Breaking Laws: Violence and Civil Disobedience in Protest 9789048528271

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Breaking Laws

Protest and Social Movements Recent years have seen an explosion of protest movements around the world, and academic theories are racing to catch up with them. This series aims to further our understanding of the origins, dealings, decisions, and outcomes of social movements by fostering dialogue among many traditions of thought, across European nations and across continents. All theoretical perspectives are welcome. Books in the series typically combine theory with empirical research, dealing with various types of mobilization, from neighborhood groups to revolutions. We especially welcome work that synthesizes or compares different approaches to social movements, such as cultural and structural traditions, micro- and macro-social, economic and ideal, or qualitative and quantitative. Books in the series will be published in English. One goal is to encourage nonnative speakers to introduce their work to Anglophone audiences. Another is to maximize accessibility: all books will be available in open access within a year after printed publication. Series Editors Jan Willem Duyvendak is professor of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam. James M. Jasper teaches at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Breaking Laws Violence and Civil Disobedience in Protest

Isabelle Sommier, Graeme Hayes, and Sylvie Ollitrault

Amsterdam University Press

Originally published as: Isabelle Sommier: La violence révolutionnaire (2008) Graeme Hayes & Sylvie Ollitrault: La désobéissance civile – 2e édition augmentée et mise à jour (2013) © Presses de la Fondation des Sciences Politiques Translated by Marina Urquidi (Part 1)

Cover illustration: Occupy La Défense, Paris, November 2011 Photo: Graeme Hayes Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Typesetting: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 90 8964 934 8 e-isbn 978 90 4852 827 1 (pdf) doi 10.5117/9789089649348 nur 740 © Isabelle Sommier, Graeme Hayes & Sylvie Ollitrault / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2019 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.



Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 11 List of Abbreviations, Organizations, and Parties

13

Introduction to Breaking Laws

21

Part 1 Revolutionary Violence Experiences of Armed Struggle in France, Germany, Japan, Italy, and the United States Isabelle Sommier Translated by Marina Urquidi

1 Introduction to Part 1: Revolutionary Violence in Context

25

2 A Subject Concealed Violence and Social Movements: Fragmented Analytic Traditions Distinguishing Terrorism and Revolutionary Violence The Silence Surrounding 1968 The ‘1968 Years’: A Cycle of Protest

29 29 32 34 36

3 A Revolutionary Period? The International Context The Student Revolts The United States Japan Germany France and Italy The Generational Dimension of Revolt The Growth of the Extreme Left The United States Japan Germany France Italy The Autonomous Movement

41 41 44 45 46 48 49 50 52 53 54 54 56 57 57

4 Radicalization Processes Repression and Countermovements Germany Italy Japan The United States Competition and Mutual Influences The United States Italy Japan France Social Isolation High-Risk Commitment and the Logics of Clandestine Action

61 61 62 63 65 66 66 67 69 71 74 75 80

5 Strategies of Violence 85 Propaganda of the Deed 86 86 The United States Japan 87 87 France Resistance and Urban Guerrilla Warfare 88 89 Germany Italy 90 The Insurrectionary Model: Taking the Attack to the Heart of the State 91 Anti-Imperialism and the Transnationalization of Actions 96 Germany 96 97 France Japan 100 6 The End of a Cycle Anti-Terrorist Policies The United States Japan France Germany Italy A Farewell to Arms

105 105 105 105 106 106 107 109

Italy Germany France

109 113 113

7 Conclusion to Part 1

119

Part 2 Civil Disobedience Graeme Hayes and Sylvie Ollitrault

8 Introduction to Part 2: Civil Disobedience in Perspective

123

9 Definitions, Dynamics, Developments 131 Theorizing Civil Disobedience 131 Conscience and Collective Action, Direct and Indirect Disobedience 134 Civil Disobedience as ‘Performative’ 136 137 Direct and Indirect Disobedience Reconsidered Conceptual Distinctions in Historical Overview 143 143 Quakerism Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) 145 Satyagraha According to Gandhi: Resistance of Body and Soul 147 150 The US Civil Rights Movement (1955-1965) and Beyond Conclusion 152 10 Genealogies and Justifications in Contemporary Movements 155 Civil Disobedience in France 156 The Cultural Importance of Manifestos 157 160 Conscientious Objection and Anti-militarism From Larzac to Notre Dame des Landes 161 Civil Disobedience in a Situation of Urgency 164 Action and Emergency 166 171 Urgency and Environmental Disobedience Urgency and Undocumented Migrants 174 Disobedience and Neo-liberal Globalization 176 177 Disobedience and Global Justice 178 Disobedience and Professional Identities Conclusion 183 11 Repertoires of Civil Disobedience

185

The Constraints of Illegal Action 185 Civil Disobedience as Technique 188 Civil Disobedience and Media Representation 192 Greenpeace, Reporters of Their Own Action 196 Civil Disobedience, Criminal Prosecution 197 Trials as Political Arenas 199 201 Civil Disobedience and Prosecution: The Case of GANVA Networks of Commitment 207 Disobedience and Biographical Availability 209 Conclusion 212 12 Negotiating the Boundaries of Violence and Non-Violence Property Destruction: A Form of Non-civil Disobedience? Justifying and Legitimizing Property Destruction Staging Action The Relational Logic of Harms The Semantic Construction of the Civic

215 216 222 227 232 236

13 Conclusion to Part 2

241

Biographical Notes 247 France 247 Germany 248 Italy 249 Japan 250 The United States 251 Bibliography 253 Index 265

List of Figures and Tables Figures Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3

Different Red Armies in Japan Origins of Action Directe Red Brigades Scissions

73 78 110

Tables Table 1 Table 2 Table 3 Table 4 Table 5 Table 6 Table 7 Table 8 Table 9 Table 10 Table 11 Table 12 Table 13 Table 14 Table 15 Table 16 Table 17

Percentage of Americans considering the Vietnam War ‘a mistake’ (1965-1969) 43 Percentage of American students qualifying themselves as ‘doves’ or ‘hawks’ (1967-1969) 43 Causes of agitation on US campuses (1967-1968) 45 SDS membership (1960-1968) 53 Number of students who were part of the Japanese new left (1967-1974) 54 Race riots and unrest in the United States from 1965 to 1967 68 Number of attacks by three Italian organizations 71 Consequences of uchigeba in Japan (1968-1980) 72 Types of propaganda actions in Italy (percentage) 92 Evolution of forms of action in Italy and in West Germany (1970-1983) as a percentage of total actions 94 Number of victims of the far left in Italy and West Germany (1970-1983) 95 Types of armed action in Italy and in West Germany 95 Types of actions committed by Action directe on French territory (1979-1987) (percentage) 98 Number of victims of Action directe on French territory (1979-1987) 98 Number of militants imprisoned for membership in the various BRs 111 Regions in which BR members were charged (percentage) 111 Italian militants’ profession (percentage) 112

Acknowledgements The authors would particularly like to thank Jim Jasper and Nonna Mayer for their guidance and encouragement throughout the process, and to the editors and editorial teams at both Amsterdam University Press and the Presses de Sciences Po for their creative input and organization. Isabelle Sommier would like to thank the CNRS (Centre national de recherche scientifique), the CESSP (Centre de sociologie et de science politique) research centre at Paris 1 University, and the TEPSIS (Transformation de l’État, Politisation des Sociétés, Institution du Social) research centre for translation support, and of course to Marina Urquidi for her painstaking work translating the original French, as well as to Graeme Hayes for preparing the final text. Graeme Hayes and Sylvie Ollitrault would like to thank colleagues at Aston and at the Arènes research centre Rennes, and above all to the activists who gave their time, effort and energy talking to us and allowing us to observe their actions.



List of Abbreviations, Organizations, and Parties

40 Days for Life (United Kingdom, 2011-) Aarrg!! Apprentis Agitateurs pour un réseau de résistance globale (France, 2001-) Association pour la communication non ACNV violente (France, 1991-) AD Action directe (France, 1979-2004) African National Congress (South Africa, 1912-) ANC Anpo Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan (1954) Außerparlamentarische Opposition, or ExtraAPO Parliamentary Opposition (Germany, 1966-1973) Army of God (United States, 1982-) AutOp Autonomia operaia, or Workers’ Autonomy (Italy, 1973-1979) B2J Bewegung 2. Juni, or the June 2nd Movement (Germany, 1971-1980) BAC Brigade activiste des clowns (France, 2005-) British Aerospace (United Kingdom, 1977-1999) BAe BI Brigades internationales (France, 1974-1976) BLA Black Liberation Army (United States, 1971-1981) BPP Black Panther Party (United States, 1966-1982) BR Brigate rosse, or Red Brigades (Italy, 1970-1987) BR-PCC Brigate rosse per la costruzione del partito comunista combattente, or Red Brigades for the Construction of the Combatant Communist Party (Italy, 1981-1988) BR-PG Brigate rosse-Partito guerriglia del proletariato metropolitano, or Red Brigades-Guerrilla Party (Italy, 1981-1982) BR-UdCC Brigate rosse-Unione dei comunisti combattenti, or Red Brigades-Union of Combatant Communists (Italy, 1985-1987) British Workers Sports Federation (United BWSF Kingdom, 1923-1935)

14 

CADAC

Breaking L aws

Coordination des associations pour le droit à l’avortement et à la contraception, or Coordination of Associations for the Right to Abortion and Contraception (France, 1990-) CCC Cellules communistes combattantes, or Communist Combatant Cells (Belgium, 1983-1985) Christlich Demokratische Union CDU Deutschlands, or Christian Democratic Union of Germany (Germany, 1945-) Confédération française démocratique du CFDT travail (France, 1964-) CGT Confédération générale du travail (France, 1895-) CIMADE Comité inter mouvements auprès des évacués (France, 1939-) CIRCA Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (United Kingdom, 2003-) CND Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (United Kingdom, 1957-) CNPF Conseil national du patronat français, or the National Council of French Employers (France, 1945-1998) COINTELPRO An acronym for the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program (United States, 1956-1971) Colonna 2 agosto, or 2nd of August Column, splintered off the BR (Italy, 1981-1982) Colonna Walter Alasia, or Walter Alasia Column, splintered off the BR (Italy, 1980-1983) COLP Comunisti organizzati per la liberazione proletaria, or Communists Organized for Proletarian Liberation (Italy, 1981-1984) Committee of 100 (United Kingdom, 1960-1968) Communauté de l’Arche (France, 1964-) CORE Congress of Racial Equality (United States, 1942-) Confédération paysanne, or Farmers’ Union CP (France, 1987-) Community Service Organization (United CSO States, 1947-) DC Democrazia cristiana, or Christian Democracy (Italy, 1942-1994) Déboulonneurs (France, 2005-)

List of Abbreviations, Organizations, and Parties

15

Den plirono, or I Do Not Pay (Δεν πληρώνω) (Greece, 2012-) DKP Deutsche Kommunistische Partei, or German Communist Party (Germany, 1968-) EU European Union Faucheurs volontaires (France, 2003-) Fédération de l’éducation nationale, or FederaFEN tion for National Education (France, 1945-) FLN Front de libération nationale, or National Liberation Front (Algeria, 1954-) Front national, or National Front (France, 1972-) FN Fédération nationale des syndicats FNSEA d’exploitants agricoles, or National Federation of Agricultural Holders’ Unions (France, 1946-) Free Speech Movement (United States, 1964) FSM FSU Fédération syndicale unitaire (France, 1993-) GANVA Groupe d’actions non violentes anti-nucléaires (France, 2007-) Gruppi di azione partigiana, or Partisan GAP Action Groups (Italy, 1969-1972) GARI Groupes d’action révolutionnaires internationalistes, or Groups of Internationalist Revolutionary Action (France, 1977-1979) genetiX snowball (United Kingdom) GISTI Groupe d’information et de soutien des immigrés (France, 1972-) Gauche prolétarienne, or Proletarian Left GP (France, 1969-1973) INRA Institut national de la recherche agronomique, or National Institute of Agricultural Research (France, 1946-) Jeunesse agricole catholique, or Young CathoJAC lic Farmers (France, 1929-1965) Jeunesse communiste révolutionnaire, or JCR Revolutionary Communist Youth (France, 1966-1969) JEC Jeunesse étudiante chrétienne, or Young Christian Students (France, 1929-) JOC Jeunesse ouvrière chrétienne, or Young Christian Workers (France, 1925-) Nihon Sekigun, or Japanese Red Army (Japan, JRA 1970-2001)

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Kakumeito Revolutionary People’s Party (Japan, 1991-2001) Keihin Anpo Kyoto Tokyo-Yokohama Anti-Security Treaty Joint Struggle Committee (Japan, 1968-1970) LARF Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Factions (Lebanon, 1979-1988) Lotta continua, or Continuous Struggle (Italy, LC 1969-1976) MAN Mouvement pour une alternative non-violente (France, 1974-) May 19th Committee (United States, 1977-1980) MIA Montgomery Improvement Association (United States, 1955-) Movimiento Ibérico de Liberación, or Iberian MIL Liberation Movement (Spain, 1971-1973) MLAC Mouvement pour la liberté de l’avortement et de la contraception (France, 1973-1975) Movimiento 15-M (Spain, 2011-) MSI Movimento sociale italiano, or Italian Social Movement (Italy, 1946-1995) NAACP National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (United States, 1909-) NAP Nuclei armati proletari, or Proletarian Armed Nuclei (Italy, 1974-1977) NAPAP Noyaux armés pour l’autonomie populaire, or Armed Nuclei for Popular Autonomy (France, 1977-1979) NCLC Nashville Christian Leadership Council (United States, 1958-) NPD Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or National Democratic Party of Germany (neo-Nazi) (Germany, 1964-) NRP Nouvelle résistance populaire, or New People’s Resistance, underground branch of the GP (France, 1970-1973) ONF Office national des forêts, or National Forests Office (France, 1964-) Operation Rescue (United States, 1986-) Ordre nouveau (France, 1969-1972) OWS Occupy Wall Street (United States, 2011-)

List of Abbreviations, Organizations, and Parties

PAH

17

Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca, or Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (Spain, 2009-) PAS Pennsylvania Abolition Society (United States, 1775-) PCI Partito comunista italiano, or Italian Communist Party (Italy, 1921-1991) Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine PFLP (Palestine, 1967-) PG Partito guerriglia del proletariato metropolitano, or Guerrilla Party of the Metropolitan Proletariat, splintered off the BR (Italy, 1981-1982) PL Prima linea, or Front Line (Italy, 1976-1981) PLO Palestine Liberation Organization (Palestine, 1964-) Ploughshares (United Kingdom, 1996-) Plowshares (United States, 1980-) PLP Progressive Labor Party (United States, 1962-) Potere operaio, or Workers’ Power (Italy, 1969-1973) PotOp PSU Parti socialiste unifié, or Unified Socialist Party (France, 1960-1989) RAF Rote Armee Fraktion, or Red Army Faction (Germany, 1970-1988) Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) Republic of New Africa (United States, 1968-1980) RESF Réseau éducation sans frontières, or Education without Borders Network (France) Revolutionary Armed Task Force (United States, 1980-1981) Rote Zora, or Zora the Redhead, feminist branch of RZ (Germany, 1977-1995) Roya citoyenne (France, 2016-) RTE Réseau de transport d’électricité, or Electricity Transmission Network (France) RYM Revolutionary Youth Movement (United States, 1969) RZ Revolutionäre Zellen, or Revolutionary Cells (Germany, 1973-1995) SCLC Southern Christian Leadership Conference (United States, 1957-) SDS Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund, or Socialist German Student League (Germany, 1946-1970)

18 

SDS

Breaking L aws

Students for a Democratic Society (United States, 1960-1969) Sekigun Red Army (Japan, 1969-1970) SFIO Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière, or French Section of the Workers’ International (France, 1905-1969) Symbionese Liberation Army (United States, SLA 1973-2002) SNCC Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (United States, 1960-1970s) SNCF Société nationale des chemins de fer français, or the French National Railway Company (France, 1938-) SOS Tout-Petits, or Save the Little Ones (France, 1986-) SPD Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or Social Democratic Party of Germany (1863-) SPK Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv, or Socialist Patients’ Collective (Germany, 1970-1972) Transcendental Club (United States, 1836-1844) La Trêve de Dieu, or Truce of God (France, 1988-) Tute bianche, or White Overalls (Italy, 1994-2001) UdCC Unione dei comunisti combattenti, or Union of Combatant Communists, splintered off the BR-PCC (Italy, 1985-1987) UEC Union des étudiants communistes, or Communist Students Union (France, 1956-) UFW United Farm Workers of America (United States, 1962-) Union de la gauche socialiste, or Union of the UGS Socialist Left (France, 1957-) UJCml Union des jeunesses communistes marxistes léninistes, or Union of Marxist-Leninist Communist Youth (France, 1966-1968) United Nations UN Union nationale des étudiants de France UNEF (France, 1907-) URA Rengo Sekigun or United Red Army (Japan, 1971-1972) Vaincre et vivre, or Conquer and Live (France, 1974-1976) Vive la révolution!, or Long Live the RevoluVLR tion! (France, 1969-1971)

List of Abbreviations, Organizations, and Parties

White Citizens’ Councils (United States, 1954-) WPC Women’s Political Council (United States, 1946-) WTO World Trade Organization WUO Weather Underground Organization (United States, 1969-1977) Young Communist League (United Kingdom, YCL 1921-1988) Zengakuren Japanese League of Student Self-government (1948)

19



Introduction to Breaking Laws

This book brings together two volumes initially published in French in the Presses de Sciences Po’s Contester series: Isabelle Sommier’s La Violence révolutionnaire, here translated from the original by Marina Urquidi, and Graeme Hayes and Sylvie Ollitrault’s La Désobéissance civile, here revised and translated by the first author. Both focus on the emergence and evolution of new and radical modes of activism in what we might call the ‘long 1960s’, from the emergence of the civil rights movement as a mass movement in the USA in the mid-1950s through to the protest cycle of 1968 and its aftermath, in which movements adopting forms of armed struggle, and movements adopting forms of non-violent direct action, challenged state power. In the first part of this book, Sommier discusses the ‘Years of Lead’ that followed the revolutionary moment of 1968. Sommier’s account provides a fascinating overview of the key groups in Europe, North America, and Japan, with particular focus on the Red Brigades in Italy, the Red Army Faction in West Germany, Action directe in France, the Japanese Red Army, and, in the USA, the Weather Underground Organization. She argues that there is an ‘unsolved crisis of memory’ concerning these groups, and more generally concerning the relationship between 1968 and the subsequent development of movements espousing armed struggle in these countries, noting that these groups cannot simply be delegitimized as terrorist, insofar as they refused to carry out indiscriminate attacks (privileging instead a form of action centring on political assassination) and recognized in their ideology and group culture the importance of public accountability. Sommier’s analysis thus has wide conceptual importance for the study of social movements in general: where social movement theory developed from (and arguably continues to privilege) instrumentally and rationally based accounts of movement organizations operating within highly structured political contexts in order to explain their patterns of emergence, mobilization, and demobilization, Sommier argues that the contrasting trajectories of armed movements can best be understood through the cultural lens of clandestinity, and thus of group identity. In the second part, Hayes and Ollitrault focus on the multiple and various legacies of the civil rights movements of the 1960s, charting the emergence of civil disobedience as a historicized form of ‘heroic’ social movement action in Western (post)industrialized democracies. Adopted by citizenship, anti-nuclear, and environmental movements in particular as they sought to differentiate themselves from class struggle in the post-1968

22 

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period, civil disobedience has more recently developed into a familiar form of action in counter-globalization, migrant rights, climate justice, and professionally based campaigns espousing a civic politics opposed to the entrenchment of neo-liberal, post-democratic political and economic arrangements. The authors argue here that the predominant normative focus on civil disobedience in liberal political theory obscures the performative significance of movement work, particularly concerning its discursive justification and legitimation, the contrasting movement understandings of accountability, and, crucially, the importance of boundary-marking between what constitutes violence and non-violence. Combining historical overview, theoretical discussion, and detailed discussion of movements (such as the French Faucheurs volontaires campaign against GM crops), they argue that the adoption of civil disobedience is emblematic of the frustration of activists with the failure of the ‘classic’ repertoire of social movement action to produce change faced with a widening democratic deficit. Though the focus of their studies is very different, together these two analyses therefore ask us to re-address normative accounts of the relationship between radicalism, the use of violence, and collective action. Both privilege contextual understanding, placing their accounts of movement development and strategic choice within the situated histories of the emergence of these movements; both focus on the importance of discursive legitimation, and on the interpretive work that social movement actors do, in order to produce political and social challenge.

