The Zad and NoTAV. Mauvaise Troupe

2See Jean de Legge and Roger Le Guen, Dégage! … On aménage, Collection ‘La province trahie’. (Les Sables-d’Olonne: Editions le Cercle d’or, 1976). For a critical history of the developmental rhetoric and policies undergirding French postwar economic growth, see Céline Pessis, Sezin Topçu and Christophe Bonneuil, Une autre histoire des ‘Trente Glorieuses’: Modernisation, contestations et pollutions dans la France d’après-guerre (Paris: La Découverte, 2013). Here and elsewhere, translations from the French are mine.

3The new definition of the acronym has entered the Grand Robert dictionary in France: a ‘zad’ is defined as ‘a (frequently rural) zone that militants occupy to oppose a development project damaging to the environment’.

4See Michele Monni, ‘Italian Politics and the NoTAV Movement: The Resiliency or Failure of Citizen Activism?’ and Lucie Greyl, Hali Healy, Emanuele Leonardi, and Leah Temper, ‘Stop That Train! Ideological Conflict and the TAV’, in Economics and Policy of Energy and the Environment, n. 2 (2012).

5David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 164–75.

6‘Marx-Zasulich Correspondence: Letters and Drafts’, in Teodor Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and the Peripheries of Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), p. 116.

7See David Apter and Nagayo Sawa, Against the State: Politics and Social Protest in Japan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).

8See Christine Delphy, ‘B comme Béton’, barricades-mots-zad.org/lettre-b.

9See Anne Berger, ‘B comme Bocage’, barricades-mots-zad.org/lettre-b.

10See Julien Gracq, Lettrines 2 (Paris: José Corti, 1974).

11Julien Gracq, radio interview, France Culture (1977) cited in Jean-Louis Tissier, ‘De l’esprit géographique dans l’oeuvre de Julien Gracq’, in Espace géographique, p. 58. See also Poirier, Louis (Julien Gracq), ‘Bocage et plaine dans le sud de l’Anjou’, in Annales de Géographie, t. 32, n. 241, 1934, pp. 22–31.

12Raymond Williams, cited in David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 27.

13See ‘A la lisière du bocage’, lundi.am/IMG/pdf/4._brochurelisie_rebocagea4.pdf.

14For a vivid enactment of the future according to the ‘airworld’, see John Kasarda and Greg Lindsey, Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2011). See also Will Self’s review of Aerotropolis in the London Review of Books, April 28, 2011, pp. 10–11.

15Escobar, Territories of Difference, p. 68.

16Williams, cited in Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, p. 29. Harvey argues that it is in the novels set in the Black Mountains of Wales that Williams analyzes the productive relationship between local embeddedness or ‘militant particularism’ and the abstract understanding of the wider realm of global capitalism.

17William Morris, ‘The Society of the Future’, in May Morris (ed.) William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist (New York: Russel and Russel, 1966), p. 459.

18See Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (London: Verso, 2015)

19William Morris, ‘The Aims of Art’, in Signs of Change (London: Longmans, 1903), p. 137.

20Mauvaise Troupe Collective, ‘Unconditional Vals vs. the Zad’ (trans.) Kristin Ross. Editorial, Le Monde, October 2016.

       Introduction

      He speaks, without pausing, for several hours straight. His powerful voice fills the small Italian café in the Susa Valley. He tells us the story of his valley, the forests he has learned how to see, the streams that no longer flow, the Juventus soccer games that no longer interest him. Each word is a reverberation of the territory he resolved to defend, now, some several years ago. Each sentence, each intonation emanates from the deepest part of himself, surprising and touching the heart as much as the mind. He sells fish, and has left his stand to devote the whole morning to three strangers curious about his stories and his reasoning.

      A few years ago, I was what the system wanted me to be. I worked, I thought I was doing good because I wasn’t harming anyone. I read the newspaper and I thought it told the truth. But now, I’ve decided what to do with my life: to fight for this movement that is also the future. If I have one more day to live, I want to use it to wake people up.

      She is in front of her cabin, in the sunlight. She tells us the thousands of reasons why she decided to move to the zad at Notre-Dame-des-Landes. She was a pianist, gave lessons to children, and today she points out the places where she imagines hiding if they try to throw her off the territory. A quality shines forth in her artless words:

      I have countless things to do, but earning money is another whole kettle of fish. I could have made 4,000 euros a month working twenty-six hours a week, but when you feel that your life could be useful for something, when you have causes that are really dear to your heart, you can’t just go on giving lessons and only do that. I had to come here.

      These are the kind of words that disrupt lives, because they flow from lives that have been themselves disrupted. Poetry can be heard emanating from the ordinary mouths of opponents to an airport on the outskirts of Nantes and to a TAV rail line (Treno ad Alta Velocità – high-speed train) between Lyon and Turin. And a poetry capable of conveying, in simple terms, what is important: lessons and ideas with the capacity to orient and guide future acts, and to make us collectively intelligent just as much as they make us laugh or cry. And all of this was born from a single first word taken to its full consequences: no. Two letters that for years have polarized the lives of thousands of men and women, letters written on barricades, tractors, houses, and that resound in slogans and songs. One syllable that gives birth to others, and that in turn gives rise to dizzying thoughts and questions.

      We gathered these hundred or so interviews between the autumn of 2014 and the summer of 2015, walking up and down the muddy paths and twisting mountain roads, the vineyards and the chestnut forests, in the bocage of Notre-Dame-des-Landes and in the Susa Valley. One part of our collective went to the western valley in Piedmont, while another had,