actions, uh, the more we were also infiltrated by, um, surveillanc

[break]

Anna Pujol-Mazzini: Just two years later, Extinction Rebellion and yellow vest activists like Mickaël were showing up together, marching side by side at Saint-Soline. Which…might sound really surprising to anyone who knows anything about the climate movement. That unity didn't just happen.

In January 2021, hundreds of people came together… there were old anti-nuclear activists… some farmers’ unions… and younger activists from Extinction Rebellion and the like.

They gathered in a makeshift community hall in a wetland area called Notre-Dame-des-Landes to create a new, more integrated movement.

Notre-Dames-des-Landes is a historic place for climate activism.

In the 2000s, hundreds of people moved to the area to try and stop the construction of a new airport.

They built an entire town made out of wood – complete with houses, a bakery, and shops…  And they lived there. It became a sort of social experiment.

They called it a ZAD – zone a défendre, a zon to defend. And since then, dozens have sprouted across France. The government is so concerned that it put together a special unit to prevent their expansion. It’s a team of legal experts that helps local officials dismantle these zones as soon as they pop up.

And in this place… all these activists from very different movements, some of which had historically clashed over class and ideological differences… they decided to create a coalition of grassroots groups from all across the country, under one banner: Les Soulèvements de la Terre. The Earth Uprisings.

Their slogan: we are the earth defending itself.

In their founding text, one of the things they emphasized was that they want to get rid of the class divide that has plagued the climate movement – not just in France but all over the world. They wrote: "We do not believe in a two-tiered climate activism in which a minority prides itself on eating organic and driving a hybrid SUV while the majority is stuck in jobs they don't want to do, long daily commutes, and low-cost food."

Their goals were to take back the land from polluting industries… occupy and disarm ecocidal projects… and bring everyone together…  the farmers… the unions… the urban social justice organizers, the anarchist groups, and the people fighting against projects in their own backyards.

They decided to focus on one issue in particular: water. Which is how we end up with Mickael heading to the Sainte-Soline protest in 2023.

Across France, there are these things called “mega-basins” being built. They’re huge reservoirs that capture and store groundwater in the winter… so that farmers can irrigate their fields during summer droughts.

Thanks in part to climate change, France has just been through back to back droughts…including our first ever winter drought last year.

The problem is… pumping water from underground actually makes droughts worse. And… the reservoirs can only be used by a handful of large agribusinesses, which are mainly focused on corn fields and other irrigation plants for export. Activists say the megabasins are effectively privatising water and putting small, more sustainable farmers out of business.

Alice: so the sort of movement against these had been growing over the months and And and I guess it became a real realization for a lot of people, what the fight for water meant and access to water. And so I think that kind of resonated for a lot of people. And it meant that a lot of people came from all over France.

Anna Pujol-Mazzini: The first big protest was organised at the site of one of the basins in October 2022 in Sainte-Soline – just five months before Mickael went there with his friends. It's a small village in western France of about 600 people… Thousands showed up.

And the government…was not happy.

Gerald Darmanin: des modes opératoires qui relèvent je n'ai pas peur de le dire, de l'éco-terrorisme que nous devons absolument combattre.

Anna Pujol-Mazzini: That’s French interior minister, Gerald Darmanin. He said: the protestors used “methods which, I am not afraid to say it, amount to eco-terrorism, which we absolutely must fight.”

It was really unusual to hear a French government official use the word “terrorism” to talk about climate activists.

Alice: And so the more the actions went on over the months, the more people would actually come. And because it's over the weekend, it means that a lot of people can travel to spend a few days there.

Anna Pujol-Mazzini: Five months later, activists re-convened in Saint-Soline. People gathered in the fields on Friday night for discussions… shared meals… an evening of fun before the big day. Hundreds of brightly coloured tents popped up around the activists' camp.

Alice: You had a lot of families and of people coming from all over France, of farmers unions political movements a lot of people who were not essentially in climate movements, but heard of what was going on and so would come there also as their first big action or yeah mass actions.

So it was Like the diversity of people I've never seen that in, in any actions that we've had in Extinction Rebellion, for example.

Anna Pujol-Mazzini: The next morning, thousands started marching to one of the basins. Their goal was to stop construction. take apart some of the pipes that had already been installed. and get a moratorium on any new reservoirs being built with public funds.

There was even a community radio station that was created specifically for the event.

