At the next Council of Ministers, the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, intends to present a decree dissolving the Uprisings of the Earth. What is this radical environmentalist group? Can it disappear?
Gérald Darmanin and Olivier Véran were affirmative: the end of the Earth Uprisings (SLT) is recorded. During questions to the government in the National Assembly, the Minister of the Interior indicated that the decree dissolving the ecological movement will be presented on Wednesday June 21, 2023, during the Council of Ministers. “No cause justifies injuring police and gendarmes”, according to the former mayor of Tourcoing. For the government spokesperson, “we do not dissolve an association based on its ideas, we dissolve it because there are abuses or endangerment of public security, this is the case here” .
This government desire to dissolve the Earth Uprisings was triggered on March 28, a few days after the violent clashes around the Sainte-Soline mega-basin. If the procedure has been slipping since then, the ransacking of experimental greenhouses in Saint-Colomban, near Nantes, has apparently accelerated the procedure. This event took place during a demonstration partly organized by the Uprisings of the Earth.
The response of the Earth Uprisings
In reaction, the movement denounced “a very political and particularly worrying dissolution demanded directly from the Head of State by the agro-industry and the FNSEA”. A call to demonstrate in front of the prefectures on June 21 is visible on their site. Before the announcement of the dissolution, 18 arrests of activists from this environmental network were carried out on the morning of Tuesday, June 20. These arrests concern the invasion of a Lafarge cement plant in the Bouches-du-Rhône last December. The operation was carried out by the anti-terrorist sub-directorate (SDAT) mainly in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, where the Uprisings of the Earth were created, and in Nantes according to Le Figaro.
According to Sunday newspaper, the Earth Uprisings have “three days to respond” to the government procedure. Raphaël Kempf, one of their lawyers, “denounces a method contrary to the rights of the defense”. The legal status of SLT raises questions, because they are not an association strictly speaking, but the meeting of hundreds of organizations and collectives. But The world indicates that “the government nevertheless considers itself justified in dissolving the movement by qualifying it as a ‘de facto group'”. This term refers to “a group of persons (natural or legal) who did not wish to complete the declaration formalities. The undeclared association does not benefit from the legal capacity of the legal person”, according to associations.gouv.fr.
The government has found the parade to dissolve the movement
An entity affiliated with the Uprisings of the Earth could be in the sights of the government: the association for the Defense of the Lands. It was created on October 19, 2021 in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, the same place where SLT was also founded in January of the same year. This association makes it possible to carry out donation campaigns, relayed on the Uprisings of the Earth website. Dissolving it would therefore allow the government to stop funding the environmental movement. Still, the collective proper of the Earth Uprisings could continue to exist even after the dissolution.
Is the dissolution of the movement a wish of the Elysée? Emmanuel Macron would have complained personally of the ecological organization in the Council of Ministers, regretting the slowness of Gérald Darmanin to dissolve it. This organization bringing together several environmental groups, including members of the former ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes in Loire-Atlantique, created in 2021 is in the sights of the Minister of the Interior after several mobilizations. The Earth Uprisings clearly show their goal: “to build a network of social struggles while driving a movement of resistance and land redistribution on a larger scale”, according to their founding text.
Which associations are part of the Earth Uprisings?
The list of signatories of this forum published on Mediapart reveals the participation of Extinction Rebellion, Attac France, Friends of the Earth, the Peasant Confederation for the best known associations in the militant and environmental group. Firm partners and names from the world of research are also part of the organization’s fight.
Benoît Feillu, one of the spokespersons of the Uprisings of the Earth, details the action of this collective in World : “This coalition has set itself the goal of intervening on two aspects: the artificialization of land on the one hand and its monopolization by agro-industry on the other.”
Why is Earth Uprising threatened with dissolution?
The Earth Uprisings have made a name for themselves by blocking several production sites of Lafarge and Eqiom, cement heavyweights. But it was above all the event in Sainte-Soline that made them known to as many people as possible. After the violent clashes around the mega-basin under construction in Deux-Sèvre, the Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin, indicated before the National Assembly his intention to dissolve this collective. His motives? “Several strong abuses against the police, several destruction of property, hundreds of gendarmes or police officers injured, several calls for insurrection.”
“We gave ourselves as methods of action, both the possibility of going to occupy land, but also of being able to intervene on construction sites, on infrastructures which we consider responsible for the ecological disaster to dismantle these infrastructures”, explains Benoît Feillu. He goes on to defend this method: “We judge that there is an absolute climate emergency and that there is an environmental inaction by the government which is absolutely catastrophic.”
They communicate via a calendar divided into seasons. Each year, a mobilization season, “season 5” is in progress from March 25, 2023 until August 31, 2023. They will thus be present in the Larzac plateau in August and in the Maurienne valley. from June 17 to protest against the Lyon-Turin railway project.
Recently, the group made a name for itself during an operation near Nantes. The goal was to protest against the exploitation of sand for the benefit of the construction industry. But agricultural land was ransacked during the demonstration. Experimental greenhouses of the Federation of Nantes market gardeners were vandalized in a few minutes. Damage that shocked even within the environmental movement, because these greenhouses serve as laboratories with crops without pesticides, for example.
Their main actions target agro-industry, the privatization of soils and their artificialization. They present themselves as “rebellious young people who grew up with the ecological disaster as a backdrop and precariousness as the only horizon. We fought against the labor law, police violence, racism, sexism and the climate apocalypse. ” Their actions are mostly illegal, the collective makes no secret of this by explaining that “being content with forums, petitions, demonstrations-walks” is no longer possible in the face of the climate emergency.
Methods close to black blocks according to Gérald Darmanin
The Parisianvia a note from territorial intelligence, argues that “the hard core of the Earth Uprisings, initially composed of ultra-left strategists, gradually widened to activists from environmental collectives, such as the civil disobedience group Extinction Rebellion, in which many members, gradually disillusioned by demonstrations and actions of civil disobedience deemed sterile, are inclined to switch to radicalism”.
They are thus compared to the black bloc movement, visible in the demonstrations, because their activists would not hesitate “to confront the police to commit their abuses (degradation, intrusions, sabotage, etc.) equipped with gas masks, umbrellas, and armed with stones, mortars, molotov cocktails, petanque balls.”
Faced with the threat of dissolution, the Earth Uprising remain unmoved. “It is difficult to see how Darmanin could dissolve a movement, we are not an association or a collective”, underlines Basile Dutertre, spokesperson, with BFM TV.