Part 1 Revolutionary Violence Experiences of Armed Struggle in France, Germany, Japan, Italy, and the United States Isabelle Sommier Translated by Marina Urquidi

1

Introduction to Part 1: Revolutionary Violence in Context

Fifty years ago, revolts broke out across the world, with not a continent spared. They were most often led by schoolgoing youth, sometimes by young workers, and although they were not in any way coordinated or even interconnected, they all developed themes related to the university system as well as to international solidarity, with denunciation of the Vietnam War at the top of their agenda. Red was the dominant colour in all the demonstrations, including those of the Prague Spring, where in the context of a people’s democracy, the liberalization of political and intellectual life, was being demanded. In several countries, this reactivation of revolutionary hope raised the question of taking power by force of arms, or at the very least that of active resistance against the perceived authoritarian drift of ‘bourgeois’ regimes. This led to an efflorescence of small extreme-left-wing groups under an eclectic range of influences mixing Marxism, of course, in all of its forms, with a dominant Maoist current, and/or anarchism and situationism. Most of these groups would quickly wither away or be reduced to verbose groupuscules mainly concerned with analysing the ‘contradictions of the system’ and predicting the forthcoming implosion of capitalism. Some, however, would advocate action from the outset and follow a process of radicalization that would steer them underground and to armed struggle. The Communist Combatant Cells in Belgium, the Revolutionary Organization 17 November (17N) in Greece, the First of October Anti-Fascist Resistance Groups (GRAPO) in Spain, and the Angry Brigade in Great Britain are among the many groups whose names are hardly known, and even less well remembered, outside their respective countries. Yet it is quite a different story for the groups that are the focus of this study: the Red Brigades (Brigate rosse, BR) in Italy; the Red Army Faction (RAF) in West Germany; the Japanese Red Army (JRA), in a different category, known the world over as well as in Japan; in France, Action directe (AD), even though it emerged somewhat later with respect to 1968; and the Weather Underground Organization (WUO) in the United States, which was partly the birthplace of the 1968 revolt and which, contrary to common belief, also experienced revolutionary violence. For the average person today, these names are only vaguely reminiscent of a far-off period, if not another age. There are several reasons for this. First, for disciplinary and historiographical reasons, the history of these years

26 

Breaking L aws

has been compartmentalized, placing 1968 on one side and the terrorism of the ‘Years of Lead’ on the other. Deprived of history, the groups belonging to the latter category seem bizarre if not pathological, and their choice of violence an incomprehensible, even irrational heresy that surfaced out of nowhere. More basically, however, history does not like the defeated, even less so when the path they took was a deviant one. Although these years are usually buried away, they reappear periodically, always under some form of scandal and controversy. It took numerous legal appeals and actions for Nathalie Ménigon*, a founding member of AD who had suffered two strokes and become partially hemiplegic while in prison, before she was finally granted day release on 19 July 2007 after having served 20 years of her life sentence. A similar legal battle was needed for Joëlle Aubron*, also an imprisoned AD member, to get her sentence suspended for health reasons in June 2004 (she died shortly afterwards, on 1 March 2006). In Germany, the release in March 2007, after 24 years of imprisonment, of Brigitte Mohnhaupt*, who had led the second generation of the RAF, also caused much discussion, although it was less impassioned. In Japan, the question of the extradition from North Korea of the members of one of the Red Armies continues to poison relations between Pyongyang and Tokyo (along with many other issues, of course), even though the children of these activists have been gradually returning to Japan since the year 2000. Italy, meanwhile, has perhaps been the most painful arena for the political and historical settlement of these years, to the point of affecting relations between France and Italy, with Paolo Persichetti’s extradition from France in August 2002, Cesare Battisti’s arrest two years later, and the extradition of Marina Petrella, jailed in France for more than a year under a request for extradition to Italy, ultimately blocked by President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2008 for ‘humanitarian reasons’. Beyond these imprisonment issues (the number of which has since declined, with 2 RAF activists still in jail in Germany, as are about 20 militants in Italy), what is still being fiercely debated is how these years and revolutionary movements are remembered, especially since the 1968 revolts and the huge cultural changes that they brought about have come under fire in several European countries. In July 1988, the life of the former leader of the legal Italian organization Lotta continua, Adriano Sofri*, was turned upside down after the confessions of a pentito (one who repents and collaborates, hereafter referred to as ‘repentant’) who accused him of having ordered the first far-left political assassination, which took the life of Police Chief Luigi Calabresi on 17 May 1972; Sofri was released in January 2012 after serving nine years in jail, followed by seven more under partial release and

Introduc tion to Part 1: Revolutionary Violence in Contex t

27

house arrest. Before being criticized for what he had said at the time about children’s sexuality, the French-German student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit had been reproached for his friendship with Hans-Joachim Klein*, a German Revolutionary Cells (RZ) militant, which had led him to hide Klein in France when the latter had given up the armed struggle in 1977, two years after having participated alongside ‘Carlos the Jackal’ (hereafter referred to as just ‘Carlos’) in the 1975 hostage-taking of the OPEC ministers in Vienna. During Klein’s trial in 2001, the German minister of foreign affairs, Joschka Fischer, of the Green Party, had his militant past catch up with him after photographs were published showing Klein and Fischer clashing with the police in Frankfurt in 1973. In short, these years are still part of the present and testify to an unresolved crisis, which will remain unresolved as long as a historical debate fails to re-explore it. This book hopes to be a contribution in this direction by examining the 1968 cycle of protest in its entirety and the context that led part of youth to feel they were experiencing a revolutionary period until they were finally demobilized after the dismantling of the armed groups and their farewell to arms. Between these two milestones, we will seek to highlight the various processes of radicalization that governed the escalation of certain groups and the evolution of their strategies.

2

A Subject Concealed

The history of the analysis of social movements, which though relatively short has produced a particularly dense body of conceptual work since the late 1960s in particular, reveals a peculiar paradox. Everything, in militant vocabulary, refers to war, starting with ‘militant’, which shares the same Latin root as ‘military’, but also ‘enlist’, ‘mobilization’, etc.; indeed, in its early stages and its first formalizations, the analysis of social movements typically associated collective action with violence. And yet, during the same 1960s, an extremely prejudicial split separated the analysis of social movements from the analysis of violence. The reason for this lies essentially in a rejection in social movement scholarship of so-called collective-behaviour approaches, which addressed social mobilization through the lens of ‘aggression’; another reason is the resonance which has more recently been acquired by the term ‘terrorism’. At the intersection of these two theoretical issues, lie hidden the political stakes involved in the link between 1968 and terrorism, a blind spot which has until recently contributed to concealing the mechanisms of radicalization during the 1970s.

Violence and Social Movements: Fragmented Analytic Traditions Before social movements emerged as a field of study, attention had been focused on violent behaviour, whether as part of ‘crowd psychology’, where crowds were considered to be causally linked to criminal behaviour, or as part of the revolutionary situations predicted by Marxism. This link was maintained in the first true tradition of collective action analysis, in that psychosocial or collective behaviour theories maintain a focus on ‘aggression’. These theories stress the social condition of the group and its community of experiences, understanding a group’s violent behaviour not as a part of human nature, but as a set of reactive behaviours responding to external stimuli, such as frustration and/or a learning process. According to Bandura (1973), learning theories tell us that violent behaviour, like any other behaviour, is learned and will either be excluded or welcomed depending on the cultural and subcultural context. Although generally disapproved by the dominant culture, violence is more or less

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actively valued by certain social groups. There are several reasons for this, which are not mutually exclusive: – either because it matches the image, usually negative, given by the social environment to the group, which then proceeds to turn the stigma back at it; – or because it is anchored to a social model, such as the popular ‘social bandit’ figure; – or because it is instrumentally legitimized, notably through an ideological vector. Gurr (1970) improved the so-called frustration-aggression model suggested by Dollard in 1939 by introducing the concept of relative deprivation. Here we no longer have an objective situation of frustration, but its subjective perception, that can lead to aggression. Aggression is born from the face-off between the expectations of individuals (value expectations, at the subjective level) and the objective satisfaction of needs (value capacities, at the objective level). Sociologists distinguish three types of violence: turmoil, or spontaneous riots, thus weakly organized if organized at all; conspiracy, the specific actions of a minority (political plots, attacks, or assassinations); and internal war (civil war, revolution), characterized by its breadth, an alliance between the masses and the elite, and a plan to overthrow the government in power. Political violence is conditioned, upstream, by the level of social violence caused by a feeling of relative frustration, but it also depends on various factors of a cultural and political nature. The shift from social violence to political violence is facilitated by two instigating factors. One is the diffusion of normative justifications of violence, i.e. of an ideology or an ethics legitimating recourse to it, including the right to resist against oppression, the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theory of tyrannicide, Marxism, anarcho-syndicalism, and liberation theories. The other factor is the diffusion of instrumental justifications (the historical effectiveness of violence, the group’s feeling of marginalization); it is the conviction, based on previous experiences, that from the practical point of view, violence is effective, that ‘only violence pays’. The weight of the past is particularly interesting for explaining the type of repertoire of contention in force and its evolution. These favourable variables can be attenuated or even destroyed by a third factor: the regime’s capacity to gather political and military support that will make recourse to violence less justified and more costly. Gurr thus introduces the study of the environment and of its reactions into the analysis of violence, in particular the regime’s legitimacy and its coercive resources, as well as the role played by means of communication and the media.

A Subjec t Concealed

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Despite the structural bias of this approach, analyses of collective behaviour were vigorously contested, and rightly so, over their emphasis on the psychosocial aspect of frustration, by what would soon become the dominant theory: the theory of resource mobilization. The undeniable progress that this theory brought to the sociology of social movements was made, however, at the cost of the total disappearance of violence as an object of enquiry, probably as a reaction to competing theories. Tilly (1978, p. 182) explains this as follows: [T]o understand and explain violent actions, you must understand nonviolent actions. Any study that treats violent events alone deals with the product of two different sets of determinants: (1) the determinants of collective action in general, whether it produces violence or not; (2) the determinants of violent outcomes to collective action.

Violence holds an ambiguous position in this school of thought, in which it can either appear as the pursuit of politics in a very Clausewitzian perspective, or be reduced to the rank of simple resource – sometimes fruitful, sometimes counterproductive – subjected to a cost-benefit calculation. Resources are considered exclusively from a utilitarian point of view, erasing the emotional dimension and the world of beliefs. Resources are cast in the same way as market goods, where their value is set with a corresponding use, measured strictly against their effectiveness, irrespective of the actors and their context. When the social and cultural contexts of mobilization are disregarded, interactions are limited to an exchange of strategic blows where the actors are assumed to have complete control over the stakes involved (see Dobry, 1992, pp. 34-38). The evident economism of this analysis creates a thoroughly disembodied image of violence which, deprived of affects and convictions, disappears as a specific object and is instead merged with conflict; and whilst conflict is constituent of society, violence is marginal and proscribed, particularly in democracies, which draw their strength from their capacity to regulate conflicts by containing them within a pacified form of expression. Resorting to violence is neither insignificant or systematic, which precludes applying the same analytical lens to commitment to violence as that applied to commitment as a whole. McAdam was the first to distinguish between low-cost and high-cost forms of activism measured in terms of the time, energy, and money they suppose, from low-risk and high-risk forms of activism, measured in terms of the danger (be it physical, social, legal, financial, etc.), anticipated in the decision to commit (McAdam, 1986, p. 67). High-risk commitment requires

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specific analytical tools that until recently the sociology of social movements did not allow for, because of the domination of the rational model. The armed militancy we are studying here falls obviously into this category: the ultimate risk for the activists involved being to lose their lives or their liberty. The risks were not, however, purely physical; the primordial risk of this form of commitment was undoubtedly to be marginal from society, to be rejected by it, was the fact that it provoked disgrace and moral condemnation, as well as there being no going back. Ultimately, this form of commitment is still today (and perhaps especially today) generally disapproved of or at best not understood, and therefore continues to weigh heavily on the lives of those who experienced it; it has very significant biographical consequences, even higher than those identif ied by McAdam in connection with the Freedom Summer (McAdam, 1990), because of its duration, its actuation in clandestinity, and the effects of imprisonment, be it actual or potential for those who are still fugitives.

Distinguishing Terrorism and Revolutionary Violence As the sociology of social movements tended to turn away from studying violence, the latter became increasingly apprehended from the angle of ‘terrorism’. In the early 1980s, more than a hundred definitions of terrorism were disputing the market within a hybrid literature mixing testimonials, journalistic accounts, and analyses by all kinds of experts, few of them academics (Sommier, 2006). Some assimilated it to any violence used for political ends, others to all violent forms of action, and still others, in the tradition of Raymond Aron, stressed the psychological effects produced by terrorism, much more than its purely physical consequences. In an analogous confusion, the term is applied to groups with fragmented profiles, as much from the ideological point of view as from that of how they are organized, some consisting of a few individuals and others representing genuine irregular armies. In a previous study, I deconstructed the category of terrorism to propose an alternative definition, total violence, indicating a particular type of violent strategy adapted to mass societies. Here, the use of indiscriminate violence aims to create a high and spectacular resonance among the civil population, rejecting the principle of separating the victims (‘non-combatants’, ‘the innocent’) from the target (political power) (Sommier, 2000, p. 109). From this point of view, extreme-left groups cannot be qualified as terrorist groups insofar as their ideological background establishes a relationship between culpability and sanction, as testified

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by their refusal to conduct indiscriminate attacks, and by their privileged recourse to political assassination. This proposal aims to ‘clean up’, so to speak, a spongy concept with very broad contours, in order to see if during the twentieth century, the emergence of a particular modus operandi in the use of violence could be observed. Indeed, violence sensu stricto does not constitute a repertoire of collective action as understood by Tilly. Its most classic definition is also too broad to designate, unambiguously, forms of action that will avoid the necessarily subjective representations that others have of it, starting with the victims. In addition, including in the same category such actions as bomb attacks in public places, targeted assassinations, window-breaking during demonstrations, and, why not, strikes in public services perceived as ‘hostage-taking’ (of the service users) makes no sense; at least, it makes no scientific or analytical sense, unless what is intended is to editorially assign this categorization to the groups and actions that generate the moral disapproval of most people at a given time. For this reason, rather than devoting a scholarly study to ‘violence’ in general, it always seems preferable to us to study it within its own particular spatial, temporal, and even ideological contexts. In the same spirit, it is clearly vacuous to focus on studying the types of groups and forms of action generally subsumed under the term ‘terrorism’. Doing so generally mixes political assassination, understood as the “killing of a person in public life, for a political motive and without legal process” (Ford, 1985, p. 2); plots, or conspiracy, as a concerted plan to attack domestic security; guerrilla warfare, which along with terrorism constitutes an indirect long-term strategy applied by irregular combatants, but is distinguished from terrorism by its territorial grounding and its political project, which aims to take portions of the territory away from state power; and finally, insurrection, which is the model to which armed militants most easily refer (though they typically lack a collective social basis for their action), explaining their recourse to demonstrative or exemplary actions. For this reason, without prejudging the modi operandi of particular groups, we prefer the term ‘revolutionary violence’. We understand ‘violence’ in its most commonly accepted definition, ‘behaviour designed to inflict physical injury to people or damage to property’ (Graham and Gurr, 1969, p. xvii). In the same vein, we understand political violence as ‘all collective attacks within a political community against the political regime, its actors – including competing political groups as well as incumbents – or its policies’ (Gurr, 1970, pp. 3-4; for a critique, see Sommier, 1998). Their violence is ‘revolutionary’ in that it seeks to attack state power based on an ideology

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of radical social change. Revolutionary violence is not the prerogative of extreme-left groups, even though they are our focus here; it is also found among certain fascistic groups, whose virulence, in the same period, would also largely contribute to the escalation of leftist revolutionary violence.

The Silence Surrounding 1968 These questions agitating academic circles are compounded, for the period we are interested in, with an additional difficulty: that of the historiographic debate on 1968 which has become clouded by political issues. As we have already underlined, 1968 is a taboo subject. This taboo is expressed in two different ways: the first is absolute silence as in Japan, where the consequences of the 1968 episode are held responsible for the subsequent collapse of the entire left wing; the other is the production of an official memory, as observed in France and in Italy. It is an ‘official memory’ because it is a finalized development of the country’s own history, a selective writing of it, according to Marie-Claire Lavabre, which has produced an ‘intellectual doxa’ thanks to support from the media (Pinto, 1991, p. 95). At stake are the deep political significance of the 1968 ‘events’ and their legacy. In France, the tempo of this editorial and memorial production has followed four phases: at the time, a profusion of live testimonials reflecting the image of a good-natured family saga; subsequent indifference, lasting until the tenth anniversary of the events, in 1978; a third phase, characterized by public speaking and legacy disputes between the two commemorations (1978 and 1988), where the celebration of a likeable ‘merry month of May’ faced off against the denunciation of leftism and Marxist ideology, claimed to have diverted the ‘true’ significance of ‘May’; and finally its great redemption as well as, since 1998, its prosecution, which hit a high point as one of the themes developed by Nicolas Sarkozy in the 2007 presidential election campaign that brought him to power. These quarrels could be seen as merely a farce in which history’s protagonists oppose one another according to their subsequent political and professional trajectories in that they feature a very particular fringe of the 1968 ‘generation’, that of the minority of former ‘sixty-eighters’ with access to the media and editorial circles. Besides the fact that it is not healthy for the actors themselves to monopolize the writing of their own history in the name of the principle according to which you cannot speak about what you have not experienced, the reinterpretation of these years, and first and foremost their separation into the ‘good’ 1960s and the ‘bad’ 1970s, creates a

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dynamic which is anything but academic. As Pisier puts it, ‘rescuing May comes at the price of excluding leftism’ (1986, p. 16). The Italian literature is divided between, on one side, the ‘terrific’ 19681969 years, celebrated for their festive and merry character, and on the other, the dark 1970s, summarized as the ‘Years of Lead’; there is no connection between the two. As we have previously argued, ‘although focusing on the traumatic event and isolating it in a space and time circumscribed by and for it may be an effort to exorcise it, this also contributes to perpetuating it, the way war neuroses perpetuate war’ (Sommier, 1995, p. 170). This process of division into separate periods is also a classic defence mechanism, whose goal is to avoid having to examine the connections between the two periods. It was not until the 1990s that research appeared in Italy aimed at grasping the cycle of protest in its entirety. Indeed, several threads run through this period. The revolutionary struggle developed at the end of the 1960s, legitimating the use of violence, including armed violence, and preparing for it. All groups shared an abstract justification of violence, whatever their actual practice of violence (be it ‘mass’, avant-garde, or underground). All were in fact convinced that the period was revolutionary and that for this reason, violence was on the agenda, whether immediately or in the near future. This seemed so obvious that there are very few documents explicitly seeking to justify recourse to violence. However, between the lines, two types of legitimation can be identified. On the one hand, a materialistic argument considered violence as a historic inevitability, and as in continuity with the revolutionary movement, of which these organizations claimed to be the heirs. Here, violence is necessary, inescapable, and imposed by the enemy, who will not be defeated without reacting. As Arendt (1972) argues in her essay ‘On Violence’, this highly self-reinforcing reading is an inversion of Marxist thought, and is perhaps explained either by a superficial reading of Marx or by the more strictly Leninist make-up of the groups of the time, who shared a Clausewitzian conception of war as the propaedeutics of politics. On the other hand, an idealistic argument justifies violence as the instrument of individual and collective liberation. Here, there is a clear influence of anarchist thought, along with Third World liberation struggles, and Vietnam in particular; the righteous violence of oppressed people enables them to recover their dignity and to defeat the enemy, even one considered invincible. Equally, this argument also sometimes contains an eschatological element. Indeed, for some, there is the feeling of a pressing psychological need; recourse to violence enables the birth of a new man. Following Fanon (1963), violence here is creative through a twofold sacrifice: that of the oppressed, and that of the oppressor.

