“the unfinished 190-million-gallon Sainte-Soline reservoir, a taxpayer-funded boondoggle intended to create a surplus of water for irrigated agriculture”
“it was to become part of a system of more than two dozen reservoirs in the Vendee, Deux-Sèvres, and Charente-Maritime departments of western France”
“the reservoir complex was a form of climate adaptation, but one that attempted to monopolize a public good—water, that basic necessity of life on Earth—for the benefit of private interests”
“A man’s skull was blown open, a woman’s foot shattered, and several people lay blinded by tear gas. As the injured screamed in agony, a few of the marchers fought back. A group of young men, masked and wearing only black and carrying wooden shields, threw Molotov cocktails and rocks dug out of the dirt; others shot fireworks at the forces de l’ordre”
“The battle of Sainte-Soline, as it became known, did not issue out of a political vacuum. It was the culmination of years of conflict over the expanding reservoir system in western France”
“A coalition of French citizens—antireservoir activists, smallhold farmers, environmentalists, students, eco-saboteurs, and black-clad anarchists—demonstrated against several reservoirs in the Deux-Sèvres and Charente-Maritime departments in 2022”
“The authorities had launched as many as five thousand grenades and tear-gas canisters. Around 3,200 cops had marshalled for the attack, deployed along with nine helicopters, four armored vehicles, and four water cannons, directed from a command center overlooking the field of battle”
“Human rights investigators with the UN had a different view. They called the violence at Sainte-Soline “alarming” and “anti-democratic” and noted that France is the only country in the EU known to deploy tear gas and stun grenades against a peaceful assembly”
“If you were to look at aerial photos of France in 1950, it was a country of millions of small parcels, irregularly shaped, diverse in what they produced”
“In the wake of the privations of wartime, France turned to the American model of productivist monoculture. Traditional wisdom was jettisoned and local diversity pushed aside for the cultivation of crops best tended by machines for maximum output and efficiency”
“Large parts of rural France fell to a regimen that required expensive tractors; heady volumes of fossil fuels, fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides; the capture of water for irrigation; and, not least, vast open fields where machines could run unimpeded over miles of uniform terrain”
“Taming the land to make way for petroleum-powered tractors would prove devastating for western France’s bocage country, a tangled matrix of woodland, heath, fields, hedgerows, and orchards laced between brooks, rivers, and ancient canals”
“In order to expand into global markets, the areas of domestic cultivation would have to broaden into the most biodiverse and important storage areas for water, les zones humides—marshes, wetlands, river deltas”
“The destruction of the old ways also meant the evisceration of an entire social class: the smallhold farmer or paysan (that is, peasant), an appellation considered a term of endearment by many rural French”
“Thirty-six percent of the adult population farmed in 1945. Today it’s less than 3 percent—which is to say that modernization eliminated roughly nine out of ten smallholders. (A similar process also unfolded in the United States: less than 2 percent of the U.S. population in 2025 remain in farming, a drop from 17 percent in 1945.)”
“FNSEA is “France’s agribusiness war machine.” It is “much more than just a farmer’s trade union: it has been the co-manager, together with large sections of the French State, of France’s agricultural system for the past 50 years.””
“In 2019, FNSEA partnered with the National Gendarmerie, the branch of France’s armed forces that focuses on civilian law enforcement, to establish a special intelligence unit, code-named Demeter after the Greek goddess of the harvest, that would single out for surveillance and harassment anyone who engaged in “agribashing.””
“Agribashing was defined to include criminal activity—trespassing on agricultural facilities, acts of sabotage, and so on—along with “actions of an ideological nature,” including “simple symbolic actions denigrating the agricultural sector.””
“French courts ruled the program illegal and shut it down in 2022. The Demeter network, however, may still be in place, according to antireservoir activists”
“The rivers that flow out of the gentle uplands of western France—the Mignon, the Sèvre Niortaise, the Vendée, and others—come together at roughly a single point west of the city of Niort, by the Atlantic Ocean, in the 386-square-mile coastal wetland-cum-canal system called the Marais Poitevin”
“the Poitevin is an artifact of human intervention that began in the seventh century, when local monks embarked on construction of a complex of earthen canals and small barrier dams to drain stretches of land in the delta where the many rivers debouched to the sea. The man-made Marais Poitevin acted as a natural reservoir, storing excess water from the uplands. It became a marvel of bocage country—“It is one of the most important wetlands on the European continent,” said one account of the Poitevin, “a favorite stopover for migratory birds” and habitat for European otters—maintained for most of the last 1,400 years first by the monks, then by generations of peasants”
“With the spread of industrial-scale farming and the rise of the corn regime, the water had been poisoned with agricultural runoff, so toxified that locals advised not to swim in it”
“Thirty years ago, when he was a teenager, he and his friends bathed all summer long. Old-timers attested that at one time, as recently as seventy years ago, one could drink the water. Julien’s seventy-year-old father”
“The water lentils that typically float on the surface of healthy wetlands, richly green, a protein source for waterfowl and cover for the fry and tadpoles of fishes and amphibians, used to be so abundant that the canals of the marsh were dubbed the Green Venice. But the water lentils, according to Christian, were dying out, slowly disappearing”
“In an essay he wrote that was published in 2023, LeGuet addressed the “ecocidal business executives of the sprawling tentacular FNSEA”:
You who idolize to the extreme a capitalistic system and all forms of techno-solutionism, you who are ready to blow up nurturing lands to dig megacraters surrounded with megadams made waterproof by an ocean of black tarps. . . . For 15 years, in the Marais Poitevin, some of you thought well to come here and disturb the water and soil cycles. . . . you thought we’d let this happen? You thought we wouldn’t resist?”