Belle comme une pioche qui déterre les tuyaux de méga bassine, c'est méga radio, la radio éphémère et vénère des luttes du Marais poitevin.

Anna Pujol-Mazzini: The protesters divided into three groups, marching separately: a blue one, a yellow one and a pink one. Each block had a mascot representing a local species that’s threatened with extinction. For the blues, an eel. For the yellows, an otter. And the pinks hold up a type of bird – called a bustard <<BUS-turd>>.

Alice: the group that I was in, we had a big a massive bird that was built out of wood that like dozens of people were carrying. You had kids people playing music.

Anna Pujol-Mazzini: The activists walked for miles before they reached the basin – a huge, unfinished reservoir, that basically looks like an empty hole.

Alice: And we arrived around the bassin and, everybody was holding hands and the idea was to literally circle around the bassin holding hands and that was it.

Anna Pujol-Mazzini: But…that’s not what happened.

Lea Hobson: you had police that kind of started to arrive from everywhere.

And Without even being a threat by simply walking in a field, you started to have police shooting tear gas and grenades.

Anna Pujol-Mazzini: She means a kind of less-lethal grenade – one that releases pepper spray or tear gas, and usually some kind of rubber pellets..

Alice: and that kind of started a bit, and then within, I'd say, a few minutes that became complete chaos. they literally didn't stop for two hours.

Capucine Blouet, a human rights observer who was on the scene, could barely keep track of all the attacks.

Capucine Blouet: there were explosive grenades. So crowd dispersal, grenades, tear gas grenades, and stun grenades.

There are the usual kind of tear gas grenades, but there are also tear gas grenades that are deafening and explosive. And they were launched nonstop.

So we were thinking  that they were very injuring.  almost a grenade per second at that time.

And almost systematically after we hear an explosion,  uh, we heard someone calling for medics.

Alice: Ithink the worst was that that moment where all you could hear was medic people shouting asking for help because you had so many people injured.

And we were 30, 000 people. So it's just, it's massive. And you have to imagine that in less than two hours they threw 4,000 grenades. So it was a constant flow of. Of of grenades being thrown at us and that noise

nobody's ever seen that before in their life. and it just wouldn't stop.

Anna: In the middle of this chaos, dozens of protesters are screaming for help.

On different sides of the field, and at different times, two men fell to the ground. They were unconscious and bleeding. One had been hit in the head, and one in the windpipe. Volunteer medics bandaged their wounds, and wrapped them under survival blankets. And then they frantically sent messages to the other doctors at the protest, begging for help. “He’s not breathing”, said one message. “It’s an absolute critical emergency” said another.

Alice: I was with a group of people trying to evacuate people who were massively injured

Doctors, activists and even politicians tried to call emergency services. But for hours… no one came.

First Speaker: vous en êtes où la du  du, de la, de la plus grosse urgence absolue de de de ce que j'ai comme impression, moi de loin.

Second Speaker: alors déjà le problème c'est que sur place donc c'est un peu compliqué. Ouais, on a eu  un médecin sur place et on lui a expliqué la situation c'est qu'on n'enverra pas un tel trop ou de moyen sûr sur place parce qu'on a pas le temps envoyer par les portes de l'Europe.

Alice: The police wouldn't let the ambulances arrive. And actually seeing these people and thinking deep down, this person is not going to live if someone doesn't come now.

Anna : Nathalie was still at home watching all of this unfold on TV. And she started to panic. She tried calling Mickael over and over again…but no one answered.

Finally… her phone rang… It was one of Mickael's friends. He told her that Mickael was one of the two people in critical condition. He was the one who had been hit in the windpipe. The last time he saw Mickael, Mickael was lying on the ground, unconscious.

Nathalie called hospitals in the region, trying to find him. It turned out he’d been taken to Poitiers – almost an hour from Saint-Soline. She drove straight there.

Nathalie Duval: ils m'ont laissé rentrer et quand j'ai vu mon fils, j'étais en larmes et on aurait dit fin de compte tout le côté gauche, tout le côté gauche, c'était Elephant man.

They let me in and when I saw my son, I was in tears. All of the left side of his face, he looked like Elephant man

et Il savait pas qu'on était là, Au départ, il ne m'a pas reconnu. C'est après, avec la voix euh, mais il restait lucide. Cinq fractions de seconde quoi. Et puis après, hop, il repartait, il dormait.

