A pungent smell spreads through the folklore of the union demonstration. Burnt plastic. A garbage can caught fire on boulevard du Montparnasse, in Paris. A few meters further, the police are trying to put out the small fire that licks the window of the Rotonde brewery. “It doesn’t take”, exclaims Timothée* with regret. To console himself, the thirty-year-old takes a sip of beer, pulls on his joint, and rubs his eyes fogged up by tear gas. “I’m stuck S for extreme leftism,” he smiles. Beside him, Thomas*, in his forties, has colder anger. This former yellow vest, construction worker, says he is “disgusted with everything”, and particularly with the pension reform, against which he came to demonstrate, this Thursday, April 6. “I had never voted before this election. I did it because I wanted to avoid Le Pen, he continues. But it is useless.” The man covered his face with a black scarf, to prevent the police from identifying him while he threw projectiles. Behind them, individuals dressed in black K-Ways, diving goggles, their faces devoured by hoods, advance and retreat according to the assaults of the CRS. Pebbles fly in the sky. Strange choreography, become an imposed figure of the days of social mobilization.
The ransacking of the Arc de Triomphe on December 1, 2018 made them famous. At Notre-Dame-des-Landes, they took part in the victorious struggle. Among other feats of glory, they pushed the prefect of police Michel Delpuech to resign, after the fire at Fouquet’s, in March 2019. According to the first elements of the investigation, we owe them the fire at the Hôtel de city of Bordeaux, March 23, attributed to “the ultra-left”, according to Gérald Darmanin. They are now the most present absent from continuous news channels, where their name accompanies the images of street furniture in flames. They are called the black blocks, in relation to their means of action, this avant-garde as compact as it is anonymous which activates at the head of the union processions at the call of a rallying sign, often an umbrella which opens. This is followed by blows with iron bars in the windows, tags, throwing Molotov cocktails, or more recently “cacatov”, water-cut excrement sent to the police in Paris. It’s not just thugs, as these brutal demonstrators were once called. Ideologically, according to their readings or their influences, they call themselves anarchists, autonomous, libertarians, anti-fascists, and their violence has a precise meaning. “We want to send a message: this world and this policy do not suit us”, summarizes Tamara *, an art student in her twenties crossed on April 6.
A pinned electoral left
This faceless army has no career plan, only a plan for revolution. The street and the riot against capitalism. Their mistrust of politicians is irrevocable, Mélenchon included. “Libertarian and anti-authoritarian currents have a natural distrust of the parliamentary left, which activists see as participating in the system”, notes Michel Kokoreff, professor of sociology at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis, author of Spectrum of the ultra-left (Editions L’Oeil d’or). “It will not be behind Mélenchon or the mélenchonoïds that things will be done, certainly not. In action, yes”, abruptly summed up the editor Eric Hazan, close to the ultra-left collective Comité invisible, in 2012. In each fanzine movement, the subject returns, like a leitmotif. The electoral left is singled out, accused of preparing the next betrayal of the working classes. “We are offered to revolt (..) before entering the partisan, associative or union ranks and for the stars of the movement, following the example of Cohn-Bendit, to hope to win an elected position there”, denounced The Seum, a Toulouse pro-sabotage magazine, in its March issue. The rare times that the Lundimatin site, important in the anarcho-autonomous sphere, mentioned La France Insoumise, it was in the tone of irony. In June 2020, Jérémy Rubenstein, doctor of history at the Sorbonne, made fun of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s “soft” security program: “Reading a political party program is rarely of much interest, except for measure the distance that this same party takes once in power; and again, the exercise only interests those who believed in it.
The ultra-left concentrates the attentions of Beauvau today. The double success of the anti-airport ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes – through several days of violent clashes with the police – and the first demonstrations of yellow vests gave credence to the idea that violence could pay. “Autonomy experienced a kind of golden age with the movement of yellow vests, which it seemed to take the lead,” analyzes Michel Kokoreff. The pension reform and then 49.3 electrified them. Are they now 3,000, 5,000, 10,000 convinced that the revolution will go through rioting? Hard to say, as the movement is plastic, elusive, fragmented. “2,200 ultra-left activists are listed S”, indicates the Ministry of the Interior. Basically, it doesn’t matter: these activists are used to doing a lot with few means. In Sainte-Soline (Deux-Sèvres), where violent clashes broke out on the sidelines of an unauthorized demonstration against a mega-basin project, on March 25, 47 gendarmes were injured, against between 7 and 200 demonstrators, according to the counts. Among these, Serge Duteuil-Graziani, a 32-year-old Toulousain, still in a coma. His journey sheds light on what the life of an “S-file” activist can be.