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This theoretical legitimation of violence sits alongside its legitimation in practical terms, where the accepted methods of political commitment include street fighting, ‘militant antifascism’ (i.e. ‘exemplary’ actions against extreme right-wing groups), illegal and even violent ‘Robin Hood’ actions for the benefit of the working class, sabotage, taking company executives hostage, taking reprisals against law enforcement authorities, attacks against the police, police stations, prisons, and so on. Based on credible testimonials (i.e. those not intended for self-exoneration from responsibility by charging others), no one ever decided, in this context, to create a terrorist organization or to go over to armed struggle (except for the Italian Gruppi di azione partigiana, or Partisan Action Groups, GAP). Rather, differentiation came about via threshold effects. These were not necessarily planned, were sometimes unconscious, and sometimes even determined by reactions to some action or another, and thus were not initially intended by the militants themselves. It is usually a retrospective illusion, to borrow Dobry’s phrase, to determine the trajectory of an organization as of its birth (Dobry, 1992, p. 67ff.). One is not born a ‘terrorist’; it is something you become as events unfold and as others view you. Indeed, the Adriano Sofri* affair, discussed earlier, demonstrates the unpredictability of how the category of ‘terrorism’ is ascribed to different groups. Up until the declarations of a ‘repentant’, Lotta continua was not regarded as a terrorist organization; though legal, until the early 1970s it practised a level of violence that set it apart from neither Potere operaio, or Workers’ Power (PotOp), nor the Red Brigades. The majority of studies today are now guided by this continuity hypothesis and the ensuing focus on the processes of radicalization and of subsequent labelling that we have adopted for our comparison of the French and Italian trajectories.

The ‘1968 Years’: A Cycle of Protest We can obviously no more reduce the 1968 revolts to violence than split them into two completely unrelated moments. For a rational clarification of the choice of revolutionary violence, history first has to be rewoven. This is partly helped by the ‘cycle of protest’ concept, which also enables us to reconcile the sociology of social movements and the sociology of violence by questioning processes of radicalization. Based on his study devoted to social movements in Italy during the transition from the 1960s to the 1970s, Tarrow developed the concept of ‘cycles of protest’, or ‘waves of collective action’. For Tarrow, a protest cycle is ‘an

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increasing and then decreasing wave of interrelated collective actions and reactions to them’, identified by five elements: the intensity of conflict; its geographical and social diffusion; the appearance of spontaneous actions as well as of new organizations; the emergence of new symbols, new interpretations of the world and ideologies; and an extension of the repertoire of actions (Tarrow, 1995, p. 95). These cycles unfold in three phases: an ascending phase of revolt (that of the ‘moment of madness’ where everything seems possible, to use Zolberg’s (1972) expression); a peak phase marked by the radicalization of actions; and a third phase of decline. A cycle starts when ‘structural conflicts’ find a favourable structure of political opportunities, where division amongst elites produces a partial opening-up of the political system to previously marginal groups, and the appearance of new social groups. This process is also related to Tilly’s repertoire of collective action, given that a cycle is often identified with a particularly salient form of action such as the 1960s sit-ins in the United States. Tarrow’s model is certainly not immune to criticism. He tends both to neglect ‘secondary events’ and to undervalue discontinuities between episodes because of the method he most often adopted to ‘validate’ the existence of a cycle, protest event analysis (PEA, a technique used to identify the incidence and character of protest actions using media sources). Tarrow based his pioneering research on a detailed examination of an Italian daily newspaper from 1966 to 1973, but without giving a satisfactory explanation as to why he chose these dates; which leads one to wonder whether the resulting cycle is not simply the product of the time frame, which can only exaggeratedly isolate the cycle, and even suspend it in time, depriving it of its diachronic dimension. As underscored by Fillieule (2007), there are three flagrant biases here, unless, as suggested by McAdam, the study is associated with other tools, such as for instance analyses of networks. What is more likely being measured are cycles of media attention than cycles of protest, strictly speaking. A cycle of protest can completely escape our attention if it clashes with other political cycles of major importance (elections, an international event, etc.). Finally, although the PEA instrument has a Darwinian selection effect among the causes that can reach the rank of ‘important social movement’ and remain ‘newsworthy’ to the media, it is not very useful for grasping their evolutions when, for example, a movement is led to giving up the street in favour of institutionalization, or on the contrary, of radicalization, which would make it move into other categorization logics. The empirical bias induced by this method becomes crucial as soon as the links between demobilization and radicalization are systematized. If Tarrow had broadened his media-based research even

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only to include two additional years, which would have covered a moment when Italy experienced a new wave of protest in 1977, there is no doubt that he would have obtained different, even completely dissimilar, results. The format of this book does not allow us to discuss the boundaries of this cycle country by country, which is why we have chosen to use Bernard Lacroix’s expression, the ‘1968 years’, to qualify a period marked by the reactivation of revolutionary hope, which translated in particular into the legitimation and preparation of use of violence, including armed violence. Apart from the methodological problem it poses, the cycle model is excessively dependent on the concept of the structure of political opportunities. It is an understatement to say that this concept is ‘spongy’, to borrow Neveu’s expression (Neveu, 1996, p. 102; see also Fillieule, 2005b, pp. 201-218). In fact, the political opportunity structure concept is so spongy that it pretty much allows saying anything and everything, by rigidifying the vulnerability factors of political regimes and ignoring the effects of temporality and context, as well as the dynamics, or processes, involved in opponents exchanging blows. The same is true for the ‘repression’ variable, which can as much inhibit protest as foster it, as we will show by considering it among the factors both of radicalization and of the end of the cycle. It seems to have become a given, in traditions as diverse as the theory of mobilization of resources and the Touraine school, that ‘demobilization radicalizes, whereas mobilization moderates’ (Wisler, 1994, p. 30). In addition to the fact that the instruments allowing a cycle to be traced ought to be refined, it seems to us that what thus appears as a ‘general law’ ought to be examined. We will do so not by examining the nebulous (to say the least) structure of political opportunities – which would ‘be closed’ in the demobilization phase – but rather by means of a ‘social isolation’ indicator. The effects of the social isolation of an organization, in particular when the social group that it hopes to represent is not responding to it, are very diverse: they can just as much lead to an organization’s radicalization as to its deliberate self-demise. Tarrow himself sets the emergence of armed groups at the end of a cycle in four phases: the creation of new organizations; the routinization of collective action; an at least partial satisfaction of demands; and the disengagement of the majority, accompanied by the radicalization of a minority. His model is not very far from the inversion model developed by Michel Wieviorka in another school of thought inspired by Alain Touraine. For Wieviorka (1988, p. 17), terrorism is an ‘extreme, broken-down form of anti-social movement’ that intends to take the place of the social movement by forcing what it sees as the necessary course of history. In previous work (Sommier, 2000, p. 80),

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we formulated several objections to Wieviorka’s theory: concerning the empirical tools capable of establishing (or not) the measure of complicity uniting (or not) the reference group and the so-called vanguard; concerning the normative scope underpinning it, where we argued that support from the reference group would somehow be tantamount to anointing the action with a noble ‘revolutionary’ goal, and absence of its support to excommunication, demoting the action to the less noble category of ‘political violence’, or even to the plainly repulsive one of ‘terrorism’

and finally at the heuristic level, where we argued that if we follow Wieviorka’s thinking, the ‘terrorist drift’ should logically affect the organizations most isolated from the famous reference group – i.e. the working class – and thus, to return to the comparison of the French and Italian cases, affect France and not Italy; and yet the opposite occurred. We could even consider that the risk of escalation was greater in France, given, for instance, that the French Maoist group Gauche prolétarienne (GP) used explosives (against the far-right daily Minute on 13-14 May 1971), whereas the far-left Italian groups did not; that the first political kidnapping occurred in France (of the French parliamentary representative Michel de Grailly two days after GP leader Alain Geismar was tried by the State Security Court in November 1970); and that the French Jeunesse communiste révolutionnaire (JCR) included violence in its plans and faced off twice (in 1971 and 1973) with the far-right group Ordre nouveau. No matter how disappointing this might be, especially to authors wishing to develop mono-causal explanations, we need to acknowledge that the variables, partly because they can be combined, have divergent effects depending on the context. Using a rational model does not preclude factoring in a group’s identity, which probably has effects on the group’s strategic choices. This we will do by examining the effects of clandestinity, i.e. of both the group’s identity and its organizational model, which is something that makes armed organizations exclusive groups, which marks them out in the study of social movements. But first, in the next chapter, we must understand the context in which revolutionary violence flourished.

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A Revolutionary Period?

In this chapter, we aim to bring back the context, and identify the salient features marking the beginning of the cycle: on the one hand, the generational character of the revolt and its incubation and development within the university, itself characterized by internal inequalities that would quickly become politicized; and on the other hand, the activism of the extreme left, in an international context favouring ideas of rupture and the rebellion of the weak. Beyond the common features which raise the question of social movement diffusion (a question which is still largely unanswered today), this chapter also highlights a number of distinctions between different situations and contexts. One of these is the variable capacity of groups to cross the initial boundaries of protest action, but there are also strictly ideological factors at play and which are common to the three European countries under consideration.

The International Context As we have already underscored, the international context undoubtedly nurtured a warrior mind-set, and solidarity with ‘peoples in struggle’ prepared the ground for the emergence of belligerent demonstrations and new types of action, sometimes inspired by urban guerrilla warfare. In France, there were bomb attacks by the Trotskyist-leaning National Vietnam Committee (CVN) against US interests (Bank of America, Trans World Airlines, etc.), and the American Express headquarters was vandalized in March 1968, leading to the creation of the Movement of 22 March. In Europe, as in the United States, anti-Vietnam War demonstrators marched to the chant of ‘Two, three, many Vietnams’, Che Guevara’s message to the 1967 Havana Tricontinental, and raised ‘El Che’s’ emblematic figure as a flag. In short, everything indicated, as stated by the far-left newspaper Lotta continua in July 1970, that ‘the general trend [was] revolution’.1 The oldest ‘sixty-eighters’, i.e. those who had become politicized or had been activists prior to the student rebellions, often say their first commitment to have been in solidarity with Algerian freedom fighters and with Cuban (or more broadly, Latin American) revolutionaries, and of course, against the Vietnam War. The ‘trip to Cuba’, taken for instance by US students 1

Lotta Continua, Anno II, no. 14, July 1970, p. 16.

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in the summer of 1960, was the thing to do, all the more so if it was an opportunity to meet ‘Fidel’ or ‘Che’, whose departure from the island to propagate focalism (‘isolated foci’ guerrilla-warfare strategy) elsewhere, followed by his assassination in Bolivia in 1967, had turned him into the quintessential figure of the romantic, tragic hero. Another revolutionary arena was China, where in 1966 Mao Zedong had just kick-started the Cultural Revolution by mobilizing youth against the bureaucratization of power. He had been offering an alternative to the big Soviet brother since his break with the USSR six years earlier, having rejected the latter’s ‘revisionist’ theories, which included peaceful coexistence and the possibility of bringing socialism into power through elections. With Lin Biao, he had developed the theory of the world people’s war whereby imperialism would be encircled by its periphery – the Third World – thus seeking to be made its champion. His support of youth against professors and party officials completed his image of a revolutionary purity unceasingly in motion, and this seemed to vindicate the youthful rebellion, which adopted his dàzìbào ‘It is right to rebel’ as a slogan; in France it would become the title of a book written by Philippe Gavi, Benny Lévy, and Jean-Paul Sartre. But the most unifying combat was beyond doubt the one ‘heroically’ fought by the (little) Vietnamese people against the US superpower. The Vietnam War took a hard turn in 1965, with the beginning of intensive bombing raids on 7 February, the mobilization of 300,000 troops, and the use of napalm, summary executions, and torture. In a domestic context already perturbed by the struggle for civil rights, the war was the spark that inflamed US campuses. Of the 26.8 million young US citizens who could have been drafted between August 1964 and March 1973, only 42.5 per cent actually were; those who were not, essentially young middle- and upper-class students, escaped the draft by deferment. The campaign against the war was championed by the New Left. The first draft card burnings began in 1965. A national protest was organized on 17 April 1965 in Washington, DC, by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and on 21 and 22 May on the University of California, Berkeley, campus by the Free Speech Movement (FSM). In November, the Quaker Norman Morrison set himself on fire in front of the Pentagon as a sign of solidarity with the Buddhists in South Vietnam who were doing the same. The struggle stepped up in 1967 when an amendment of the Selective Service System rules threatened to draft higherlearning students who were getting poor grades. In addition to sending back their draft cards, many (estimated at 20,000) fled the country, mostly to Canada; 27,444 cases of desertion were recorded between 1 July 1968 and 30 June 1969. In January 1968 the trial of Dr. Benjamin Spock began; a

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renowned psychiatrist, Spock was charged along with four other persons with conspiracy to counsel, aid, and abet resistance to the draft in violation of the Universal Military Training and Service Act. The following year, in February 1969, 400 US soldiers in Seattle organized a march for peace, and mutinies broke out, though only sporadically, between 1967 and 1969. In this two-year period, the American New Left, through its demonstrations and initiatives under the slogan ‘Hell, no, we won’t go’, clearly contributed to turning the country’s public opinion around on how the war in Vietnam was seen, as reflected by the following survey data, Tables 1 and 2. Table 1 Percentage of Americans considering the Vietnam War ‘a mistake’ (19651969)

1965 – August 1967 – July 1968 – August 1969 – October

Americans aged 21 to 29

Americans aged 30 to 49

Americans aged 50 and older

14 32 48 58

22 37 48 54

29 50 61 63

Source: Lipset, 1971, p. 39

Table 2 Percentage of American students qualifying themselves as ‘doves’ or ‘hawks’ (1967-1969)

‘Doves’ ‘Hawks’ No opinion

Spring 1967

Autumn 1969

35 49 16

69 20 11

Source: Gallup poll, in Lipset, 1971, p. 43

But the fight against the war would also be internationalized and become the New Left’s key circulation vector of protest and interconnection. Student protest came to Great Britain in the summer of 1965, at Oxford and the London School of Economics. The Russell Tribunal, which gathered distinguished figures from across the world, was established in November 1966 and was held in Stockholm in May 1967 (France refused to host it); it found the United States guilty of genocide. An International Congress against the War in Vietnam was held in West Berlin in February 1968 and was followed by numerous demonstrations, often violent, in Berlin of course,

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but also in Freiburg, Hamburg, Munich, and Bremen, to mention only the most important. It was also an opportunity for the various far-left groups to meet because it was attended by many foreign delegations (including the JCR, represented by Alain Krivine), and to plan various forms of solidarity together (sending money and drugs, but also weapons, a desertion and sabotage campaign, etc.). That autumn, SDS students went to Japan to meet with their Japanese Bundo (or League of Communists) counterparts. Three observations need to be made about this context, as well as about the rhetoric that was feeding it. First, we should wonder about the mainsprings of the Third World cause serving as a proxy for a generation that for the most part (with the exception of a fraction of French youth who had known the conflict in Algeria) had no direct experience of war, but also about the effects that it induced among part of it in its relationship to violence. This question is in addition warranted by the very moral tones that the student revolt had taken at the start. The Vietnam War, it was repeatedly demanded, was not to be fought ‘in our name’, and protest against it was all the stronger in those countries which were directly or indirectly engaged in it (first and foremost the United States, but also Japan and West Germany because of the US military bases established there). Feelings of guilt were stronger in those countries with a fascist and militarist past (West Germany, Japan, and Italy), where they were compounded by questions about participation in World War II, thus reinforcing issues of individual, as well as collective responsibility in situations of armed conflict; as we will go on to argue, this factor may not have been insignificant to the subsequent trajectories of certain groups. Finally, two countries stand out because of the parallels drawn between the ‘distant victims’ of the Third World and the ‘domestic victims’ (in other words, the workers, considered as ‘internal immigrants’). Through this process of attribution of similarity (to use McAdam’s expression, in Fillieule, 2005a, p. 64) which induces action emulation and coordination, the French and Italian militants took a more explicitly Marxist approach, seeking to place themselves within the traditions of the labour movement; here again, this had distinctive strategic consequences for them as compared to their counterparts. Taken together, these contextual elements therefore point to different conflict dynamics in the five countries under consideration.

The Student Revolts Higher education institutions were plunged into turmoil just about everywhere: the London School of Economics in March 1967, the Italian University

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of Trento in November, the University of Madrid in January 1968, of Leicester in February, of Rome in March; Columbia University was occupied in April; the revolt came to a head in May in Paris, in June in Belgrade, all summer long in Japan and in Mexico City, in Frankfurt in September, etc. There were also movements in Belgium, Sweden, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Similar ingredients and demands were often observed, including anti-Americanism and support for Vietnam, and criticism of the contents of teaching and of consumer society. Added to these were country-specific factors running through the different student movements and leaving a deep imprint on them. The United States The US ‘movement’, the first to emerge – at the end of the 1950s – was initially based on pacifism, which underpinned several protests: against mandatory military training then against the draft; for Cuba and for the ‘oppressed peoples’ of the world, starting with the Vietnamese; for civil rights and against racial segregation through sit-ins and boycotts or with the Freedom Riders of the summers of 1961 and 1962. Student protest began in autumn 1964 at University of California, Berkeley, where the Free Speech Movement demanded ‘student power’. It culminated on 23 April 1968, when SDS and black activists occupied Columbia University to mark their opposition to the presence on campus of the CIA and recruiters for the war in Vietnam. Twice, they would be violently evacuated by the police. Causes ‘external’ as well as ‘internal’ to the academic world were at play, as shown by a survey conducted by Peterson among 859 colleges and universities undergoing agitation over the 1967-1968 period, the results of which are shown in Table 3. Table 3 Causes of agitation on US campuses (1967-1968) External causes

Internal causes

Vietnam War: 38% The draft and military recruitment: 25% Civil rights: 29%

Disciplinary regulations: 34% Participating in decisions: 27% Dissatisfaction with curricula: 15%

Source: Caute, 1988, p. 335

The types of cause were often not clearly distinguished; for example, protest against university disciplinary measures frequently stemmed from unrest caused by the military policy of recruiting on campuses. The occupation of Columbia University can for instance be explained by three interconnected

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factors: black students rallying against a plan to extend the university and encroaching on the black neighbourhood of Harlem in a context which had become increasingly tense since the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.; a demonstration in solidarity with a female student who had been referred to the disciplinary board; and an inflamed speech by the president of the local SDS chapter, Mark Rudd*, against collaboration between the university and the army. Driven by Rudd, student actions would be sharply radicalized as campus buildings were occupied and the dean was taken hostage. According to an official investigation in May 1969 cited by Caute (1988, p. 335), university turmoil in the previous few years was the cause of 471 incidents, including 25 bomb attacks, 46 cases of arson, 207 occupations, 598 persons injured, and 6158 arrests. Japan In Japan, student agitation had been kindled for many years by antiAmericanism, embodied successively in mobilizations against the Korean War (1950-1953), against nuclear testing starting in 1956, against the presence of 128 US military bases in Japan and their role in the Vietnam War, for the restitution of the island of Okinawa to Japan, and against the Anpo Treaty signed in January 1960 (the latter factor being undoubtedly the most important for our purposes). The first security treaty aimed at ending US occupation was signed in September 1951; Japan consequently became a ‘member of the Western camp’ and was accorded sovereignty, though it was limited by the continued possibility of US intervention in the country, even in the event of internal disturbances, and by the US’s right to maintain weapons on Japanese soil, including nuclear weapons. Protests from the left advocating for Japan to be a pacifist, non-aligned country stepped up after an incident in 1954 during an H-bomb test in the Bikini Atoll. They escalated between October 1959 and June 1960, when renewal of the security treaty was being debated in parliament. On 15 June 1960, a female student was killed at a demonstration in a showdown with the police, leading to the fall of the prime minister and the assassination of the chairman of the Socialist Party by the far right. This episode forged what was called the ‘1960 Anpo generation’, which morphed into the ‘1970 Anpo generation’ as mobilization recommenced in the late 1960s in anticipation of the ten-year renewal of the treaty in the midst of student rebellion. ‘Anti-war student committees’ were formed. In 1968, Hiroko Nagata* founded the Maoist-leaning Tokyo-Yokohama Anti-Security Treaty Joint Struggle Committee (Keihin Anpo Kyoto), which the following year would take part in the founding of the Japanese Red Army.