He didn’t know we were there. At the beginning he didn’t even recognise me. Then he did when he heard my voice. He would stay lucid for a fraction of a second. Then he’d be gone again, he’d go back to sleep.

,. Il disait Euh, laissez-moi tranquille, j'ai rien fait, Arrêtez de me tabasser, Voilà.

he’d drift away again. He kept saying “leave me alone! Stop beating me up!”

Nathalie Duval:  …il avait plus rien, quoi. Et moi je lui disais. Tu me laisses pas Michael, t'as pas le droit, t'as ton fils, t'as pas le droit, t'as pas le droit de nous abandonner, hein?

There was nothing left of him. And I kept saying to him: “you’re not leaving me, Mickael, you can’t, you have a son, you can’t abandon us”

Anna Pujol-Mazzini: The next day, Nathalie got a call from the hospital.

Nathalie: j'ai le médecin qui m'appelle et me dit.

Madame, il faut absolument que je vous parle de votre fils. Tout de suite, j’étais en larmes.

The doctor called me and he said: Ma’am, I really need to talk to you about your son. Instantly I was in tears.

Bon, on est obligé d'opérer votre d'urgence du cerveau, c'est très très urgent. Donc il faut que je vous explique. En gros, une fois, il a une hémorragie interne, a une artère, il on va essayer de boucher l'artère, le fait donc on va être obligé de le mettre dans un coma.

We have to operate on your son’s brain urgently. It’s extremely urgent. So he explained — he has internal bleeding and we’re trying to close up the artery. we’re going to have to put him in an artificial coma.

J'ai téléphoné à ma fille pour lui dire que qu'onl allait peut-être perdre Mickael

I called my daughter to tell her that there was a chance we would lose her brother…

Michaël Les derniers mots que qui dit il a eu un petit moment de lucidité, c'est Oh ma maman, t'es là! Et puis la repos sont com. J'essayais de lui parler. J'essayais de le réveiller. Je disais Mikey, k K. mais il était il était déjà les vapes répondait plus il? j'ai dit. Mon fils, il est en train de mourir, mon fils, il est en train de mourir.

Mickael, the last words he said when he had a moment of lucidity were “oh my mummy, you’re here?” and then he went straight back into his coma. I kept trying to talk to him. I kept trying to wake him up. I said “Mickael, Mickael, Mickael” but he was already gone, he wasn’t responding anymore. I told myself: my son is about to die. My son is going to die.

WATERFALL OF MEDIA COVERAGE

demain on tuera des gens de la cause écologique ou animaliste.

Je suis très gêné par l'ensemble de ces petits khmers verts.

Ça s'appelle l'éco terrorisme.

Cela relève de l'éco terrorisme pour cette branche d'extrémistes verts de Khmers verts d'ayatollah vert

c'est quoi? L'étape d'après? C'est qu'on bloque des départs de jets qui transportent des organes?

Anna Pujol-Mazzini: For months, media coverage of climate activists had been getting worse. But now, as surgeons were operating on Mickael’s brain… and Nathalie was anxiously waiting for news… politicians and commentators went on the offensive. Including President Emmanuel Macron…

Macron: “Vous avez des milliers de gens qui étaient simplement venus pour faire la guerre.”

He said: You have thousands of people who simply came to wage war.

And news outlets said the protesters were violent.

They focused on the dozens of police officers the government says were injured…but left out the fact that so were 200 protesters. And two of them, including Mickael, were fighting for their lives.

And the interior minister, Gerald Darmanin, said that no weapons of war had been used by police. But human rights observers, activists and journalists who were at the protest — they all released videos showing that they did..

And in the midst of all of this… public opinion turned against the protesters. So Darmanin took advantage of the moment…and announced he would disband the movement:

J'ai donc décidé d'engager la dissolution des soulèvements de la Terre, que je proposerai en contradictoire à un prochain Conseil des ministres.

I have therefore decided to initiate the dissolution of the Earth uprisings, which I will put to a future Council of Ministers.

This was a huge blow to activists. And it was about to get a whole lot worse… Because behind the scenes, a powerful lobby was getting involved… one that had the power to definitively tip the scales against the protesters.

After the water protest, lobbyists were angry. Especially Arnaud Rousseau – the president of one of the largest agriculture interest groups in the country – known as FNSEA. Tens of thousands of people had turned up at Sainte-Soline… and then just a few months later there were more protests at industrial farms.