A life without vertical organization
Son of a libertarian publisher close to Daniel Cohn-Bendit in May 1968 and of a university professor, this 30-year-old was seen in anti-NATO, anti-prison, anti-nuclear demonstrations. A time suspected of having participated in the ransacking of a premises of the Ministry of Justice, in 2011, he had founded a place of anti-capitalist activism in Toulouse, the local Camarade. He was involved in parallel in the middle of the squats and, recently, in the Autonomous Action, a small group whose Telegram loop testifies to the attraction for vandalism or clashes with the police. An archetypal counter-society functioning of this left “outside the walls”. “The ambition among many of them, but not all, is to live communism ‘here and now’, that the course of their lives be as much as possible the reflection of their principles and their speeches”, describes Hugo Melchior, researcher in contemporary history at the University of Rennes 2. “These militants claim a life without vertical organization. friendships and enmities”, adds Audric Vitiello, lecturer in political science at the François-Rabelais University of Tours.
Sometimes a little more. Territorial Intelligence currently monitors 42 sites in France where ultra-left activism is particularly dynamic. “Notre-Dame-des-Landes has moved the movement out of Paris, insists Audric Vitiello. If large bastions exist, as in Rennes or Nantes, it is today more diffuse, established in small towns”. Despite the lack of overall coordination, links do exist between all these groups. On the many militant sites of this microcosm – Paris-luttes.infoExpansive in Rennes, Rebellyon.info in Lyon, the Cric in Grenoble, or Anti-authoritarian Info in Toulouse – you can read “tips and tricks” there to sabotage a pylon, communicate away from the ears of the police. The “poukaves” are sometimes denounced there, these former comrades approached by the police who ended up giving details of the activities of their group. Questioned while he was still national coordinator of intelligence and the fight against terrorism, in March 2022, Laurent Nunez indicated that 170 sabotages had been perpetrated since 2020 by ultra-left militants.
“The Black K-Ways People”
Despite the media legend, the capital of French anarchism has never been Tarnac, in Corrèze. In 2008, Julien Coupat, a 34-year-old Essec graduate, was accused of being the cause of catenary sabotage on an SNCF track. The return of ultra-left terrorism, persuades the Minister of the Interior, Michèle Alliot-Marie. He is indicted with eight other people living around this village on the Millevaches plateau, in Haute-Corrèze, where they have organized themselves into a self-managed community. The Coming Uprising, a small book published by La Fabrique in 2007 by an anonymous collective, The Invisible Committee, in reality the Tarnac gang, is presented as the inspiration for their actions. The book will strongly sell 122,000 copies, Edistat figures. Ten years later, Coupat is released. The fiasco serves as a lesson to intelligence, which is now trying to follow this trend with tact. “There is a world between the activist who only adheres to the discourse, the person who practices the black bloc to express a generalized fed up and the one who lives in anonymity to participate in large-scale actions, warns Arthur *, a former gendarmerie officer who has participated in several surveys on the ultra-left at the national level. This variety of profiles makes the ultra-left elusive.”
The episode especially popularized the radical approach of the Tarnac gang. Julien Coupat now publishes with the prestigious editions of Seuil – anonymously. Mathieu Burnel, another released from the case, animates the site Monday morning, very followed in this microcosm. Well-known names participate, such as the Goncourt Eric Vuillard prize, the writer Alain Damasio or the researcher Frédéric Lordon. And surprise, even on the parliamentary left, many now have lenient words for those who believe in the power of broken glass. “The anarchists speak ill of me, but not me, because I consider that we are from the same political family. And we do not speak ill of his family”, assured us Eric Piolle, the mayor of Grenoble, in May 2022. “Unfortunately, some have the impression that the only solution to be heard today is to turn to degradations”, includes Ségolène Amiot, LFI deputy for Loire-Atlantique. At Sud Solidaire, we unambiguously assume our support “for the people of black kways”. “We will not spit on them, because we know that there are some of our people in it, assumes Frédéric Bodin, responsible for the service of order at Solidaires. We know that certain comrades will provide the service of order of a union one day, or demonstrate as a militant Sud-Rail or CGT, and go in the procession of the head another. It all depends on the degree of anger of the moment.
Focal change
Hugo Melchior, who recalls his own militant years with Sud-Etudiant and with the Revolutionary Communist League, observes that the circles of socialization of the ultra-left, the far left and the parliamentary left “are often the same”: “But if we can find ourselves in certain discussions, the disputes are often present,” he adds. The environmental struggle offers the pretext to unite momentarily. “The autonomous are very opportunistic. Any struggle becomes a pretext to intervene”, notes Sébastien Schifres, former militant of the autonomous movement, a time close to the Invisible Committee. Today, activist libraries are now populated with books dedicated to ecological activism, such as How to sabotage a pipeline, by Andreas Malm. The Swede is claiming actions of sabotage on movable property such as SUVs or oil installations. “They want to put out of harm’s way everything that is considered to be mainly responsible for the current disaster, continues Hugo Melchior. Conversely, organizations like Extinction Rebellion can be seen as less effective, because less in action. “
The Uprisings of the Earth, at the origin of the mobilization of Sainte-Soline and targeted by a procedure of dissolution of the Ministry of the Interior, represent the perfect junction of ecology and the anarcho-autonomous movement. In Deux-Sèvres, on March 25, walked together classic environmental activists, elected EELV and LFI, but also much more radical profiles. “We have gone from a worker centrality to a radical ecological centrality”, confirms Hugo Melchior. And soon to green blocks?