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Turmoil in the Japanese mobilization cycle began in 1965, caused by both the escalation of the war in Vietnam and a first increase in university registration fees. On 8 October 1967, a demonstration was organized against Prime Minister Satō’s visit to Southeast Asia, including South Vietnam. In very violent clashes between the police and demonstrators clad with helmets and gloves, a student from Kyoto was killed. A few months later, on 19 January 1968, the US Navy’s nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Enterprise docked at the port of Sasebo, leading to a fierce demonstration attacking the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the sound of ‘The Internationale’ and the chanting of ‘Down with American imperialism! Enterprise, out of Japan! Nuclear arms, never on Japanese soil!’. In April 1968, anti-US riots led to 110 injuries and 179 arrests in Tokyo. The strictly student protests began in science, medicine, and urbanplanning university departments, particularly in Nihon in April 1968 and in Todai (Tokyo) in June. The triggering factors were different. In the first case, it was a bribery scandal and in the second, a bill increasing mandatory hospital internship from one to two years. Other concerns included the denunciation of about 400 private universities, the increase in registration fees and of selective admission in publicly owned establishments, and teaching methods and the absence of freedom of association. A manifesto, ‘Theory of Student Revolution’, written by Norisuke Andō, a Ph.D. student and member of the ‘struggle committee’ at the Tokyo Faculty of Pedagogy, attempted to formalize these in terms surprisingly close to those running through Nanterre University in France and elsewhere. The manifesto describes university struggles in three ‘moments’ growing stronger and stronger as generalization and politicization of the university conflict intensifies: the first moment has ‘as its goal the “revolution of the university and of teaching”, i.e. the total abolition of the structure and the principles on which post-war university was founded’; the second is to ‘call into question the very foundations of the entire knowledge enterprise’ and ‘reconsider the meaning of “knowledge” and “science” in the university, taken as the intellectual mainstay of society’; and the third analyses the ‘contradictions of the university’ as ‘the expression of the crisis of current capitalism’ (in Béraud, 1970, p. 72). In the summer of 1968, 54 Japanese universities were boiling over, soon to be 80. A four-month strike at Keio University in Tokyo began early in July against US funding of medical research. On 27 August, there was a violent face-off between the police and students of Kyushu University rallying to demand the closedown of a nearby US Air Force base. On 4 September, 6000 Nihon students clashed with 1200 riot police who had come to break up the

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students’ occupation of the campus (154 arrests). On 8 October, student riots at the University of Tokyo ended in 800 injuries and 150 arrests. At the end of the month came the three-day ‘assault on Tokyo’, which included the storming of parliament and the US embassy, a siege of police headquarters, an occupation of the Shinjuku train station, etc. The occupations lasted up to a year; their active defence (with for instance cemented barricades in Todai) as well as the extreme violence of the clashes with the police force are among the characteristics of the Japanese movement of the time. Selfcriticism and humiliation sessions of professors (‘public airing’), modelled on the actions of the Chinese Red Guards, are another. The brutality of the repression (Todai would be evacuated on 18 January 1969 by 8000 riot police who would make nearly 1000 arrests), far from putting an end to agitation, kept it going: about 100 universities were on strike during that year. As in the United States, the students organized into struggle committees (Zenkyoto movement), which had a powerful politicization impact on students who had yet to commit to the cause, and set up ‘anti-university classes’ on issues such as racism against ethnic minorities and untouchables, or on capitalism. Germany Protest surfaced on the European continent in West Germany with comparable dynamics. There, too, its anchors were anti-Americanism and the Vietnam War with the organization of a first demonstration in West Berlin in February 1966, criticism of the authoritarianism of the university institution and, on a national level, the campaign against the inclusion of the Notstandgesetze, or Emergency Acts, in the German constitution. The Notstandgesetze had been at the core of political debates since they were first proposed in 1958, and were designed to enable the executive to take emergency powers; imposed by the Allied powers, they were a condition of the abrogation of the Status of Occupation (and thus of the Federal Republic’s full sovereignty). The SDS (Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund, or Socialist German Student League), which was characterized by its innovative and comic forms of intervention, was looking closely at movements developing elsewhere, in particular in the United States and in France. Under the ripple effect produced by the French ‘May ’68’, a short-lived alliance between students and workers, took shape the same month. On 1 May 1968, 30,000 workers joined the march called by the SDS in parallel to that of the trade union confederations. The two groups came together ten days later for a demonstration against the emergency laws, totalling 50,000 marchers in Bonn. But the movement would soon fade away.

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France and Italy The French and Italian cases were undoubtedly less dependent on the international context and consequently were initially centred on the university situation. In the two countries, student protest took off from new faculties located in the suburbs and specializing in sociology: the Higher University Institute for Social Sciences in Trento starting in January 1966, and the University of Nanterre at the end of the following year. The catalysts were reforms (the so-called ‘Gui’ reform in Italy and ‘Fouchet’ reform in France, each named after the respective country’s minister of education at the time) aimed at adapting education to the new requirements of the production system and the surge in the numbers of students due to the lengthening of schooling – the number of students rose from 268,000 in 1960-1961 to 500,000 in 1967-1968 in Italy, and from 220,000 to 514,000 in France. Also denounced were the professors, as ‘class content in education’, and ‘capitalist and imperialist society’, and ‘counter-courses’ were organized. At Nanterre, the enragés cultivated disturbances, disrupted classes that, according to them, were preparing students to be the ‘watchdogs of the bourgeoisie’, denounced the disappearance of critical sociology to the benefit of using the discipline for the domestication ends of capitalism. But in both cases, behind the initial criticism of the academy, other aspirations – for greater emancipation and freedoms – were taking shape. The first Nanterre incidents surfaced in March 1967 when boys occupied the girls’ dormitory, while in Italy, a high-school newspaper discussing sexuality created a major scandal. France and particularly Italy shared another characteristic: student agitation there produced a political crisis, which was precipitated and momentary in the first of these countries, and latent and enduring in the second. Indeed, the latter was compounded by intense workers’ conflicts, which galvanized the far left and in turn impacted the parliamentary left in a way that was much more marked here than elsewhere. The crisis in France, in contrast, was concentrated solely in May. We can assume that the centralization of the French university system was a factor in the politicization of the conflicts agitating it. On 14 May, the employees of a major aeronautics construction company in Nantes, Sud-Aviation, launched the factory-occupation movement. By 18 May, 2 million workers were on strike, and by 20 May, 6 million. Civil servants joined them on 21 May. On 29 May, General De Gaulle’s departure to Baden-Baden to meet with General Massu, chief of the French forces in Germany, dramatized the crisis by giving the impression that the executive was wavering, but this door was

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rapidly closed with the De Gaulle’s immediate return the next day. This was followed by an imposing demonstration of support for the regime and finally by the president’s dissolution of parliament, the Assemblée nationale, and by legislative elections one month later, bringing the parliamentary right wing to uncontested power. In Italy, Maggio strisciante (drawn-out May) – the first student protests stretched out from 1967 to 1969 – was succeeded in 1969 by the autunno caldo (hot autumn) of the factories. From the start, the workers’ strikes took a not-very-usual path that was not particularly favourable to compromise: union leaders were disparaged, and the principle of delegation was vilified; the habitual forms of militant action were scoffed at as routine, while illegal, even violent forms of action were rediscovered, such as occupying factories, taking executives hostage, or sabotage by negligence. In total, between September and December 1969, 8396 industrial workers were charged with 14,036 offences, including 3325 cases of ‘illegal invasion of company, grounds or public buildings’, 1712 of ‘private violence’, 1610 of ‘railway blocking’, 1376 of ‘interruption of public services’, 235 of inflicting bodily injuries, 179 of destruction and plundering, 124 of ‘detention of war weapons or explosives and intimidation with the use of explosive materials’ (figures from FIM-FIOM-UILM, 1970, p. 3). The intensity of workers’ strikes and their radical nature remained high until at least 1973, and when they wound down, a new student rebellion was launched to protest once again against a university reform plan. This would be the 1977 autonomous movement.

The Generational Dimension of Revolt Does the simultaneous character of the student protests show that they were the expression of expectations specific to a generation beyond all borders, or was it the product of an imitation and ripple effect? Was it related, as Touraine (1969) claimed, to the emergence of a new form of conflict and society, the post-industrial society? The dominant explanatory paradigm of the university crisis advanced by sociologists from Boudon (1969) to Bourdieu (1984) stressed a fear of downgrading due to the massif ication of student numbers and the inflation of university degrees. Yet this paradigm hardly explains the situation in 1968 (though it might have done had there been a student protest of similar scale in the 1980s); full employment had not yet really made the depreciation of university degrees perceptible (in France, the

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rise in unemployment since 1966, when 225,000 persons were jobless, was not yet a concern among student ‘sixty-eighters’). It also misses other more relevant explanatory elements, including the importance of generational conflict. What was happening everywhere was mostly the emergence of a mass youth culture and the birth of adolescence, as described by Edgar Morin in the French daily Le Monde on 7 July 1963. This culture had its romantic and tragic icons (including James Dean and Jean-Luc Godard’s films for those most culturally equipped), its new dress codes and a favoured mode of expression: music (in France, the explosion of yéyé music in 1965, protest songs in the United States, and rock’n’roll). This popular culture, which was more generational than social in nature, def initely served to glue identity building together and to diffuse new models of behaviour across borders. It also drew its strength from the crises in other vectors of socialization: the religious space, shaken up by Vatican II and the development of social Catholicism; the family circle, destabilized by the decline in male domination, both paternal and marital, and by the assertion of sexuality; and the schooling arena, upset by the arrival of baby boomers. When listening to the protagonists’ testimonials and memories, we hear that May ’68 was above all new oxygen, new breath, and freedom from strictures, in which collective as well as personal transgressions were intermingled (wearing jeans, letting your hair grow, etc.). Here, Hobsbawm notes, personal and social liberation went hand in hand: ‘Making love and making revolution could not be clearly separated’ (1994, p. 333). May ’68 was about anti-authoritarianism being unleashed against all institutions: educational, familial, partisan, political, etc. This was the very basis of what can be called the original ‘spirit of ’68’, before Marxist ideology was grafted onto it: a maelstrom of anarchistic utopianism tinted with Freudianism and romanticism rising up against the pre-set prospects of slipping into material well-being and consumption. It was nourished by the ‘counterculture’, which had variable influence on a continuum going from France, which was the least sensitive to it, to its place of origin, the United States. The ‘underground’ movement surfaced from the Californian hippie subculture and with british magazines like IT (International Time, 1966-47) and Oz (first Australian from 1963 to 1969 and british from 1967 to 1973), which were often sued for gross indecency based on their unambiguous sexual and often provocative classified ads. Counterculture was expressed in a disorderly way: in magazines and movements, hippy and psychedelic (1963-1964); in the politically radical

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productions of the Living Theatre, a pioneer in this area; in the Free School (which started out as the Free University of New York, FUNY) founded in 1965, offering, for instance, courses on Mao and Black Power or on American radicalism, and workshops in self-defence or in improvisation. These experiments won Berlin over with the creation in March 1967 of Kommune 1, a commune inspired by anarchists and the Amsterdam Provos, and in November 1967 of the Critical University (600 students and 60 professors); then came London, with the opening in the same period of the London Anti-University, and so on.

The Growth of the Extreme Left The youth revolts also marked, and this is the third essential element, the rise of radicalism among young schoolgoers but also, in Italy, young workers. In each country, though in different ways, the institutional left was unsettled by internal disputes (driven by operaismo, or workerism, in Italy, for example) or by the appearance at its margins of intellectual groups whose influence would be much greater than the number of their members, such as ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’ and the Situationist International. These dynamics invigorated the groups of the extreme left, or what many sociologists of collective action preferred to call the ‘libertarian left’; as Kitschelt (1990, p. 180) defines them, They are ‘Left’ because they share with traditional socialism a mistrust of the marketplace, of private investment, and of the achievement ethic, and a commitment to egalitarian redistribution. They are ‘libertarian’ because they reject the authority of the private or public bureaucracies to regulate individual and collective conduct.

In North America, the prevailing term at the time was the ‘new left’. Whatever term is used, there were several common points: mistrust of the traditional left (and even anti-communism) and more generally of institutions and organizations; a libertarian imprint laced with Marxism in variable proportions depending on the country and the group; at least as much consideration of alienation as of exploitation; expectations with regard to the Third World; criticism of the consumer society and for some, of the productive society (hence criticism of technology, and the emergence of political ecology); and anti-authoritarianism. All of this was connected to the counterculture, if to differing extents.

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The United States The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), founded in 1960, developed its identity two years later with the ‘Port Huron Statement’, which in its opposition to both the USA and the USSR charted ‘alternatives’ to the social order of the time and promoted participatory democracy. The document was highly successful; the 20,000 copies of the first edition were out of print within two years and the second edition, published in 1964 in the same numbers, was also out of print within two years. The same applies to the ranks of the SDS, which swelled as the organization became more radical. From the start, far from confining its activities to student issues alone, the SDS multiplied its topics of intervention and extended them to civil rights, peace, and the fight against nuclear testing. In September 1963 it launched a volunteer programme in the ghettos and from 1965 took the lead in mobilizing against the Vietnam War. The Columbia University events in the spring of 1968 brought it even greater popularity. Of the 7 million US students, it is estimated that 250,000 were ‘politically active’ in 1967-1968; SDS membership skyrocketed from 4000 around 1965 to between 60,000 and 100,000 in 1968-1969 (see Table 4). Table 4 SDS membership (1960-1968) End of 1960 1961

1964

1965

1966

1968 (spring)

1968 (autumn)

200

1365

4300

7000

40,000

100,000

575

Source: Rolland-Diamond, 2004

But the SDS’s success would also be its downfall. As it grew, the organization became flooded by various opposing Marxist-Leninist groups which would tear each other apart, while at the same time the SDS’s non-ideological currents would begin to move away to start single-issue groups such as feminist and gay rights groups, and those of different ethnic minorities. For example, the Maoist PLP (Progressive Labor Party), founded in 1961 by former Communist Party members who had rebuked the party’s revisionism, joined the SDS in the mid-1960s; the domination it would wield there would lead to the formation of the RYM (Revolutionary Youth Movement) led by Bernardine Dohrn* and Mark Rudd*. Elsewhere, party youth organizations and traditional student unions strived to become autonomous from their ‘tutor’ party or union, when they did not simply enter into crisis.

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Japan In 1968, 61 per cent of the 1.4 million Japanese students were members of the Zengakuren (Japanese League of Student Self-government). Belonging to a student union was mandatory in Japan. Zengakuren had been founded in 1948 by the Communist Party and sometimes shared the latter’s violent activism. Like other communist student organizations, from 1956 (the year of the Khrushchev report) it gradually broke free from the Communist Party’s supervision due to its disagreement with the party line, which had become legalist. After that, it split into many different far-left currents of varied observance; there were 24 of these by 1969. The communists were in the Zengakuren Minsei, created in 1964 by the Communist Party and by far the largest organization with 14,000 members, and the dissidents in the ‘reform the structures’ current (1000 members). The Maoists went into the Marxist-Leninist League, whose student branch included nearly a thousand militants, and to the MarxistLeninist Movement. The Trotskyist current, which would comprise 6000 militants, was mainly represented by the League of Communists, or Bundo, created in December 1958, and from April 1963 by the League of Revolutionary Communists, which was divided into two groups: Kakumaru and Chukaku. As Table 5 shows, from 1967 the new left grew exponentially: Table 5 Number of students who were part of the Japanese new left (1967-1974) 1967

1968

1969

1970

1972

1974

9700

26,900

53,500

50,000

40,000

35,000

Source: Kawahara, 1983, p. 219

These ‘sects’ (Sampa-kei Zengakuren), as they were called in Japan, came from the ‘Anpo generations’ of the late and early 1960s. They were on every front – students and pacifists involved in the controversy over the US-Japan security treaty and in the fight against the Vietnam War – and supported other social struggles like the family farmers’ fight against Narita international airport (Apter and Sawa, 1984). Germany The extreme left also became autonomous from the traditional left in West Germany, where in 1968 ‘active’ students were estimated at between 30,000 and 60,000 – out of a total 271,000 students in the country (see Della Porta

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and Pasquino, 1983). Of these, 4000 were members of the SDS (Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund, or Socialist German Student League).2 Founded in 1946 as a social democratic movement, it became radicalized around the issues of German rearmament and the atomic bomb, but mostly by its rejection of the turn taken by the Social Democratic Party (SPD) at the 1959 Bad-Godesberg conference, when the party abandoned all references to Marxism. Two years later, the SDS was excluded from the SPD, and its influence grew from then on. According to a survey conducted in 1968, 67 per cent of 15- to 25-year-olds were favourable to the demonstrations agitating the student population, notably under the auspices of the SDS, which had the sympathy of one-fifth of students. The SDS was the first European organization to know about the Free Speech Movement and to draw inspiration from it, along with other references, which at the time were the Frankfurt School and the Situationist International. It was also connected with the French university students’ union UNEF, with which it organized joint seminars on the Third World and the Critical University. The formation of the Grand Coalition between the SPD and the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) on 1 December 1966 made the students’ divorce from the institutional left final, and triggered the birth of the Außerparlamentarische Opposition (APO, Extra-Parliamentary Opposition), bringing together students, pacifists, and trade unionists for whom the adoption of emergency legislation was a serious threat to democracy. From spring 1967, protest became more conflictual. On 3 April 1968, four people, including the students Andreas Baader* and Gudrun Ensslin*, firebombed two department stores in Frankfurt. At their trial, they would explain that their action had been intended to protest against the public’s ‘indifference to the genocide in Vietnam’. On 2 June, Benno Ohnesorg was killed by a plainclothes police officer while he was marching in his first demonstration, which had been organized by the SDS against the Shah of Iran’s arrival in West Germany. The Springer press raged against the leftist students, blaming them for the tragedy. Emotional polarization developed over the months until the assassination attempt against the student leader Rudi Dutschke perpetrated on 11 April 1968 by an individual justifying his act by ‘anticommunism’. Violent riots followed, directed in particular against the Springer Publishing Company; 350 people were arrested in three days, which merely confirmed the new left’s accusations of aggressive repression. Nonetheless, the protest swelling against the adoption of the laws of exception was unable to prevent their ratification on 30 May 1968. The APO dwindled away, as did the SDS, which wound itself up two years later. 2

Not to be confused with the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) in the United States.

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France Although the German far left was not in any way affected by the Communist Party (it had been prohibited in West Germany since 1956), it was a very different story in France and in Italy. Following Le Goff (2002), we can distinguish three main leftist clusters in France: a self-government cluster, which wagered on the development of people’s struggles to bring about social transformation; a ‘neo-Leninist’ cluster (state power takeover and class struggle); and a ‘libertarian-cultural’ cluster (whose goal was to ‘change life’ with the weapons of subversion), which would come together as the so-called ‘new social movements’. The first was constituted during the Algerian War with the founding in 1960 of the Parti socialiste unifié (PSU, Unified Socialist Party). The PSU was a merger of three groups: the Parti socialiste autonome (PSA, Autonomous Socialist Party), which had splintered from the main Socialist Party (known as the SFIO, or French Section of the Workers’ International); the Tribune du communisme, made up of former French Communist Party members; and the Trotskyist-leaning ‘new left’ Union de la Gauche socialiste (UGS, Union of the Socialist Left). The Tribune du communisme emerged from the UNEF and, mostly, from the Union of Communist Students (UEC), whose repeated practice of exclusion gave rise to two new parties: the Trotskyist Jeunesse communiste révolutionnaire (JCR, Revolutionary Communist Youth) in April 1966, and the Maoist Union des jeunesses communistes marxistes léninistes (UJCml, Union of Marxist-Leninist Communist Youth) in December of the same year.3 Shortly after May 1968, the UJCml underwent its own crisis, from which two organizations emerged: the Gauche prolétarienne (GP, Proletarian Left) and Vive la révolution! (VLR, Long Live the Revolution!). The latter would quickly give up the Leninist goal of seizing state power, and instead explore paths to cultural revolution through new social movements and the counterculture, in a strategy characteristic of the third ‘cultural-libertarian’ cluster.