Politicians, and big ag interest groups said the activists were targeting poor, hardworking farmers. In France, where agriculture is such a big part of the economy, this argument really resonated with the public. And Arnaud Rousseau seized on this…

He said: “The total impunity of Earth Uprisings will lead everyone to civil war.

The FNSEA calls on everyone to be calm and restrained. But…

I have to add that I am not sure I will be able to hold my troops for long.

An incident can happen.”

And when someone LIKE HIM makes a threat, it doesn’t go unnoticed. The FNSEA spends 600,000€ a year on lobbying. They’re powerful. Militants affiliated with the group have set town halls on fire and droppED tons of cow dung in front of the ministry of agriculture. They've attacked elected officials and threatened climate activists.

But to the government, the water pruhtectors are the eco-terrorists. And the union farmers, well, they need to be protected. In 2019, the government even gave them THEIR OWN POLICE FORCE. Yes, you heard that right. The French government created a special intelligence unit to deal with threats against agriculture interests, what they call "agri-bashing". The force is called the Demeter Unit. It was created in partnership with the FNSEA – that big lobby I mentioned before. And it often targets climate activists.

In 2023, days after Rousseau made his threats, the government announced by decree the dissolution of the Earth Uprisings. But Earth Uprisings wasn’t an NGO or even an organization. Which left people wondering… how do you disband a movement? Can the government even do that? What they *could* do was arrest activists…and they did. Eighteen were arrested in connection with alleged violence at the water protest.

The government didn’t just start these crackdowns overnight. There was a long lead up to their ability to do this – and for the public to tolerate it. Eight years before the Saint-Soline protests and the dissolution of the Earth Uprisings – in November 2015 – French climate activists were preparing for the moment that the whole world would be watching them: COP21 in Paris.

For years, COPs seemed to turn into one missed opportunity after the next. This time, they decided, it would be different. Activists would put so much pressure on governments that they would have no choice but sign a real agreement… one that would not let global warming reach more than two degrees.

But two weeks before…

ARCHIVAL PARIS ATTACKS

Police have now confirmed at least four attacks in the city of Paris tonight. One at the Stade de France, where there was a major soccer game between France and Germany.

The French president, Francois Hollande, in attendance. The AP reporting there were suicide bombers outside the stadium. You could hear it right there as the game was going on. And the most horrifying attack of all at the Batta Climb concert hall, where an American heavy metal band was playing tonight. the AP is reporting that at least 100 have been found dead inside that concert hall.

Anna Pujol-Mazzini: Gunmen broke into the Bataclan in the middle of a rock concert, and started shooting. They gunned down people having drinks at terraces. And even tried to blow up the Stade de France while the president was watching a soccer game.

By the end of the night, 130 people were dead.

The country was in shock. It was the deadliest terror attack France has ever seen.

The president said: never again. And in the wake of that, parliament passed new laws to prevent terrorist activity on French soil. The first law… declared a state of emergency.

NBC FOOTAGE: Protesters were out in the streets despite a state of emergency. banning dozens of demonstrations planned for this week's climate summit, and most of them wouldn't leave.

That state of emergency restricted protests and even put 24 activists on house arrest to stop them from protesting. So that huge climate march planned for COP? It was cancelled.

Instead, activists brought four tons of shoes to the Place de la République – this huge square in the middle of Paris – to represent all the people who wanted to come out and march.

NBC Footage: It had all started peacefully. Laying shoes to represent the thousands whose marches were cancelled.

Vox Pops: They're not interested in having their voices kept out of this climate conference.

This is where the revolution started. This is where the people can express themselves. It's not called the Placid Republic for nothing.

And even though it was illegal… a few thousand did still come out.

300 people were arrested.

NBC footage:

It's about an hour after the tear gas was thrown, you can see that the crowd is really worked up as some of the protesters are staging a sit in, other ones are lying on the ground, one gentleman refusing to move.

From there, parliament continued to pass laws they said were designed to fight terrorism… laws that made it easier to ban protests… to disband groups that were seen as a threat to public order… to expand surveillance and search people without warrants… to put people on house arrest even if they hadn’t committed a crime…

One of the laws passed is known as the anti-separatism law. It requires nonprofits to pledge allegiance to the values of the French republic…or risk losing their funding. It also allows authorities to disband a group if any one of its members is accused of inciting "material degradation" — meaning destruction of public or private property.

And what makes a “terrorist,” is very much up to interpretation.