“In the summer of 2021, LeGuet and other representatives of Reservoirs No Thank You met with members of a grassroots environmental action group called Les Soulèvements de la Terre, or Earth Uprisings, to answer that question. The group was an outgrowth of a successful land-defense movement that had formed in northwestern France, in the rural community of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, where farmers had been fighting for decades to protect four thousand acres of small-hold bocage farmland from destruction for a planned airport”
“Starting in 2008, activists and anarchists joined the farmers’ movement, and despite attempts by successive administrations to evict the land defenders, who fought repeated battles with police that involved tear gas and beatings and lots of injuries, the airport was never built and the bocage was left intact. The occupation at Notre-Dame-des-Landes—nicknamed zone à défendre (ZAD) as a middle finger at the developer’s common lingo “zone à déveloper”—provided the model for resistance that Earth Uprisings would now uphold”
“The group’s 2024 manifesto, First Tremors, a three-hundred-page, anonymously authored book published by radical Paris imprint La Fabrique Éditions, made clear their vision of ecological revolt in the context of global capitalism that had become “intoxicated by Herculean power” and left the natural world a shambles”
““We are young rebels who have grown up with the ecological disaster in the background and precariousness as our only horizon,” said the manifesto. It inveighed “against the urbanization that tends to cover [the planet] with concrete, to infinitely extend the tentacles of roads, lines, and flows,” the landscape suffocated with infrastructure. It denounced the extractivist economy “that pollutes irremediably in the service of fossil capitalism.””
“Earth Uprisings proposed three prongs for land defense: occupation (of places, by people en masse who refuse to budge); blockade (of industrial activities and byways—roads, for example—that threaten those places); and sabotage (of industrial machines and property), which they called “disarmament.””
“Starting in 2021, cells of direct actionists who issued communiqués via Earth Uprisings sabotaged cement and concrete factories, sand quarries, road construction sites, and road-building equipment across France”
“Autonomous collectives of French anarchists joined and would become instrumental in tactical and defensive strategy to fight back against violent policing and give other protesters, most of them terrified of battle, a better chance to exercise the right of assembly”
“All rebels were welcome, all methods were in the running, as long as a line was drawn at the taking of life”
“By the end of 2021, FNSEA’s old enemy, the Peasant Confederation, a formidable union of smallhold farmers established in the 1980s to oppose agribusiness, had also joined the rebellion against the reservoirs”
“Arrayed against the water defenders, farmers, anarchists, and environmentalists were the FNSEA patrollers—a mix of “virile fraternity, binoculars, beers, sodas, and shotguns in the trunks of utility vehicles,” as described in First Tremors—who took up posts around reservoirs deemed most threatened”
“Saboteurs posted communiqués using names that evoked satire and enigma: here struck the “Regional Directorate for Water Protection,” there the “Fremens of the Marais Poitevin.””
“By the time of the Sainte-Soline march, so much damage to reservoirs had accrued across western France that the resources of FNSEA, the Macron government, and local municipalities and police prefectures had been exhausted by a campaign of sabotage that operated across hundreds of miles of rural terrain. The campaign was fluid, organized, anonymous, and relentless”
“The odd thing about the Sainte-Soline site is there was nothing for the rebels to sabotage, no pipes or pumps or plastic tarps yet installed. The government defended with ferocity an empty crater because it was symbolic to hold the ground against unruly citizens”
“The alliance of peasant farmers with Reservoirs No Thank You and Earth Uprisings’ direct actionists had produced a good run. Reservoirs in Deux-Sèvres were on hold, and in 2025 the authorities in the department of Vienne would announce the cancellation of the planned construction of forty-one other reservoirs”
“reservoirs as a publicly funded support for agribusiness have become a growing object of revulsion across France, largely because of the negative publicity the rebellion against them brought”
“Laury Gingreau, a co-owner of a cooperative farm, where she and her partners in recent years had planted three thousand trees, including sixty different species, their goal the rewilding of the landscape”
“the site of the future Saint Sauvant reservoir. For miles around, except a few remaining vestigial forests, all one saw was machine-scythed corn that crunched underfoot. Little children carrying buckets of seeds—types of peas and wheat and other grains—sowed the fields with their parents in an act of protest against monoculture”