3 The JCR would change names several times following its two dissolutions by governmental decree: the Communist League (Ligue communiste) from June 1968 to June 1973, the Communist Revolutionary Front (Front communiste révolutionnaire) until January 1975, when it took its current name, the Communist Revolutionary League (Ligue communiste révolutionnaire, LCR). For reasons of clarity, we refer to it as the JCR throughout this book.

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Italy Leftist incubation in the communist bosom was even clearer in Italy, where the extreme left found its origins in the renewal of Marxist thought worked out within the Partito communista italiano (PCI, Italian Communist Party) on the basis of operaismo, or workerism. Workerism initially comes from a method: the workers’ survey, a project of ‘militant sociology’ conducted at factory gates at the start of the 1960s, which aimed to understand the relationship between the propensity to rebel and the class trajectories of young (biologically and professionally speaking) workers in the industrial triangle of Milan, Turin, and Genoa. It allowed young intellectuals, such as Mario Tronti, Toni Negri*, Sergio Bologna, and Dario Lanzardo, gathered around journals such as Quaderni Rossi, Quaderni Piacentini, and Classe Operaia, to formulate a critique of socialism and to identify a new figure: the ‘mass worker’. This figure was highly differenciated from both the workers’ culture and the traditional trade union movement, in that the mass worker was inclined to revolt against, and later reject, the work ethic. Operaismo would become a weapon used to challenge party apparatuses from within, leading subsequently to ‘worker autonomy’. Under the auspices of the latter, small groups would start forming in 1966; driven by the Fiat workers’ struggles in May 1969, these groups would come together under a common name, Lotta continua, or Continuous Struggle (LC). This coalition would collapse the following summer, leaving two competing organizations: Potere operaio and Lotta continua.

The Autonomous Movement The three European countries that experienced armed struggle thus have in common a radical autonomous tendency which originated in Italy, reaching Germany via France through a process of circulation; this process can be elucidated through analysis of cultural transfers, and particularly of the social networks and ‘brokers’ facilitating the exchange of ideas. Autonomy as a political movement stems from operaismo, and perhaps more distantly, from the councilist tradition. Autonomy is, first, the rejection of any form of class representation, and thus of trade union organizations, as well as of routine forms of mobilization, favouring direct action to be taken by the working class, and beyond, by all social actors. For Toni Negri* in particular, it is also based on a refusal of work and a focus on the ‘social worker’ at the margins of the (notably precarious) working class. But more

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than by doctrine, autonomy is characterized by a form of organization (autonomous groups functioning under direct democracy) and especially by forms of action favouring spontaneity and illegality for the direct appropriation of goods, qualified as ‘social wages’: squats, sabotage, ‘militant antifascism’, ‘self-discounts of public services’, ‘political marketing’ (mass shoplifting from supermarkets), and even ‘proletarian expropriations’ (bank robberies). As stated in the headline of the March-April 1975 issue of the journal Rosso, ‘The illegality of struggles is the source of the law’ for ‘communism here and now’. 4 The Italian movement was born in parallel to the crisis of the far-left groups that had emerged from the biennio rosso (or ‘red biennium’, the two ‘red’ years of 1968 and 1969) and was nourished by the decomposition of PotOp in the summer of 1973, the recruitment of disappointed former LC militants, and the incorporation of entire groups of less importance (such as the Gramsci group). A first cluster composed of numerous ‘autonomous workers groups’ organized during the wave of the strikes that again affected Fiat in March 1973, along with those establishments that had been most active four years earlier (Sit-Siemens, the Rome public hospital, the national electricity company, Alfa Romeo, etc.). A second cluster, represented by the Rosso newspaper, formed in Milan and Padua around the Gramsci group and especially Toni Negri, who had just been expelled from PotOp. Less workerist than the first cluster, it emphasized the virtues of rebellion under the influence of Negri’s ‘social worker’ theory. A third cluster, known as ‘creative’ or ‘desiring’ autonomy, formed around journals and free-radio stations that relayed (and Italianized) the American counterculture, then by the ‘Metropolitan Indian’ movement. In France, Schifres (2004, p. 2) identifies workers’ or proletarian autonomy ‘as a political far-left trend’ distinguished from other groups also referring to the Autonomous movement (the ultra-left, certain Maoists, and revolutionary trade unionists). It too emerged from several sources of the post-GP period: VLR!, Camarades, Marge, the Organisation communiste libertaire (OCL, Libertarian Communist Organization), and La Cause du peuple (a Maoist weekly newspaper). The French autonomous movement comprised an estimated 2000 activists at its peak in 1977, with the mass demonstration at Creys-Malville nuclear power plant, and the announcement of the deaths of the founders of the German Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF, Red Army Faction). Its decline was linked to that of its Italian counterpart, which from

4

Rosso, no. 15, March-April 1975, p. 49.

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7 April 1979 was hit by a wave of repression, leading many Italian activists to seek refuge in France. But as Schifres (2004, p. 15) argues, Beyond the strictly Italian situation, it is the autonomous political model that collapsed. This provoked three different types of response: radicalization in the direction of armed struggle and organized crime, strategic retreat, and a drift into drug addiction.

Finally, the autonomous movement arrived in Germany in 1973 under the influence of the French and Italian models, following the decomposition of the K-Gruppen (autonomous and Maoist groups, which were independent from one another) but also in the wake of the squatting and anti-nuclear movements. It would not survive the repression of 1977, but a new generation would appear in 1980, becoming (unlike in other countries) the quasihegemonic and massive expression (around 20,000 activists) of the German extreme left. Hobsbawm’s hypothesis (1994) that Western youth’s awareness that they formed a group and of the new and/or accelerated circulation vectors of ideas is interesting but probably insufficient to explain this trend. It would need further work to understand the logics at play in the extension of a social movement. Such an enquiry would not be limited to noting, for example, the conferences which were organized to allow activists hailing from different places to meet, share their ideas and modes of action, agree on a common experiment, or set convergent lines of action. It would also have to ask how such meetings were possible, what the social characteristics of the cross-border movers were, where they got their capacity to convince their affiliate group of the interest of holding these meetings and still more, of forming alliances, as well as what means were made available to manage all this.5

5 We endeavoured to implement a programme of this type to study the alterglobalization movement; see Sommier, Fillieule and Agrikoliansky (2008).

4

Radicalization Processes

Analyses often interpret ‘terrorism’, as we have mentioned, to be degeneration facilitated by repression, the progressive closure of the political system, and social isolation. This is the case, for example, for Wieviorka’s (1988) anti-social movement paradigm or for Tarrow’s (1995) idea that radical groups generally appear in the demobilization phase of a protest cycle. We can make the assumption that radicalization is more likely to occur among those who did not experience the initial phase and joined the movement later, which seems to be corroborated by greater levels of violence among second- and third-generation militants. Four variables will be considered here: the degree of repression; the group’s relations with the benchmark revolutionary subject; social movement organizations and their relations; and the micro-sociological level, limited here to reflection on the cognitive and emotional effects of functioning in small groups insofar as our knowledge of the individual determinants of radicalization are very fragmentary outside of the Italian and, to a lesser degree, German cases. Two precautions should be taken. On the one hand, it should be remembered that none of these dimensions has a mechanical and linear effect because depending on the temporality of the movement, they each have distinct effects, i.e. in the initial phase when inclinations are formed, in the armed struggle phase when levels of violence rise, and finally, in the disengagement phase. They will also partly resurface to explain the processes of exiting the crisis. On the other hand, these dimensions are interconnected, and combine with one another; it is therefore only for illustrative purposes, and in order to identify general tendencies, that we can consider that any one of these dimensions might explain a given case.

Repression and Countermovements If we follow Tilly’s reasoning, repression has a curvilinear impact on mobilization, and thus a major radicalization effect when it is at its mid-point. Repression, whether continuous or suddenly accelerated, was a decisive factor in several of the countries studied here.

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Germany For all the groups studied here, it was indeed often a repressive event that triggered the radicalization process, placing them in a cycle of provocationrepression-violence. The police killing of Benno Ohnesorg on 2 June 1967 marked the true symbolic turning point of the German new left; it would moreover provide the name of the other armed group – the 2 June Movement – in memory of this first ‘martyr’ of the revolutionary cause. We have here an illustration of how repression serves as a political resource for the purposes of strengthening and extending a movement through the solidarity it engenders, and also justifying the need to build up the organization. At the meeting that followed Ohnesorg’s killing, Gudrun Ensslin*, future founder of the RAF, cried out, ‘They’ll kill us all. You know what kind of pigs we’re up against. This is the Auschwitz generation. You can’t argue with people who made Auschwitz’ (see Steiner and Debray, 2006). This killing was a genuine, outrage-producing ‘moral shock’, to use Jasper’s term (Jasper and Poulsen, 1995, pp. 498-499). It was all the more so because the officer responsible for the shooting was acquitted, in a context already sensitive to the issue of public freedoms which were threatened, in the eyes of the left, by the Notstandgesetze, and where politics was increasingly radicalized through the reappearance of extremes on left and right, with the reformation of the KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, banned in 1956) as the DKP (Deutsche Kommunistische Partei) in 1968, and particularly, the founding in 1964 of the NPD (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, a nationalist neo-Nazi party). There were regular clashes between far-right and new-left militants. The attempted murder of Rudi Dutschke one year later, on 11 April 1968, worsened the malaise; defence groups were organized on the left, militants carried weapons to protect themselves, and violent demonstrations followed, with attacks against Springer interests. There were arrests by the hundreds. On 30 May, Parliament adopted the Notstandgesteze, which came into effect the following month. The SDS went into crisis after having condemned the violent clashes between activists and the police, a crisis that continued throughout the summer of 1968. After having been sentenced to a suspended two-year jail sentence for having participated in the April demonstrations, Andreas Baader’s* lawyer, Horst Mahler*, was called before the Bar Council to examine the suspension of his right to practise. The Council was not, however, able to reach a decision, as nearly a thousand students came to express their solidarity; violent clashes with the police left 120 injured. The journalist Ulrike Meinhof* wrote in the May 1968 issue of Konkret that

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the bullets that hit Rudi […] have ended the dream of nonviolence. Whoever does not defend himself will die. Whoever does not die will be buried alive: in prisons, in reformatories, […] in the stony wastelands of the new housing developments. (Cited in Varon, 2004, p. 205)

By the autumn of that year, the question of moving to ‘urban guerrilla warfare’ had begun to crop up in a number of groups. Italy A similar process took place in Italy, but in two stages. It began on 1 March 1967 with the brutal repression inf licted on demonstrators during the ‘Battle of Valle Giulia’, and especially in the aftermath of the Piazza Fontana bombing, which killed sixteen people at a bank in Milan on 12 December 1969. For many, this ‘trauma’ (a word frequently used in testimonials) confirmed the tangibility of the threat of an authoritarian reaction to social unrest. It also raised, within the organizations, the question of defence strategies, either through ‘militant antifascism’ (clashes with extreme right-wing militants), or by calling for resistance – legal resistance for Lotta continua, and underground resistance for the publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who founded the first underground armed group, the Gruppi di azione partigiana (GAP, Partisan Action Groups), based on both the partisan and the focalism models. The experience ended with Feltrinelli’s accidental death in 1972 while he was preparing to attack a high-voltage power line. Most of the militants still in activity would then join the Red Brigades (BR), which had been founded in November 1970 by Renato Curcio*, Margherita Cagol, and Alberto Franceschini as a means of resistance to a potential coup d’état. Under the influence of the GAP, the BR’s first targets had indeed been neo-fascist groups and CEOs suspected of being close to them before they moved on to a new, clearly insurrectionary ‘strategic phase’. The Piazza Fontana bombing radicalized negative representations of the state, which swung from the status of adversary to that of enemy as it was accused of having instrumentalized the neo-fascist groups ultimately found guilty of the bombing; this accusation would be confirmed by an official investigation in the late 1980s. Piazza Fontana thus inaugurated a long series of ‘state massacres’, as they were called to underscore the complicity of part of the state apparatus in attacks that, from 1969 to the bombing of the Bologna train station in August 1980, left 127 dead and 506 injured. Today – since Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti’s revelations in 1990 – we know that at the

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time, Italy was the location of one of the most active ‘stay-behind’ cells set up in Europe by NATO.6 Like their other operations, the operation known as Gladio (‘sword’ in Italian) worked to block the communist threat by leading government takeovers or by conducting a tension strategy intended to acclimatize public opinion to being favourable to an authoritarian turn in the country. Gladio benefitted from the support of several high officials of the army’s secret service and of the P2 Masonic Lodge. Between 1969 and 1974, far-right groups were responsible for seven times as many victims (63) as was the extreme left; across the entire 1969-1980 cycle, according to official statistics, of the 362 victims of the ‘Years of Lead’, 178 were caused by the far right as against 119 caused by the far left, while 30 were killed during shootouts (Galleni, 1981; there is no mention in these sources of the remaining 35 victims). Neo-fascist groups staged fewer actions but caused more victims, which can be explained by their choice of conducting indiscriminate attacks. Of the 362 dead, 297 were civilians and 65 belonged to the police force. Using these far-right organizations for counter-mobilization purposes highlights the importance of countermovements (Melucci, 1982, p. 110). Here, it is important to avoid the excessively genealogical enterprise of seeking the ‘true’ initial movement against which another is born as a reaction: making ‘the other’ initially responsible for an action is often a legitimation strategy, constructing a given group as a victim that merely ‘reacted’ to a prior attack. This is especially the case where a recourse to violence is concerned, presented and justified as ‘legitimate counter-violence’. Yet when examining the dynamics of collective action, attention to countermovements is doubly productive. First, it enables us to study the continuous interactions and interdependence effects between initial movement and countermovement that often feed into mobilization cycles. The emergence of a countermovement can have contrasting effects on the initiator movement: it can stimulate it or solidify it under the impact of external threat; it can also lead it to become radicalized, as is the case here. The subsequent ‘couple dynamic’ at once influences the values, objectives, tactics, and modes of action of both groups. Second, by reminding us that social movements emerge as much from feelings of threat as from political opportunities, it draws our attention to the fundamental role of emotions (fear, indignation, etc.) within mobilization processes. 6 See the joint report of the Italian Senate and Chamber of Deputies, Relazione del Comitato Parlamentare per i servizi di informazione e sicurezza e per il segreto di Stato, Doc. XXXIV, no. 3, 26 October 1995, http://www.camera.it/_bicamerali/leg14/sis/documen/xii34_3.htm, last accessed 31 January 2018.

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Japan The radicalization of the new left seems all the more probable and all the stronger when repression and counter-mobilization are combined and seem to act in concert, as was obviously the case in Italy, and also in Japan. Here, the maintenance of law and order was often brutal. In January 1968, 300 members of the Trotskyist faction of Sengakuren were arrested. In 1969, the police stormed universities 938 times to tear down barricades, arresting 10,628 students. Between 1968 and 1969, the special elite riot police Kidotai clashed on 2000 occasions with activists, and although no one was killed, 10,000 were injured (Farrell, 1990, p. 182). It is true that the demonstrators themselves adopted particularly violent and very well prepared tactics: they wore gas masks and different-coloured helmets depending on the factions they belonged to; they used stones and bamboo lances as weapons; and they were supported by female rescue teams. All of this made the incidents of the time very spectacular, at least in the minds of people in the West, where these tactics, broadcast on television, drew much attention and were imitated. As repression developed, activists changed their tactics; this appeared for the first time during the October-November 1969 demonstrations against Prime Minister Satō’s departure for the United States, when they split into small groups of five or six and threw Molotov cocktails at specific targets (police stations, employers’ headquarters, etc.) while the police had gathered at the official starting point of the demonstration. Here, too, the authorities and major companies (such as Hitachi and Toshiba) are purported to have used the far right (the Great Japan Patriotic Party) hoping to stop the development of protest and acclimatize public opinion to the need for a brutal return to order, attacking Socialist Party leaders, which happened twice in 1960; this culminated in the assassination of Inejiro Asanuma, chairman of the Japan Socialist Party, on 12 October that year. During this turbulent period unsettled by the issue of the US-Japanese security treaty, the kuromaku Yoshio Kodama played a significant role in mobilizing mobster gangs and ultranationalist groups against pacifist demonstrators.7 7 Literally, kuromaku means ‘black curtain’, and it designates the behind-the-scenes power brokers who connected the business world, the political community, and the yakuza. A war criminal and founder of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), Kodama was also the founder of the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League (APACL), which in 1967 would merge with the AntiBolshevik Bloc of Nations and give birth to the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). Among the members of the WACL, which would be on the front line of the CIA’s Phoenix (1968-1971) and Condor (1976-1977) programmes, were the founder of Movimento Sociale Italiano (Italian

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The United States Elite support for countermovements can take several forms, from delegating the dirty work to it to treating it with benign passivity while it perpetrates acts of violence against activists from the initiator movement. The latter was clearly the case for segregationist groups in the southern states of the United States. A countermovement par excellence, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) remobilized in 1954 following the Supreme Court’s decision to desegregate all public schools. In 1967, at the peak of this new phase of militancy, its membership totalled 17,000. Its privileged targets were blacks, but also civil rights activists of any colour. The 1964 Freedom Summer in the state of Mississippi culminated in 35 firearm incidents, 30 buildings bombed, 30 churches burned, 80 people violently beaten, and 6 activists murdered (Gurr, cited in Della Porta and Pasquino, 1983, p. 106). A Congressional Committee would later learn that across two decades, one-fifth of KKK members were FBI informers (ibid., p. 133). The United States was then struck by two political assassinations: of Martin Luther King, Jr. in April 1968, and two months later, of Robert Kennedy, who was running to be nominated as the Democratic candidate to the following November’s presidential elections. As for repression, it was fierce, and often illegal, against the black activists who organized a self-defence group in 1966, the Black Panther Party (BPP). For example, in Chicago in December 1969, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were killed in their sleep without warning by the police, who fired 82 shots while only one was fired back. Although it did not reach the same proportions, from 1968 repression against the student movement also became the rule, as demonstrated by the response to the new-left demonstrations organized in Chicago during the Democratic Convention on 28 August 1968.

Competition and Mutual Influences Solidarity with repressed movements in a given country could take on transnational dimensions; thus, the attempted murder of the student leader Rudi Dutschke on 11 April 1968, which he would miraculously survive, triggered a demonstration of a thousand people in front of Springer’s London offices, protected by 800 British police officers, followed by demonstrations in several other cities: Amsterdam, Prague, Brussels, Vienna, Zurich, Paris, Social Movement, MSI), Giorgio Almirante, and two Italian neo-fascist militants who had been charged with strage di Stato (massacres thought to be organized by state organs).