Anna Pujol-Mazzini: Fatima Ouassak is a political analyst, a writer and a prominent climate activist. She says those laws meant to "counter terrorism" have been unfairly used against a lot of innocent people long before they were used to target white climate activists. And that when you look Black or Arab…you don’t need to be campaigning for the climate to get called a terrorist.

Fatima Ouassak: People of colour get repressed only for existing, not for their political choices or their activism. That's the big difference. And we con sider that violence to be less important politically, that the one against climate activists, that's the tragic part.

Unlike in the US and other countries, in France, the government's official stance on systemic racism is that… it doesn't exist. To the point that it's even against the law to gather ethnic data.

So we don’t actually know how many people of colour live in this country. Let alone how many people are killed, attacked, or harassed by the police.

Fatima runs a working-class environmentalism center, called Verdragon. And when it first opened, threatening posters and leaflets started showing up around the neighbourhood.

They said that mothers behind the project were planning to sep-EUH-rate Musslim kids from the others in a bid to sort of segregate the schools. An Islamist plot.

Fatima it's hard to get to a space and to see that people made the trip very early in the morning with their faces covered to put up these posters again and again to hand out leaflets in the neighbourhood, in mailboxes three times to tell the working class people of our neighborhood not to associate with us.

And very quickly, right-wing media outlets were at her door, asking her: Are you plotting to overthrow democracy and instate Shar-ee-a law?

Fatima when people say you are a separatist, how do you prove that you are not? How do you prove that you are not an Islamist?

When you drop off your children to school, for example, the teachers and the parents don't say hello to you anymore.

To understand what is happening in France, you have to understand that a person like me who campaigned four years for kids to have a vegetarian option in the school cafeteria and environmental issues, on the impact of factory farms, global warming, the issue of animal abuse, public health, and the health of children when they over consume meat.

All of these are environmental issues, but someone like me, Doesn't get called an environmental activist. they get called a separatist or an Islamist.

Anna: Fatima didn't get much support from the climate movement, either. Even though the work she and others do at Verdragon is rooted in environmentalism. Like teaching kids to cook vegetarian meals, selling organic vegetables, and explaining the findings of the IPCC reports to the neighbours — it doesn’t get recognised as climate activism.

Fatima in France when activist groups are led by people of color and located in working class areas, they are not labeled as climate activists even when they do environmental work.

And that has always meant getting threatened, or attacked.

Anna: In June, that reality broke through the consciousness of everyone in France.

Social media exploded with videos of police shooting to death a 17 year old Arab-French boy in the suburbs of Paris.

His name was Nahel Merzouk.

Despite not having his licence yet, he was driving a friend to school, and moments after police pulled him over for a traffic stop, one of the officers shot Merzouk at point blank range. He died an hour later.

After his death, his mother Mounia, marched and protested and talked about systemic racism and police violence…all the while she was still in shock.

Fatima says there’s a link between police brutality against kids of colour, the repression of climate activists, and inaction on climate change.

Fatima I often say this as a mother. I don't want my children to die under the weight of three cops. That's what happened to Adama Traoré.

Anna Pujol-Mazzini: Fatima is referring to a 24-year-old Black Frenchman who died while in police custody.

Fatima I don't want my children to die under the weight of three cops…

But I also don't want my children to die from the air they breathe. I live in Bagnolet, just across the highway interchange. It's one of the most polluted places in Europe. The issues of. Environment and police brutality. I deal with them on a daily basis. It's a real fear that I deal with every day for my own children.

How do we make sure that our children can breathe?

[beat]

Anna: On April 14, 2023 – three weeks after he was taken to the hospital – Mickael woke up from his coma.

Le premier souvenir que vous avez au moment où vous vous réveillez, c'est quoi ?

What’s the first thing you remember when you woke up?

Mickael : De voir ma maman. J'avais encore une sonde dans la bouche. Je ne pouvais pas parler et et d'être content d'être réveillé sur tout quoi. ce que je croyais que ça faisait un jour que j'étais à l'hôpital et en fait ça faisait deux semaines et demie.

Non mais j'étais quand je me suis réveillé, J'ai j'étais pas, j'étais pas moi même quoi, j'étais perdu quoi. Je savais pas quel jour on était. Je ne savais pas. Qu'est ce qui m'est arrivé?

Mickael: Seeing my mom. I still had a tube in my mouth. I couldn't talk but I was happy to be awake. I thought I had been in the hospital for a day and in fact it had been two and a half weeks.

