What is the Earth Uprisings, the collective that Gérald Darmanin will dissolve?

Europe 1 with AFP / Photo credit: ALAIN PITTON / NURPHOTO / NURPHOTO VIA AFP 17:43 pm, June 20, 2023

The "Earth Uprisings", whose dissolution the Council of Ministers will pronounce on Wednesday, is a young movement, which has become one of the main actors of the "radical" ecological protest, which claims actions of occupation or sometimes sabotage in the name of the defense of the environment.

A "heterogeneous" movement born in Notre-Dame-des-Landes

The Earth Uprisings were born in January 2021 in the former ZAD (zone to defend) of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, with two objectives: "fight against artificialization and against agro-industrial grabbing," details for AFP Benoît Feuillu (a pseudonym), a spokesman for the movement and former activist of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, according to a police source. "We are a movement, a coalition of organizations, inhabitants of territories in struggle, unions, farms, peasants..." or "a relatively heterogeneous coalition", he claims.

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It is a "de facto" grouping, i.e. not formally declared as an association. Its operation is intended to be horizontal, with local committees mobilized on emblematic projects. "During the general assemblies that take place two, three times a year, the local groups present their struggles and their needs and a collective decision is taken: are the uprisings involved and to do what?", explains Nicolas Girod, spokesman until May of the Peasant Confederation, associated on certain actions. On the menu of "season 5" (March-September 2023): after the Sainte-Soline basin and the Castres-Toulouse motorway project, the exploitation of sand in the Nantes region and more recently the Lyon-Turin railway project were targeted. A large gathering is planned for early August on the Larzac plateau.

Accusations of violence

Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin announced on March 28 that he had initiated the procedure to dissolve the movement, which he blamed for violent clashes in Sainte-Soline during a banned demonstration against water reservoirs. The minister accuses them of "several invasions of companies, strong abuses against the police, destruction of property, hundreds of gendarmes or police injured, several calls for insurrection". "For several months," there has been "a form of radicalization of the modes of action of the environmentalist sphere," notes a police source. This strategy, born from the "observation of a certain failure of the climate marches as well as citizen protest", favors "the idea of rapid and radical action", she adds, citing the groups Last Renovation, Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion or The Earth Uprisings.

Some activists will, "as we saw in Sainte-Soline, prepare Molotov cocktails, stones, objects made to hurt or seriously degrade," adds another police source, evoking "very determined profiles", "relatively young", but already having, for some, "several struggles" to their credit. The Uprisings, for their part, claim the use of sabotage (called "disarmament") against infrastructures deemed harmful, such as sites of the cement manufacturer Lafarge. A mode of action popularized in France by the book "How to sabotage a pipeline" by Swedish anti-capitalist activist Andreas Malm. "We do not describe ourselves in ourselves as a pacifist movement, after very clearly we do not call, we have never called and we will not call to attack people," says Benoît Feuillu.

Radicalization of militants?

The novelty of the use of sabotage is however to be relativized, says Sylvie Ollitrault, director of research at the CNRS, who recalls the dismantling of a McDonald's restaurant or the mowing of GMOs of José Bové. "Mowing GMOs twenty years ago was also perceived as sabotage," she recalls. For one of the police sources, the novelty is the "multiplication of protests on projects of lower intensity, for example a highway ramp or an Amazon warehouse". On these local protests, the "level of violence is now rising very quickly," she adds.

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Elsewhere in Europe, hundreds of legal proceedings are ongoing against Letzte Generation (Last Generation) in Germany for public disorder such as traffic blockades. Searches within this movement took place in Germany in May.

"Coexistence" with other movements

The Ministry of the Interior believes that the uprisings were founded by "members of the ultra-left", a label that the movement rejects. For Sylvie Ollitrault, it is necessary to distinguish the militants of the environmental cause from the autonomous or ultra-left activists, even if they have been able to rub shoulders. "There have been places of melting pot, of common socialization of this generation, that are the alterglobalist movements on the one hand and the ZAD on the other" - even the movement against the pension reform - but "it is often more a coexistence than an inclusion".

The uprisings claim an "extremely varied" base. A support evening in April attracted various political, artistic and scientific figures, including paleoclimatologist Valérie Masson-Delmotte - who however showed her "complete incomprehension" in June after an action targeting market gardeners.