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Rome, New York, Tel Aviv, and more. There was certainly nothing new about protest circulating in this way, but the capacity to react was obviously accelerated by means of communication, of images in particular, which for the first time were forging the imagination of an entire generation of activists. Practices were shared from country to country, as reflected for instance by demonstrations the world over marching to the beat of participants dancing while chanting ‘Che lives!’ and ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh’ (its US variant being ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is gonna win’). There were ripple effects on a strictly national scale, and the dynamics of a movement cannot be understood by examining it as if it occurred in a vacuum. It must be considered relationally; its development must be traced sequentially, in terms of the authorities’ responses to it (or lack thereof) and of the reactions it triggered (such as by countermovements), and also in terms of its relations with other organizations; this makes it possible to identify what was mutually borrowed, what competition rationales were at work, how alliances and oppositions played out, etc. McAdam (1995) offers a good illustration of this phenomenon when, building on Tarrow (1995), he focuses on the ‘movement families’ in a protest cycle. He distinguishes ‘initiator movements’ that ‘signal or otherwise set in motion an identifiable protest cycle’, from ‘spin-off movements’ that ‘in varying degrees, draw their impetus and inspiration’ from the first, i.e. they adapt its organizational model, may even be incubated within an initiator movement, and are aligned on its interpretative framework. The United States In the United States, there is no doubt that the student movement, made up of mostly whites, was catalysed and partly made possible by the black movement, from which the ‘civil rights’ framework was diffused to all the other groups: student, feminist, pacifist, homosexual, and antinuclear activists, etc. Segregation was a source of indignation. It gave the cycle of protest more of a moral dimension (as exemplified by the slogan ‘Not in my name’ – not the Vietnam War, not segregation) than a social one and offered white youth a first experience in activism, for instance by joining the Freedom Riders or volunteering in the ghettos as encouraged by the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). Campus protest and the new left were pegged in their development to a dynamic which was partly driven by the civil rights movement: non-violent civil disobedience in the initial phase, followed by radicalization from the mid-1960s, including riots in the ghettos (22 riots in the black ghettos in 1964, 82 in the summer of 1967), the

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appearance in 1966 of shootouts with the police, and the founding of the Black Panther Party the same year in Oakland. Table 6 Race riots and unrest in the United States from 1965 to 1967

Number of riots Deaths Injured Arrests Estimated cost (in million $)

1965

1966

1967

5 36 1206 10,245 40.1

21 11 520 2298 10.2

75 83 1897 16,389 664.5

Source: Gurr, in Della Porta and Pasquino, 1983, p. 120

The mobilization cycle of the 1960s was propelled more by the interweaving of various protest movements (counterculture, Black Power, and student movements) than by just the Vietnam War. The central place occupied by the SDS is explained by its ability to articulate multiple mobilization causes and to maintain contacts with the black activists of the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), which it used as a model, but also with the Black Panthers. One of the reasons the Columbia University occupation led by Mark Rudd* had such a strong impact is that it strengthened the alliance between white and black students. But this would also be the issue that would shatter the SDS. The Maoists of the PLP (Progressive Labor Party) were concerned about this alliance and would have preferred a more traditional alliance with the working class, especially when under the impulse of its new president, Stokely Carmichael, the SNCC became radicalized from 1966 by rejecting the initial principle of non-violence and advocating – in the name of ‘Black Power’ – separatism and no collaboration with whites, whoever they were. The SDS was then consumed by impassioned debates on the identification of the revolutionary subject, which in December 1968, was designated as black youth by the SDS national secretary, Mike Klonsky, in his contribution to the debate, ‘Toward a Revolutionary Youth Movement’ (Klonsky et al., 1968). Another text, ‘More on Youth Movement’, was submitted on 13 May 1969 in the SDS journal, New Left Notes. In it, its author, Jim Mellon, a former academic dismissed in 1964 for supporting the Vietnamese NLF (National Liberation Front) and secretary-treasurer of the New York Free University, disqualified the US working class from the revolutionary vanguard as corrupt and racist, raising blacks and youths suffering ‘alienation’ in its stead. For Mellon (1969),

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The participation by white workers in the oppression of the black nation gives an anti-colonialist aspect – in addition to the working-class aspect – to the struggle for black liberation. These two conditions, in addition to the high level of consciousness and militancy of the black colony, mean that at our point in history the black liberation struggle is the vanguard of the working class movement.

The confrontation between the PLP and the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) came to a head at the SDS convention held on 18 June 1969 in Chicago. In its document ‘You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows’ (the title taken from the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’), the RYM, drawing from Mellon’s analysis, concentrated on two points: the key role of the black liberation struggle, and youth as the revolutionary vanguard. The situation ended in total confusion. The PLP was excluded but refused to leave, and the RYM split up into two groups: RYM II, the minority, and RYM I (known as Weatherman). On the night of 6 October, RYM I bombed a statue honouring the Chicago police and organized the ‘Days of Rage’ from 8 to 11 October. They expected thousands of activists to storm the bourgeois districts of the city, but 500 at the most answered the call and 287 of them were arrested. The clashes produced damages amounting to $ 1.5 million. The assassination in December 1969 of Black Panther Party militants Fred Hampton and Mark Clark by the police reinforced their conviction that the time had come for war (for testimonials, see Berger, 2006). With Mark Rudd and Jeff Jones, among others, the couple formed by Bill Ayers* and Bernardine Dohrn* declared war against the US government (‘Bring the War Home’) and went into clandestinity as the Weather Underground Organization (WUO). Italy As discussed above, competition among leftist organizations was a critical factor in the escalation of violence in Italy, and to a lesser degree in France. It can explain the synchronized nature of the militarist turns taken by PotOp (Potere operaio) and LC (Lotta continua) from 1972 and was unquestionably a factor in the increasing audacity of the GP (Gauche prolétarienne) and the actions of the JCR (Jeunesse communiste révolutionnaire) through to 1971. It also largely contributed to championing the organizations’ security wings and to the tendency of these security wings to become autonomous from their political leadership, something that precipitated the crises at the JCR and LC, for instance; these security wings later became a recruitment

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pool for Italy’s underground organizations. In the context of the time, the revolutionary value of a militant tended to be tested in terms of how inclined he or she was to wage war against the authorities. Clashes with the police or a competing group were a powerful engine to strengthen group cohesion and conferred an undeniable aura on the ‘bravest’ militants. Optimizing physical capital was a key factor in the constitution of small groups bound together by combat experience. It in fact became an instrument for building the collective, and what can be called an ‘emotional community’. Membership of an organization’s security wing – already in itself the beginning of militant specialization – develops inclinations that are useful for violent action, enables the delineation of different members’ social roles, and creates ownership of ‘feeling rules’ – the shared standards regarding what the appropriate and/or congruent feelings and emotions are – giving a group a particular ‘emotional style’ (Hochschild, 1979, p. 566). The subsequent development of armed actions can partly be seen as a consequence of the competition between the Red Brigades and the autonomous groups, on the one hand, and among the different autonomous groups, on the other. 1977, the peak year of the autonomous movement, saw a 77.62 per cent increase in attacks against property (party headquarters, military barracks, police stations, courthouses, companies, etc.); according to the Ministry of the Interior, one attack took place every four hours. Bologna and Rome (12 March) witnessed an armed demonstration (with 60,000 demonstrators in Rome) in which many were marching with Walther P38 semi-automatic weapons, which had replaced Molotov cocktails. Out of the 2189 attacks that same year, 553 were against individuals, 517 against parties or political movements (including 173 against the Christian Democrats, 124 against Movimento sociale italiano, or the Italian Social Movement [MSI] and 70 against the Italian Communist Party [PCI]), 406 against industrial and commercial buildings, 247 against public institutions (56 of these against the telephone company), 126 against the police force, 108 against schools, 65 against churches, 50 against trade unions, 22 against newspapers, 19 against penitentiaries, and 76 against other targets. This was the context in which the second armed group of importance, Prima linea (PL, Front Line), was officially born in 1976 on the initiative of orphaned LC militants. In fact, many armed organizations were formed in the wake of the dissolution of LC and PotOp: NAP (Nuclei armati proletari), FCC (Formazioni comuniste combattenti), FCA (Formazioni comuniste armate), UCC (Unità comuniste combattenti), CoCoRi (Comitati comunisti rivoluzionari), etc. Others, like PAC (Proletari armati per il comunismo) came from the autonomous movement. In all, between 1969 and 1980, 597

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organizations – 484 on the left and 113 on the right – claimed responsibility for attacks. This profusion is notably explained by the brief existence of certain groups known under initials that sometimes disappeared to be revived under a slightly different name, or by the practice of claiming attacks under different acronyms. Table 7 Number of attacks by three Italian organizations

Total attacks Out of which: Against property Against persons Assassinations

BR

PL

NAP

439

101

33

316 123 55

62 39 16

? ? 4

Source: Statistics provided by the Ministry of Interior to the Italian Chamber of Deputies on 6 July 1982; see Sommier, 1988

Some activists even consider that the kidnapping of Aldo Moro by the BR was partly designed to secure their hegemony once and for all. In any case, it has been shown that the repression triggered by this action forced less structured organizations to join what had become the mythical ‘O’ (for organization), i.e. the BR. Similarly, the considerable rise in the thresholds of violence when the groups were undergoing very strong repression in the early 1980s is a reflection of the upheavals that the repression was producing within the BR, hence of the many scissions that occurred starting then (see Chapter 6). Japan Competition among the ‘sects’, as the far-left factions were called, was particularly fierce in Japan. It was based on both ideological and practical mainsprings to attract members. Kawahara (1983, p. 220) found five leftist groups in 1973, themselves divided into thirteen sub-groups within the Zengakuren. Their violent internecine warfare was even given a name: uchigeba (from uchi [internal] and geba [violence], to indicate violence within a group torn apart by factions). Its number of victims increased significantly starting in 1974 while at the same time the number of incidents began to decline, as can be seen in Table 8. By the end of 1968, the groups were facing internal tensions and crises, as well as repression. It was in this context of discouragement that at an

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Table 8 Consequences of uchigeba in Japan (1968-1980) Year

Number of incidents

Number of injured

Number of deaths

1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980

85 308 175 272 183 238 286 229 91 41 32 22 15

700 1145 527 425 340 575 618 563 195 57 52 40 40

– 2 2 5 2 2 11 20 8 10 7 8 8

Source: Kawahara, 1983, p. 226

August 1969 meeting, a group separated from the League of Communists (Bundo). From then on called Sekigun (Red Army), it called to take up arms for the world revolution: ‘The revolution is not limited to our country, it is a world revolution. The Red Army invites all revolutionaries to take up arms and to organize’ (in Béraud, 1970, p. 82). In its ‘Declaration of War’ of 3 September 1969, it considered itself as belonging to a whole, alongside the SDS and the Black Panther Party in the US and China’s Communist Party, which it opposed to another compound made up of the ‘French Revolutionary Communist Youth’ and of the Chūkaku faction of Kakkyōdō (the nucleus of the Japanese League of Revolutionary Communists), which, it claimed, was limited to a movement of ‘armed self-defence and action committees’. The Sekigun comprised several hundred militants at that time, 150 of which were purported to belong to the ‘core of armed revolt’. They had a handbook at their disposal called Poems on Roses, which on its first page was presented as ‘a manual for the production of the “invisible soldiers” – explosives – that are the basis of struggles in guerrilla warfare’ and provided the details of the different ways of fabricating explosives, translated from Carlos Marighella’s Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla (see Farrell, 1990, p. 91). 8 They were 8 Carlos Marighella (1911-1969) was a member of the Brazilian Communist Party before being expelled in the late 1960s. He then founded the ALN (Ação Libertadora Nacional, or National Liberation Action), and the following year launched urban-guerrilla actions as alternatives to the focalism advocated by Che Guevara. His work, translated in many countries at the beginning

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Figure 1 Different Red Armies in Japan Sekigun-Ha (Red Army Faction) 1969

Keihin Anpo Kyoto (Struggle Committee against the ANPO) 1968 Rengo Sekigun (United Red Army) 1970

Sekigun-Ha Yodo Group 1970

Nihon Sekigun (Japanese Red Army) 1971

originally from the university elite, whose hierarchy was scrupulously reproduced in the internal organization. This first armed group was in fact very short-lived. The police made about one hundred arrests during showdowns launched at the beginning of the 1969 academic year under a ‘War of Tokyo’ banner, extended to Osaka and Kyoto, which were supposed to match the ‘Days of Rage’ organized in Chicago by the WUO. On 5 November 1969, 53 militants were arrested while they were training in guerrilla warfare in the mountains, which put an end to the Sekigun’s Molotov cocktail attacks against police stations, as well as to their plan to kidnap Prime Minister Satō. Their only subsequent (if highly impressive) action was the hijacking on 31 March 1970 of a Japan Airlines flight by nine militants who forced the plane to land in North Korea; the destination had been chosen out of simple opportunism, Cuba being too far, since the point had only been to make the organization known through a spectacular action. The following year it was divided into three groups. One part of Sekigun remained in Korea with Takamaro Tamiya; another, under the leadership of Tsuneo Mori, merged with the Tokyo-Yokohama Anti-Security Treaty Joint Struggle Committee (Keihin Anpo Kyoto, founded in 1968 by Hiroko Nagata*) to form the Rengo Sekigun, or United Red Army; the third, internationalist group was set up in 1971-1972: the Nihon Sekigun or Japanese Red Army. Its leader, Fusako Shigenobu*, went to Lebanon with ‘pink film’ activists to shoot the documentary, Red Army – PFLP: Declaration of World War.9 of the 1970s, had a lot of influence on revolutionary groups such as the BR, the JRA, and the RAF, as well as on those fighting for independence such as the Irish Republican Army (IRA). 9 ‘Pink film’ was an independent film genre at the time. It used violence and sexuality to convey a political message and makers of pink films are said to have constituted a recruitment pool

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France In France, protest against the Vietnam War allowed different groups to meet, but also to compete with one another, often on the field of action with a violent dimension. Three organizations, totalling perhaps about 5000 militants, disputed the campaign against the Vietnam War prior to the May 1968 ‘events’: the Comité Viêt-Nam national (CVN), the only one that had been truly unified since November 1966; the high school CVNs, which would become the Comités d’action lycéens (CAL, high school action committees); and the Comités Viêt-Nam de base (CVB, Vietnam Grassroots Committees) formed in May 1967 by Maoists. It was in fact the arrest of CVN activists following the vandalization of the American Express headquarters in March 1968 that indirectly led to the ‘Movement of 22 March’ in the wake of the occupation, the following night, of the conference room at the University of Nanterre. The May events were a springboard for groups that intended to move to action. The JCR went from 350 activists in April 1968 to 1000 in June. According to its analysis, it was urgent to build the party that had been missing in May to ensure ‘the passage from revolt to revolution’ and thus to transform the events into a ‘dress rehearsal’, as 1905 had been for 1917.10 It therefore intended to follow a classic Leninist pattern: build the party, insurrection, civil war. In the meantime, the plan was to extend the ‘mass movement’ according to ‘intervention-sector dialectics’, where one starts from the periphery (students and teachers) to conquer the centre (workers) (Salles, 2005, p. 103). The ‘science’ of insurrection, as it was called by Alain Krivine, was to be precise; thus the JCR equipped itself with an underground organization in charge of security and of conducting exemplary actions aimed at ‘arming the workers with the desire to be armed’.11 The culmination of this strategy was the decision to physically prevent a meeting of the extreme-right group Ordre nouveau at the La Mutualité conference centre on 21 June 1973. The result was a fiasco: there were many casualties, Krivine and Pierre Rousset for the JRA. The PFLP, or Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Marxist and nationalist, was founded in 1967 by George Habash after he was sidelined by Fatah leader Yasser Arafat. The PFLP joined with Arafat’s PLO the following year. It specialized to some extent in hijacking airplanes, the first taking place in July 1968 against an El Al flight. 10 The expression ‘dress rehearsal’, or répétition générale, was used by both Krivine (1973, p. 145), and by Bensaïd and Weber (1968). 11 Krivine (1973, p. 244), speaks of the ‘science’ of insurrections. The ‘desire to be armed’ statement comes from an internal JCR booklet, Taupe rouge, ‘Autodéfense ouvrière’, undated, no. 14, p. 25. This document breaks down the insurrectionary process into f ive stages, from ‘protecting workers’, militants’ and organizations’ actions’ to ‘armed insurrection and establishing the workers’ state, the state of the people in arms’.

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were arrested, and above all, the dissolution of the organization was ordered by government decree. A change in the party line was then prompted by the ‘working sector’, notably by Jeannette Pienkny, against the ‘militarist drift’ of the security wing directed by Michel Recanati.12 To the students’ ‘juvenile leftism’ and ‘street mythology’, Pienkny opposed the slow and patient work of ‘establishment’ in the factories. The ‘Mao-spontex’ (for Maoist spontaneism) GP wished to ‘serve the people’, playing the ‘role of the spark’, and through violent actions show the way to armed struggle at a time it considered marked by fascisization; the GP thus called for ‘people’s resistance’, the name of its underground branch founded in the spring of 1970, the Nouvelle résistance populaire, or New People’s Resistance (NRP). The GP’s weekly, La Cause du peuple, which the following year had a circulation of 40,000, announced in August 1969: ‘Bosses: this is war’. From then on, the group launched a series of sabotage and arson attacks on employers’ headquarters, attacked police stations, ransacked the luxury Parisian delicatessen Fauchon (8 May 1970), blew up the premises of the extreme-right newspaper Minute (14 May 1971), and even kidnapped a member of parliament, Michel de Grailly (26 November 1970), and the assistant head of social relations at Renault-Billancourt, Robert Nogrette (8 March 1972). Raymond Marcellin, the minister of the interior, attributed 82 ‘attacks’ to the GP in the period from its foundation to the summer of 1970, when it was dissolved and went underground. In short, from an ideological as well as a logistical point of view, the passage to armed struggle had been prepared in France, too.

Social Isolation Strictly speaking, however, this leftist phase ended around 1973 when the workers’ struggles dried up; the GP dissolved itself in November, and the JCR changed its party line after severe self-criticism shortly after the confrontations at La Mutualité. How, then, can we explain the abrupt stop in the radicalization of the groups born directly from the 1968 events? If we are to believe the former Maoist leaders themselves, the ‘likeable nature’ of the ‘French May’ and (or) 12 Michel Recanati had been one of the founders of the Comités d’action lycéens, which were the high school action committees that had been set up in 1967 and had been very active in May 1968 through to 1969. After the violent incidents of 21 June 1973 at La Mutualité, he was forced to go underground and leave France; he then later spent a few months in jail. Hurt by the ‘militarist drift’ accusation, he quit the JCR in 1975 and committed suicide in March 1978. His story was told by the film-maker Romain Goupil in Mourir à trente ans, released in 1982.

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their own ‘moral values’ are what had led them to put an end to an experience that had taken them to the verge of disaster (for a discussion, see Sommier, 1994). Yet this appears a rather superficial explanation. Indeed, when we compare the French and Italian cases, we can identify several competing explanatory frameworks. A social-historical perspective points to very strong differences in the legitimacy of the two countries’ political systems, and (for example) makes fascisization of the state in France a scarcely credible proposition. Moreover, attention to medium-term dimensions enables us to place potentially violent organizations within their political environment, and the consequent ‘career’ stemming from it. First, the structure of political opportunities, as measured by the level of repression, was much weaker in France, where the prospect of political change by peaceful means had been opened up by a left-wing common programme of government signed in 1972, leading in particular to a surge of ‘sixty-eighters’ joining the French Communist Party, whose membership rose from 380,000 in 1969 to 520,000 in 1978. Second, the extreme left’s relationship with its revolutionary reference group, the working class, was ephemeral and mythologized in France; whereas in Italy, this relationship explains the length and the intensity of the cycle of protest. Here, contacts with workers could create the impression that the working class had a revolutionary objective, as well as reinforcing the virtues of armed propaganda (Sommier, 1998). Doubts over the effectiveness of violent agitprop on the working class crept in among GP militants when they noted the weak reaction to the February 1972 events at the Renault factory in Billancourt, in particular when the militant Pierre Overney was murdered by a Renault security guard, Jean-Antoine Tramoni, on 25 February. When the GP retaliated by kidnapping the assistant head of social relations at Renault-Billancourt, Robert Nogrette, and then releasing him almost immediately (on 8 March), the organization came very close to a decisive change of course. The struggle at the Lip watch and clock factory in Besançon, which began in April 1973 and included the occupation, takeover and self-management of the factory by the workers, drove the final nail into the coffin: though considered an ‘exemplary’ (and certainly illegal) conflict, the Lip occupation took place without the participation of the very forces whose role was to ‘wake up the masses’, the Maoists. The GP’s leadership drew the consequences from this situation, and in November 1973 dissolved the organization. ‘A cycle of class struggle is over’, acknowledged the GP’s theoretical journal, Les Cahiers prolétariens, in its January 1974 issue.13 13 Les Cahiers prolétariens, no. 2, January 1974, p. 1.