When I woke up, I wasn't, I wasn't myself, I was lost. I didn't know what day it was. I did not know. What happened to me?

Nathalie: ce qui m'a marquée c'est Michael quand il s'est bien réveillé, et les premiers mots Euh, qu'il a dit à L'ub il a enlevé ils ont enlevé L'intubation il a dit, tu me commandes un kebab? Ah, on a bien rigolé, on a bien rigolé. C'est vrai qu'on a bien rigolé et euh, et je regarde Michael, je dis mais tu sais que t'as pas droit au kebab? il me dit ben alors un hamburger je dis mais t'as pas le droit aussi à un hamburger?

Mais maman, il me fait ça fait combien de temps que je suis là? Il fait Ben ça fait plus de deux semaines mon chéri déjà il me fait. t'es sérieuse, je dis ben il me fait était resté tout le temps avec moi. Je fais oui, je fais Ben oui, Tu sais très bien que maman, c'est maman, Ben voilà c’est ça, elle est là.

Nathalie: what struck me was Michael when he woke up, the first words that he said, they removed the intubation and he said, can you order a kebab for me? We had a good laugh, we had a good laugh. I look at Michael, I say but you know you're not allowed to eat kebab right? Then he says to me well then a hamburger. I say but you’re also not allowed to have a hamburger

But he said mom, how long have I been here? I said it's been more than two weeks my darling. He said, are you serious? And you stayed with me the whole time? I say yes, I say Well yes, you know that your mum is always going to be there.

Anna: When I met with Mickael last summer, he couldn’t feel his fingers at all — cigarettes would fall from his hands and he wouldn’t even notice. And because his hands were numb, he couldn’t go back to his job sorting the mail. Nathalie said he was still struggling with short term memory loss — things like forgetting appointments repeatedly or not remembering parts of conversations he had the day before.

But he still goes out to the streets to protest.

There’s a fear now that he didn’t have before. Because he’s deeply aware that he could have died. And because he saw the scared look in the eyes of his 11-year-old son.

MICKAEL des manifs pacifiques Oui, mais des manifs avec de la violence, non, c'est oui, c'est terminé. J'ai j'ai envie de rentrer chez moi entier. J'ai pas envie de rentrer chez moi. Abîmé ou quoi? Surtout que les violences policières en manifestation, il n'y a que ça.

Peaceful protests, yes. But protests with violence? No. That’s it, that’s finished. I want to return home in one piece. I do not want to return home damaged… or worse. Especially since police violence during protests has become so common.

It’s been almost a year since the Sainte-Soline protest upended the lives of so many activists.

Anna: Mickael is on track to make a full recovery. He’s finally regained enough strength to go back to work at the post office. And he and his mum Nathalie have gone back to their roundabout to protest with their Yellow / Vest / comrAHdes.

But the other man who was hit, the one who was hit in the head, wasn’t so lucky. He woke up from his coma after several months…but he’s still regularly in the hospital. His body no longer functions like it used to, and he can no longer do the things he once did – he now has hearing and visual impairments, frequent pain, chronic fatigue, and paralysis in his face. He has a lot of trouble just moving around on his own.

After months of back and forth, in November, France’s highest court announced that the government decree to disband the Earth Uprisings … was thrown out.

It said that although activists "engaged in provocative and violent acts against property," its disbanding was "not appropriate, necessary and proportionate to the situation". Their members are now free to protest again, and their membership has skyrocketed.

At the same time…water reservoirs are still being built, and France is still not meeting the emissions reduction commitments it made as part of the Paris agreement.

In preparation for the 2024 Olympics, the government has displaced people and destroyed natural habitats and arable land. And another law was passed to prevent climate protesters from disrupting sportS events.

And yet…people continue to protest. Even though they risk so much, and so rarely see the results of their labor.

Corinne Morel-Darleux is a French eco-socialist activist and writer. In her book “Plutôt couler en beauté que flotter sans grâce” — which means “Better to sink beautifully than to stay afloat without grace” — she grapples with trying to find a moral comp-euh-ss in this ongoing environmental collapse.

In it she writes “I feel compelled to continue… not in the hope of future victories… no, if I stay focusED it is no longer with the goal of winning one day. it is vain to aim to change the world. The only thing we can try to do is to protect its beauty, as a token of our own humanity — before we have ruined everything.

If we must continue, it is for that, for the dignity of the present.” [END]

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