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Those who refused dissolution went in three directions. Some of them went on to relaunch La Cause du peuple. Around a dozen others, some from the GP’s Renault Struggle Committee, founded a group called Vaincre et vivre (Conquer and live), which specialized in factory-based actions, the best known of which was to have violently beaten the director general of the nationalized mining company Charbonnages de France (12 January 1976) in late retaliation for a methane explosion that killed 42 miners in Liévin in northern France on 27 December 1974. A third group founded the Brigades internationales (BI), which in 1974 began to attack foreign diplomats: the military attachés at the embassies of Uruguay on 19 December 1974 and of Spain on 8 October 1975, and the ambassador of Bolivia on 11 May 1976. In an interview with the daily newspaper Libération on 30 June 1976, their founder, Jean-Denis Lhomme, explained that the BI had been formed as a reaction to the military coup in Chile and added, For us, guns, like pens, are an instrument of propaganda […]. We are not Carlos. We are more like those who first joined the Resistance and killed officers with shotguns, those who learned war by making it. (In Bourseiller, 1996, p. 250)

Lhomme’s suicide the following month plunged the group into a crisis; it then decided to merge with Vaincre et vivre to create a new organization, NAPAP (Noyaux armés pour l’autonomie populaire, or Armed Nuclei For Popular Autonomy), two of the members of which were Frédéric Oriach* and Régis Schleicher*. NAPAP came into being with its first action, the assassination on 23 March 1977 of Jean-Antoine Tramoni, the Renault security guard who had killed Pierre Overney in 1972; this action demonstrated NAPAP’s continuity with the GP’s history. In the face of numerous arrests, they embarked the same year on a series of actions, here again in continuity with the GP’s ‘demonstrative’ dogma. These included an attack against the far-right trade union CFT (Confédération française du travail) in April and the bombing of one of the divisions of the steel factory Usinor in Thionville in Lorraine on 6 June, while the former GP members now in the BI were doing the same, but targeting diplomats. In the summer of 1977, NAPAP met up with Jean-Marc Rouillan’s* organization, the Groupes d’action révolutionnaires internationalistes (GARI, Groups of Internationalist Revolutionary Action), which had spun off from the MIL (Movimiento Ibérico de Liberación, or Iberian Liberation Movement, fighting against the Franco regime from French territory). In a context marked by anti-nuclear struggles and the development of the autonomous

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Figure 2 Origins of Action Directe

GP

Nouvelle Cause du Peuple 1974

MIL

Brigades Internationales 1974

Vaincre et vivre

NAPAP 1977

Other Autonomous Groups

GARI 1973

Action Directe Mars 1978

Lyons Branch

Internationalist Branch

movement, the GARI constituted, with other collectives, a ‘political and military coordination internal to the autonomous movement’ (Schifres, 2004, p. 53). In March 1979, this coordination would become Action directe (AD), which announced itself by machine-gunning the headquarters of the Conseil national du patronat français (CNPF, the National Council of French Employers) on 1 May. Radicalization in France was thus rather delayed with respect to the 1968 events, both in terms of time and its cultural context, which was largely external to 1968 since it was mostly of separatist and autonomous inspiration. For Della Porta (1995, p. 107), German radicalization is also the result of marginalization, on two counts: from society, as well as from the ‘movement itself’. Unlike the Italian militants’ radicalization, which was played out in confrontations with countermovements, Della Porta considers the German case to have been fed by a growing feeling of isolation reflecting two types of radicalization experiences: day-to-day experiences, and ‘the intellectual experience’ (ibid., p. 164). In any event, the radicalization of the student movement came partly from the absence of a relationship between the institutional left and the extra-parliamentary left. With the ‘long march within the institutions’ (1970-1973) that began when Willy Brandt came to power in late 1969, many gave up the streets as their field of action, while others were radicalized. Between 1969 and 1973, 100,000 people under the age of 35 joined the ranks of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), while the SDS

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(Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund) and the APO (Extra-Parliamentary Opposition) dissolved itself. Only a small minority decided to continue their action underground. Andreas Baader* and Gudrun Ensslin* went underground to escape their three-year prison sentence for the 1968 department store arson attacks, but Baader was arrested in April 1970 during a routine driving licence check. His breakout on 14 May by a commando group led by Ulrike Meinhof* announced the birth of the Red Army Faction (RAF), as explained in a letter addressed to the libertarian journal Agit 883: Comrades of 883, it is pointless to explain the right thing to the wrong people. We’ve done enough of that. We don’t want to explain the action to free Baader to babbling intellectuals, to those who are freaked out, who know it all anyway, but rather to the potentially revolutionary section of the people.14

The letter ends with the following watchwords: ‘Develop the class struggle – Organize The Proletariat – Start the armed struggle – Build the Red Army!’ At that moment, the group comprised barely a dozen members. In 1972, it was expanded by the arrival of militants from another group, the SPK (Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv, or Socialist Patients’ Collective), founded in 1970 at the psychiatric ward of the University of Heidelberg, who had managed to escape repression when the group’s leaders were arrested. It was also to escape the police that some of the Kommune 1 anarchists sought refuge in Jordan, where they learned the rudiments of armed struggle. In 1971, along with militants from the anti-repression Schwarze-HilfeGruppen (Black Aid Groups), they set up the June 2nd Movement (B2J), which described itself as an ‘armed branch of the Berlin anti-dogmatic left’ (see Della Porta, 1995, p. 102). A third organization with an autonomous imprint, the Revolutionäre Zellen (RZ, or Revolutionary Cells), was born in 1973 from the ranks of the ‘anti-torture committees’. It had a feminist arm, Rote Zora (Zora the Redhead), which between 1977 and 1995 committed 45 arson and bombing attacks against companies or businesses accused of oppressing women. The RAF was organizationally beheaded in June 1972 when their most important members were arrested, and for the next three years, abstained 14 Agit 883, no. 61, 22 May 1970, p. 1; see https://plakat.nadir.org/883/ausgaben/agit883_61_​ 22_05_1970.pdf.

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from any action. The chief arena of conflict shifted to the Stammheim prison, where between 1972 and 1975, RAF prisoners went on three particularly harsh hunger strikes to protest against their detention conditions. The last of these, 145 days long, ended with the death in November 1974 of Holger Meins, who (like the others) was being force-fed. Meins’s death set off demonstrations, including 10,000 people in Berlin, where his picture was displayed alongside one of an Auschwitz prisoner. It also triggered the radicalization of other groups and created a new generation of militants, as the next day the B2J murdered the president of the Berlin Supreme Court. The RAF intended to use this campaign, disapproved of by Horst Mahler*, to ‘make fascism visible’, to reveal the ‘true face’ of social democracy, which, at its Bad Godesberg convention, had ‘fulfilled its post-war mission, i.e. to absorb and liquidate legal opposition in the Federal Republic’ and had indentured the country to the United States (Meinhof, Croissant, and Rote Armee Fraktion, 1977, p. 81). Like Carlos Marighella, the RAF saw ‘the escalation of the counter-revolution’ as a positive thing that would lead others to join its fight. The second generation, which joined the RAF between 1975 and 1977, was marked by counterculture and militancy in committees to support the first-generation prisoners (Red Aid, Black Aid). It had no relationship with student or party organizations, which can explain its ‘lesser theoretical production’ and a ‘lesser concern for dialogue with the legal movement’, and this made the organization’s isolation even more pronounced: as it were, the RAF shut itself off from the outside and moved away from the protest movement, which, in turn, felt less and less concerned by the ‘war’ opposing the RAF to the state. (Steiner and Debray, 2006, p. 112)

High-Risk Commitment and the Logics of Clandestine Action The different thresholds that were crossed in the escalation of violence (1973-1974 and 1977-1978) were opportunities for the BR to strengthen the organization and its clandestinity along the lines of a highly centralized and compartmentalized model: they were run by a ‘strategic direction’ whose members were co-opted and on which depended the ‘columns’ of the cities where they were established (primarily the industrial triangle in the north, Rome, and Naples) and the various ‘fronts’ (in factories, of the fight against the ‘counter-revolution’, and logistical). The fully clandestine BR members were ‘regular’; the others were ‘irregular’.

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But not all underground organizations were as secret, nor were they all structured according to a military model. This latter was even judged severely by the BR’s competitor Prima linea, whose members did not give up their jobs or their other militant activities. In Germany, the B2J also decided to combine ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ work and differentiate itself from the hierarchical structures that it saw as characterizing the RAF. The RAF was made up of eight groups of eight to ten people, in six cities, with each operating relatively autonomously from one another – all the more so because they were clearly run by the imprisoned militants, notably Ensslin* and Baader*, whose leadership was uncontested; Baader was, according to Meinhof*, ‘the guerrilla combatant that Che said was the group itself’ (Meinhof, Croissant, and Rote Armee Fraktion, 1977, p. 60). Conversely, at B2J, groups were of three to nine militants, held together by friendship and long-standing ties, and were free to decide their actions; coordination between groups was assured only by meetings of their delegates. Meanwhile, the RZ (Revolutionary Cells) were made up of small groups of three to five persons who had affinities but did not necessarily know each other and were supposed to continue living and going about their activism, insofar as possible, as they had done before. This relative openness was short-lived, however. The intensification of repression led to increased concentration, which always benefits those most organized. Thus in Germany, from 1971, the RAF took in militants from less structured, sometimes informal groups that could not withstand the repression, such as the Hash Rebels and the SPK. In June 1980, part of the B2J broke up while another part decided to join the RAF. In Italy, the BR benefitted successively from their absorption of the GAP then of the NAP, as well as other minor groups. Clandestinity and organizational hierarchy grew stronger under the pressure of the government’s security measures; this supports Erickson’s (1981) analysis, which – contrary to Simmel’s classic (1906) interpretation of individual inclinations to hierarchy and control in secret societies – stresses the structuring effects of this type of group. North American and Japanese activists were spared these organizational divergences and recombinations for the simple reason that they were isolated from one another. The WUO was organized into collectives of a dozen militants who lived together in a single room with no privacy because ‘everything [was] social’: sexuality, self-criticism sessions, as well as taking LSD ‘to help [the members’] paranoia, complexes, and inner problems emerge’ (Gerassi, 1970, p. 1804). They were coordinated by the WUO central committee, called the Weather Bureau. The JRA (Japanese Red Army) was directed by a political committee led by Fusako Shigenobu*, who headed

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three other committees: the military committee, the scientific committee, and the logistics committee. There are two reasons for stressing these organizational aspects: first, because as underscored by Snow and Zurcher (1980), the question of why someone enlists is inseparable from the question of how they do so; and second, because of the specificity of armed militancy. Activism in a social movement, in a formal organization, and militancy in a clandestine organization cannot be analysed in the exact same way. McAdam rightly points out that ‘people do not “join” social movements in the same sense that they join formal organizations’ because ‘the boundaries of a movement are never as clearly defined as those of formal organizations’ (1986, p. 66). In his comparison of Freedom Summer participants and the sympathizers who did not actually enlist, he showed that the reasons underpinning high-risk commitment were not different in nature from those underpinning commitment in general. The difference was only in degree or intensity. Similarly, the inclinations of militants do not differ much from those of others (although it seems that many of the militants in armed organizations had experienced religious socialization). It is known that enlistment is facilitated by contact with a ‘recruiting agent’ (either an individual, or an organization serving as a recruitment pool, as we noted in connection with far-left group security wings). Militants engaged in high-risk commitment have a previous militant career, which is mostly political, older, and denser (as measured by their number of affiliations). They also have more and stronger friendships with members of the group. Finally, enlistment is also correlated with biographical availability, that is, the absence of limitations to participation, which favours the recruitment of those who are young (but not too young). The qualitative data we have collected tallies with Della Porta’s quantitative data (1995, p. 167). Of the militants in Italian armed groups, 38 per cent had previously belonged to legal far-left organizations (mostly PotOp and LC) and 84 per cent had been part of the autonomous movement. Of the 1214 militants surveyed who joined an armed group, 843 had a friend in it. In 74 per cent of recruitment cases, the newcomer had more than one friend in the same group and 42 per cent more than seven. According to a German study by Gerhard Schmidtchen cited by Della Porta, 32 per cent of German militants had taken part in unauthorized marches in the late 1960s (versus 4 per cent of the young belonging to the same cohort), 17 per cent in squat operations (versus 1 per cent), and 63 per cent in confrontations with the police (versus 8 per cent) (ibid.). Their average age of 25 in 1970 shows their continuity with the student movement; 60 per cent were students or had been when they enlisted in the RAF (versus 19 per cent for the age group as

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a whole). Cases of enlisting as a group or at least as a couple were frequent. The importance of women is also worth noting (33 per cent of the militants of German armed organizations and 23 per cent of the Italian ones were women) as compared to women’s participation in the conventional political activities of the time. It should be added that progressive commitment to armed struggle can be made without realization that it is being made, as we noted in connection with Italian far-left militants. As Becker (1960, p. 38) writes: the commitment made without realization that it is being made – what might be termed the ‘commitment by default’ – arises through a series of acts no one of which is crucial but which, taken together, constitute for the actor a series of side bets of such a magnitude that he finds himself unwilling to lose them.15

According to some militants, there is no one date or key event which can by itself explain their commitment, but rather several, which make sense as they become interrelated, like the accumulation of sediments which create atypical careers through threshold effects (and sometimes also by chance). This dimension was also observed by Della Porta (1995). For her, recruitment is a form of conversion as understood by Berger and Luckmann (1966), and governed by both facilitating factors (previous experiences of violence and a ‘devotion to friends’) and precipitating factors (solidarity with a friend who was arrested, reaction to deaths of militants, being forced to go underground to escape arrest, etc.). Friendship is then fed and strengthened by the excitement of the risks incurred together in a small group (of usually not more than five), which makes ‘turning back’ difficult. In this, the actors’ individual inclinations are less important than the bonds that connect them to significant others. This momentum logic can explain why commitment becomes radicalized when at the same time the cycle of protest is actually calming down or even running dry: ‘Shoot higher’ can be a way of refusing a normalization process – continued action having the value of proving one’s fidelity to the mobilizing idea – and/or the result of a calculation whereby turning back comes up at too high a cost (which would mean reconsidering repressive policies and offering activists solutions to go back to ordinary life, and this constitutes a major difference between 15 Becker uses the same reasoning with regard to trans-sexualism, where, he argues, the ultimate decision is the last of a long series of previous decisions, none of which, taken separately – and this was the key point – had ever seemed strange in itself (in Becker et al. 1968, pp. 199-212).

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Italy and France, for example). As underscored by Anne Steiner and Loïc Debray with regard to the RAF, many of those who would join the RAF between 1968 and 1970 had not experienced the student movement as a few months’ digression in their life. They had gone too far to consider going back to their former life: to school or a paid job, to pursuing their career, or to family life. For some, events related to their private life, like the separation of a couple (Meinhof and Ensslin, for instance), strengthened their will to break with everything. After their experience of living in a commune, of working in a collective, of violence, and sometimes of imprisonment, the normalization that loomed as the student movement ebbed was not acceptable. (Steiner and Debray, 2006, p. 100)

Armed group militants shared a warrior imaginary with three elements: the idea of belonging to a vanguard; faith in radical change, involving a close connection between political ends and military means, in which violence is therefore a key driver; and the importance of physical capital and specialization in combat roles, reinforced by the experience of clandestinity, leading activists to ‘change worlds’ (for further discussion, see Berger and Luckmann, 1966). Indeed, there is a logic specific to underground life in total institutions, all the more so when they are small, because commitment to this type of group inescapably involves a consequential biographical rupture. This rupture involves the abandonment of one’s former identity and a symbolic re-birth (notably through the attribution of a ‘nom de guerre’), along with the internalization of minutely codified rules of behaviour, sometimes even through the use of mortification techniques, etc. Apart from the Italian BR and their nearly one thousand arrested militants or Prima linea and their 900 members, the groups were very small in size: in Germany, the RAF never had more than 40 militants at a given time (or a hundred members over seven years), and from the three German organizations 227 were arrested; while in Japan, the intelligence services estimated that the JRA in 1977 had between 25 and 35 members and at most a hundred sympathizers. The psycho-affective dimension of commitment was most likely heightened by the level of personal involvement required and the risks incurred; though overlooked by Olson (1965), this dimension involves a series of moral, psychological, and symbolic selective incentives to commitment, as identified by Gaxie (1977) in connection with political parties. This dimension was certainly significant, in that it made turning back more difficult.

5

Strategies of Violence

As noted by Gurr (1970), the shift from social violence to political violence is facilitated by the diffusion of normative and instrumental justifications of violence, which vary depending on the country and the singularity of their historical development. From this point of view, the experiences common to the three countries most affected by armed rebellion (Italy, Germany, and Japan), i.e. where the construction of the state was both late and painful, and where there is a history of fascism, are most certainly connected. Beyond these similarities, it is important to stress that the shared reference to Marxism of these groups harboured a wide variety of discourses, even if the factional differences amongst Communist credos specific to each group should not be taken too seriously. Indeed, the credos were often confused, a rough mixture of Maoism, Guevarism, and Third Worldism, grafted onto the specific revolutionary traditions of the particular countries, such as Trotskyism and anarchism. In September 1971, the BR portrayed themselves as follows: Our points of reference are Marxism-Leninism, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the actual experience of metropolitan guerrilla movements; in a word, the scientific tradition of the international labour and revolutionary movement. (Soccorso, 1976)

In addition, though covered by an artificial ideological veneer, they were really based on group dynamics, the mainsprings of which were of a very different kind, and were emotional and geographical in particular. Their main function was therefore to rationalize, using a valued ideological discourse of the time, the emotional bonds that make up the flesh and blood of social movements, and to mask the rivalries driven by the logics of group distinction and self-assertion. Consequently, the groups’ violent strategies stemmed less from an ideological current than from the political environment specific to each country, which as it were, had wrought the general tone of the protest movement (hence the importance of not separating the study of the 1968 protest from that of ‘terrorism’). They were also directly related to the status of the organizations’ militant forces, as well as to their origins. One last reservation needs to be made over attempts to link violent strategies to ideology, given that these strategies evolved over time as the protest cycle ran its course.

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Propaganda of the Deed The United States Convinced of the ‘fascisization of the state’, the WUO planned to attack a dance for military officers. But on 6 March 1970, the bomb being constructed for this purpose by three militants exploded accidentally in their New York City Greenwich Village townhouse. The incident obviously put the group in the spotlight, but most of all, it led the WUO to reconsider violence. From then on, its actions had a symbolic dimension, would be strictly designed as propaganda to ‘beat pig Amerika’, and would be announced with prior warning in order to allow evacuation before the bombs exploded. They targeted the Capitol on 1 March 1971 to protest against the invasion of Laos, the Pentagon on 19 May 1972 in reaction to the bombing of Hanoi, courthouses, police and prison-authority buildings, the New York offices of International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) on 28 September 1973 to denounce the company’s involvement in the Chilean coup, the San Francisco offices of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (accused of sterilizing poor women, 6 March 1974) and of the California attorney general (on 31 May, following the police killing of six Symbionese Liberation Army militants), and so on. In a July 1974 text called ‘Prairie Fire’, the group claimed responsibility for nineteen dynamite attacks since its formation five years earlier and called for a revolutionary communist party. To finance its activities, on 12 September 1970 the WUO organized, in exchange for $ 25,000, the prison break-out of Timothy Leary, who had been incarcerated for promoting LSD. Many self-styled revolutionary groups would claim responsibility for a number of attacks. Though they could not compete with the WUO, two of these can at least be mentioned. The first, the New World Liberation, had until 1974 done nothing more than publish Carlos Marighella’s famous guerrilla manual. It moved into action with eight attacks in 1974 against companies, including ITT in reaction to its participation in Pinochet’s coup in Chile, and 22 further attacks in 1975. The second, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), claims its fame from its murder in 1973 of a school superintendent in Oakland and even more from the kidnapping in February 1974 of Patty Hearst, the granddaughter of press tycoon William Randolph Hearst, followed by her Stockholm syndrome-induced conversion to the cause. In exchange for her release, the SLA demanded that $ 2 million worth of food be distributed to the poor.

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Japan Of the three Japanese groups, only the United Red Army (Rengo Sekigun) remained on Japanese soil. It developed a strategy known as the PBM tactic: P for the kidnapping of famous people, B for bombing and building up bases for armed struggle, and M for obtaining money to finance the activities (Apter and Sawa, 1984, pp. 122-123). The group’s actions were limited throughout 1971 to holding up banks and attacking armed storage depots, before carrying out in December its first political assassination; the victim was the wife of a police officer. Prior to the attack, the group killed two of its own members who had wanted to leave; this sectarian modus operandi prefigured the events of the winter of 1971-1972, when it retreated to the mountains and began an internal purge in which it gauged members’ loyalty through torture and self-criticism sessions. Fourteen of the 24 militants present lost their lives in particularly appalling circumstances. When the police raided the Mount Asama holiday lodge on 28 February 1972 (the Asama-Sansō incident) and discovered the macabre scene, public opinion was horrified. Subsequently, the URA (United Red Army) lost the few sympathizers it had left in Japan. One of its leaders, Mori Tsuneo, committed suicide in 1973 for having made ‘mistakes’, and the other, Hiroko Nagata*, was sentenced to death. The URA then disappeared from history. France In France, responsibility for most autonomous armed actions went unclaimed. As explained by an activist to Schifres: The point of view of the autonomous movement, was, precisely, propaganda of the deed and diffuse guerrilla warfare. Everyone was perpetrating attacks. If not, you weren’t autonomous. To be autonomous was to go chuck a Molotov cocktail at the local temp agency, or the local realtor’s. (2004, p. 51)

Initially, Action directe (or the autonomous collectives that would converge within it) was anxious to concentrate on the major struggles of the period, particularly the anti-nuclear campaign; in September 1977, for instance, there was a ‘night of terrorism’ with 23 attacks against the Superphénix nuclear power plant in Creys-Malville, France. Equally, AD mobilized against the extradition of the German RAF’s lawyer, Klaus Croissant. They offered a harsh analysis of ‘foreign political-military practices that [led] “specialized”

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combatants into a suicidal solidarity-based struggle against the modern state apparatus’, according in October 1977 to the NAPAP, which went on to explain: Our practice is part of the construction of workers’ autonomy organized within the people’s movement. Our goal is not to call for the formation of 1, 10, 100 NAPAPs governed by a central leadership like a staff-of-potentialpeople’s-violence. We are entering another stage, which consists in melting into the dynamics of the movement and not in seeking to take its lead in an official or wangling way.16

The collectives signed their actions with zany initials and names: CARLOS, for ‘Coordination autonome radicalement en lutte ouverte contre la société’ (Autonomous coordination in a radically open struggle against society); MATRA, for ‘Mouvements armés terroristes révolutionnaires anarchistes’ (Armed terrorist anarchistic revolutionary movements); or ‘Smicards en pétard’ (Hopping mad persons on minimum wage), etc. AD enacted this autonomous line with a sustained series of bomb attacks on the headquarters of the agency in charge of housing for migrant workers, Sonacotra (16 September 1979), the Paris area headquarters of the CNPF (27 September 1979), the labour inspectorate (3 February 1980), real estate agencies (12 March 1980), the French internal security service, (DST, Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire) (14 March 1980), etc. It put its actions on hold during the 1981 presidential campaign and the majority of its imprisoned militants would be granted clemency by the new president, François Mitterrand. The group was then divided into four branches, including two ‘movementist’ ones, which abandoned violent action. This ended AD’s first period.

Resistance and Urban Guerrilla Warfare The ‘new fascism’ theme, fascism from the top, was one of the recurring topics of debates within the Western far-left groups of the 1968 years. It was launched in France by the philosopher André Glucksmann in a special issue of Les Temps modernes in 1972 (see Glucksmann, 1972) and amply used by the GP Maoists. But it was in Germany and Italy that this thesis constituted the mainspring for a call to arms. 16 In L’Encrier, no. 28, 1er semestre 1978, p. 1; see http://archivesautonomies.org/IMG/pdf/ autonomies/documents/lencrier-n28.pdf.

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Germany Of all the organizations under consideration here, the RAF was the one that pushed the anti-fascist analogy the furthest, to the point that several social psychology studies have interpreted it as youth’s exasperated interpellation of their fathers’ past under Nazi Germany, or a ‘burden of memory’ (Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich, 1972; Becker, 1977; Gaudard 1997). The majority of the first generation militants had been born between 1942 and 1949, and reached adulthood at a time marked by debate on the past, which had started at the same time that the controversy over the Notstandgesetze (and the possibility that the army would be given exceptional powers in an insurrectionary situation) was contributing to the dramatization and polarization of politics. Articles written by Ulrike Meinhof* over a number of years in the monthly magazine Konkret developed a parallel between the current situation and Nazi Germany. The policies of repression, the RAF prisoners’ hunger strikes, and the international campaign in which Sartre took part in 1974 to protest against their detention conditions continued to give credence to this parallel until the end of the 1970s. Even their most well-known action, the assassination of the ‘boss of bosses’, Hanns Martin Schleyer, on 18 October 1977, was legitimized not by his function but by his past as an SS lieutenant. Feelings of guilt were compounded by those of responsibility for the Vietnam War because of the presence of US military bases on German soil. The often abundant communications of armed groups for legitimation purposes (letters, communiqués claiming responsibility for actions, and various resolutions) produce a set of common themes: reference to Lin Biao, Mao, Che and Marighella’s Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla, the United States as a ‘paper tiger’, imperialism, ‘counter-revolution’, the reaction or fascisization of the authorities in power, etc. But there is a very distinct feature in the writings of German militants (and of the WUO to a lesser extent): themes of sacrifice and redemption, and the conviction that the conquest of dignity through violence would regenerate and give birth to a new man. Armed struggle was to ‘make bombs burst in people’s consciousness’, ‘make weapons a disease’ and thus allow the individual to become emancipated from isolation and authoritarianism (quoted in Steiner and Debray, 2006). The alternative was, in the words of Holger Meins in a letter written five days before his death on 9 November 1974 to a comrade who had just stopped his hunger strike, to be ‘a bastard or a man’, ‘by fighting against bastards as men for the liberation of man’ (quoted in Meinhof, Croissant, and Rote Armee Fraktion, 1977, p. 47). Indeed, for

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the RAF, the revolutionary subject was ‘constituted by the totalization of individual subjectivities and praxis in revolt’, not by the working class, considered as definitively corrupted by capitalism (Steiner and Debray, 2006, p. 194). Italy In Italy, the mainspring for taking up arms was the fear of fascisization or a coup d’état; it was thus a means of anti-fascist resistance, as much for the GAP as for the BR, which in January 1973 set out the following three goals: War against fascism, which is [found] not only in the black shirts of Almirante [leader of the MSI, the Movimento sociale italiano, or Italian Social Movement], but also in the white shirts of Andreotti [Christian Democrat minister of foreign affairs] and of the DC [Democrazia cristiana, or Christian Democracy] […] [means] [r]esistance in the factories […] [and] [r]esistance against the militarization of the regime, which does not mean fighting to defend democratic spaces, but to destroy the state’s armed structures and its parallel militia.

Unlike the GAP, however, the BR used the legitimizing reference to the Resistance metaphorically, because they believed less in a return of historical fascism than in a De Gaulle-type evolution of the Italian regime. The theoretical premises of action directed against Christian Democracy, and through it, against the ‘heart of the state’, were thus posed. Notwithstanding, the actions conducted between 1970 and 1973 primarily targeted the extreme right: an arson attack on Prince Borghese’s office one week after his coup attempt (13 December 1970), a ‘search’ at the home of an adviser to the far-right MSI (27 January 1972), setting alight the cars of nine far-right trade unionists (26 November 1972), and the kidnapping of the provincial secretary of the same trade union (12 February 1973). The Sit Siemens manager, Idalgo Macchiarini, was the first to be ‘pilloried’, a type of action taken by the BR from Volante rossa, one of the dissenting communist groups that had refused to disarm at the end of World War II. Macchiarini was kidnapped on 3 March 1972 and released the same day after being subjected to a ‘people’s trial’. The BR’s first assassination targeted two members of the MSI on 17 June 1974, the day before they kidnapped a judge, Mario Sossi, a former member of the same party (18 April to 23 May). The ‘resistance’ issue in Italy owed a lot to the context of the time, marked by neo-fascist activism and two coup attempts (Prince Borghese’s in 1970

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and the 1974 Windrose conspiracy), but also revealed scores that had yet to be settled within the communist family after the war. It revived the memory of an unfinished revolution, ‘betrayed’ by the secretary general of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), Palmiro Togliatti, who from 1944 had concentrated on thwarting the insurrectionary hopes of his troops and on disarming them. Many of the militants used the anti-fascist values transmitted by their families to legitimize their furtherance of a struggle in which their parents had been engaged (either in fact or in myth) and which they considered incomplete. These ‘red diaper’ activists, to use Keniston’s (1971) expression, felt they were completing a family commitment unfulfilled by their elders. But reviving this dashed hope meant attacking the foundations of the regime, which was the result of a compromise reached between Communists and Catholics.

The Insurrectionary Model: Taking the Attack to the Heart of the State The strategy of the Italian groups would evolve around 1973 as the threat of a coup receded, but also as a result of the ‘historic compromise’ theorization developed by the secretary general of the PCI, Enrico Berlinguer. From Pinochet’s Chilean coup, Berlinguer drew the conclusion that the left would not be able to govern Italy without taking the risk of a reaction identical to that experienced in Chile, which made it advisable to reach a governmental compromise with the right-wing Christian Democratic Party. In 1975, he therefore accepted maintaining the country in NATO and recommended an austerity policy, and in 1976 made the commitment to not bring down Giulio Andreotti’s government (a ‘government of non-mistrust’ [of the communists] followed by ‘national solidarity’ governments until 1979). The extreme left’s diagnosis was diametrically opposed to that of the PCI: Allende’s failure, in their view, was due to the fact that he had not armed the people. Mainly, the extreme left saw the communists’ strategy as a reason for abandoning the possibility of social transformation through the voting process. The BR’s strategic leadership considered in April 1975 that ‘the revisionists [had] once and for all, taken sides with the imperialist forces and their counter-revolutionary policy’ and recommended attacking ‘the heart of the state’, which according to them had become ‘the imperialist state of the multinationals’, characterized by an imperialist political personnel, centred on the executive branch, using reformism as means to destroy the revolutionary forces, and practising preventive counter-revolution (original

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text reproduced in Progetto memoria, 1996). This new ‘strategic phase’ also reflected the change in leadership since the arrest in September 1974 of founders Renato Curcio* and Alberto Franceschini, who were replaced by Mario Moretti*. Between 1974 and 1977, violence became the work of specialized underground armed groups or autonomous collectives. The legal far left retreated into the background. PotOp dissolved itself in the summer of 1973, and Lotta continua did the same in 1976 after having been incorporated into a not very conclusive electoral alliance with others in 1973. The target of propaganda actions is revealing of the revolutionary subjects to which the Italian organizations turned, as shown in Table 9. Propaganda addressed to factory workers was the hallmark of BR, while the other ‘second generation’ armed groups favoured ‘social’ propaganda focused on a variety of targets: small companies or small businesses, real-estate agencies or advertising firms, data-processing departments, dealers, psychiatrists, and security guards. They also stayed away from political targets, which required a firepower that the majority of them never had. Table 9 Types of propaganda actions in Italy (percentage)

‘Factory’ propaganda ‘Social’ propaganda Political targets

BR

Other armed groups

40 6 24

11 31 10

Source: Della Porta, 1990, p. 216

The percentage of attacks against the military state apparatus rose from 20 per cent of all actions in 1970 to 50 per cent in 1982, with a peak of 75 per cent in 1977. Actions of ‘revenge against traitors’ followed a similar evolution; there was only one before 1979, but four between 1979 and 1980, and thirteen between 1981 and 1982 (Della Porta, 1990, pp. 246-247). The year 1977 was also marked by a number of assassinations (including the president of the Turin Bar Association, Fulvio Croce, and the deputy director of the newspaper La Stampa, Carlo Casalegno) and a number of journalists were shot in the legs. This was a true turning point, as 80 per cent of the assassinations perpetrated by the far left took place after 1977, reaching their peak with the kidnapping of leading Christian Democrat Aldo Moro, who was held from 16 March to 9 May 1978. To understand this action, it should be recalled that Moro had been the artisan of the rapprochement between his party

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and the PCI – which was to have been formalized in parliament on the very day when he was kidnapped – through the formation of a ‘national unity’ government presided by Andreotti. Moro’s body was found eight weeks later, halfway between the headquarters of the two parties in Rome, which was under a state of emergency. It was therefore not a simple coincidence that the theorization period of the historical compromise (1973-1975) was also that of the first underground groups’ progressive shift towards armed struggle, which spread between the two 1976 and 1979 elections and culminated with the Moro affair. The BR (all generations included) were responsible for more than half of the 128 victims of the extreme left, and Prima linea for more than 15 per cent of them. Of the victims, 61 per cent (or 79 persons) were law-and-order officers (public or private police, prison wardens, etc.), nearly 8 per cent (ten persons) were magistrates or lawyers, and 7 per cent (nine persons) were businessmen. More than 4 per cent of the victims were company managers and the same percentage were politicians (six persons in each category). While escalation seems to have occurred gradually in Italy, in two waves (around 1974-1975 and then in 1977), it was more sudden in West Germany and experienced two peaks, in 1975 and 1977 (see Tables 10 and 11). Like the BR, RAF actions were initially intended as demonstrative or utilitarian (with a series of hold-ups in 1970 to finance the organization), but they included murders much earlier, beginning in 1972, partly because of their regular use of explosives, which the Italians did not employ, as against the US Air Force base in Frankfurt (11 May 1972) then in Heidelberg (24 May), and against the publisher Springer (19 May). In the two German peaks of escalation, it is surprising to note, as Steiner did, the ‘disparity between the level of their actions and the tenuousness of their fall-back bases’, which testifies to the militants’ social isolation (Steiner and Debray, 2006, p. 38). An RAF commando group carried out its first political assassination on 10 November 1974, that of Günter Von Drenkmann, the president of Germany’s Superior Court of Justice. Meanwhile, the B2J kidnapped Peter Lorenz, president of Berlin’s CDU (Christian Democratic Union) and mayoral candidate, two days before the 27 February 1975 elections, and let him go in exchange for the release of six prisoners, including Horst Mahler*. Another characteristic of the German groups was the importance of hostage-taking to get prisoners released, as was done by the ‘Holger Meins’ commando group in the West German embassy in Stockholm on 24 April 1975. Comparing their action repertoire with that of their Italian counterparts clearly shows that their percentage of defence actions (for the survival of the organization, such

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Table 10 Evolution of forms of action in Italy and in West Germany (1970-1983) as a percentage of total actions

20 0 47.4 57.1 66.6 60.9 70.6 42.4 78.3 46.2 90 95.7 97.4 100

0 0 0 0 16.6 4.3 0 12.1 4.3 0 0 4.3 2.6 0

40 50 31.6 42.9 16.6 30.4 23.5 33.3 0 30.8 10 0 0 0

40 50 21.1 0 0 4.3 5.9 12.1 17.4 23.1 0 0 0 0

Total Total %

713 61.5

231 18.1

171 14.8

44 3.8

182 69.2

10 3.8

46 17.5

25 9.5

Shootings

0 0 0 0 4.3 4.5 5.8 1.5 0.8 3.9 3.8 7.9 22.4 33.3

Robberies

0 17.6 12.8 14.1 4.3 9.5 5.8 8.6 10 17.3 26 28.6 42.9 0

Attacks against persons

0 0 2.6 21.4 10.8 12.2 10.7 15.7 23.7 26.7 22.9 36.5 24.5 66.6

Attacks against goods

100 82.4 84.6 64.1 80.4 74.4 77.8 74.1 65.5 52.5 47.4 27 10.2 0

Shootings

1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983

Year

Robberies

Attacks against persons (attacks and kidnappings)

West Germany

Attacks against goods (bombs and walk-ins)

Italy

Source: Della Porta, 1995, pp. 126-127

as bank robberies, shoot-outs during an arrest, punishing ‘traitors’) is higher (37.3 per cent versus 21.1 per cent) and about the same for anti-repression actions (against the police, judicial authorities, and the prison system). On the other hand, there were far fewer propaganda actions (targeting their adversaries, including both politicians and economic leaders), according to Della Porta’s definition (1995): 44.1 per cent of all actions, versus 61.1 per cent (see Table 12). This can be seen as a sign of the RAF’s social isolation. For Horst Mahler, only the young and the marginal could be won over to armed struggle, not the ‘working-class aristocracy’. And even the assassinations and kidnappings included in the category were often more for defensive than for offensive ends, to avenge the death of a militant or to demand the release of prisoners.

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Table 11 Number of victims of the far left in Italy and West Germany (1970-1983) Year

Italy

West Germany

1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 Total

0 0 1 0 5 7 10 6 29 23 29 14 17 1 179

0 2 7 0 2 10 3 10 3 2 0 2 0 0 41

Source: Della Porta, 1995, p. 128

Table 12 Types of armed action in Italy and in West Germany

Propaganda actions Defence actions Anti-repression actions

Italy (1970-1983)

West Germany (1970-1980)

61.1% (N = 783) 21.1% (N = 263) 17.3% (N = 219)

44.1% (N = 78) 37.3% (N = 66) 18.6% (N = 33)

Source: Della Porta, 1995, p. 120

As in Italy, 1977 marked a new phase in the rising levels of violence in Germany, with the assassinations on 7 April of Attorney General Siegfried Buback and on 30 July of a bank director, the kidnapping of Hanns Martin Schleyer, who would be found dead on 18 October, and finally the hijacking of a Lufthansa flight from 13 to 18 October by four militants of the Commando Martyr Halima, who demanded the release of the RAF prisoners. Three of the militants were killed during the attack launched by West German special forces on 18 October in Mogadishu, Somalia, where the plane had landed. The same day, Andreas Baader*, Gudrun Ensslin*, and Jan-Carl Raspe were found dead in their respective Stammheim prison cells. Their suicide is still contested today by their supporters, the same as Ulrike Meinhof’s* one year earlier and Ingrid Schubert’s on 12 November 1977, based partly on the testimony of Irmgard Möller, found stabbed and seriously wounded in her cell on the same 18 October.

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Anti-Imperialism and the Transnationalization of Actions Germany The Lufthansa hijacking marked a new stage for the RAF, henceforth more clearly geared to the ‘anti-imperialist front’. The RAF had always regarded West Germany as a puppet state, a cog in the imperialist wheel, and from the start had defined itself as part of a whole, namely the World Red Army (hence the ‘faction’ in their name). But now more isolated than ever, it sought alliances with its European counterparts with a view to building an ‘international organization of the proletarian struggle in the metropolises’, as explained in a January 1985 official communiqué signed jointly with Action directe.17 The two organizations also had in common that they signed their actions with the name of a ‘martyr’ of the world revolution (members of the Black Panthers, the BR, the anti-Apartheid struggle, etc.). Having no illusions about the working class nor even any interest in it, the two main German groups concentrated the whole of their actions on ‘anti-imperialism’ or solidarity with foreign movements; the B2J, for instance, called itself ‘the fifth column of the Third World’ and supported the Northern Irish Catholics. Only the RZ intervened on completely ‘domestic’ issues like the anti-nuclear struggle. They began their illegal activities by sabotaging Frankfurt transport and ITT subsidiaries before conducting two operations with the Palestinians. On 22 December 1975, they were part of the Carlos-led commando operation that took OPEC ministers hostage in Vienna. On 27 June 1976, an RZ-PFLP (Revolutionary Cells, and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) commando squad hijacked an Air France flight bound for Tel Aviv and made it land in Uganda. It demanded the release of the RAF leaders imprisoned in Germany and 40 prisoners held by Israel, including Kozo Okamoto*, who had survived the Lod massacre perpetrated by the Japanese Red Army in 1972. In Entebbe, while they were waiting for a response to their demands, the hijackers ‘sorted’ the 256 passengers according to whether they were Jewish or not Jewish, and promised to kill the ‘Zionists’. The wait lasted one week before Israeli special forces attacked. According to Hans-Joachim Klein*, the RZ’s mercenary activity allowed them to get weapons and money. These two international operations were however disputed within the group. Since 1986, the group had focused its activities on domestic politics, in particular by attacking 17 Communiqué commun, RAF – Action directe, 1985; see http://etoilerouge.chez-alice.fr/ docrevinter/allemagne10.html, last accessed 31 January 2018.

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and shooting administrative and political personnel in the legs, in protest against German policy towards foreigners. Together with their feminist branch, Rote Zora, the RZ was charged with having perpetrated more than 186 attacks between 1973 and 1995. France In March 1982, Action directe legally published a manifesto called ‘For a Communist Project’, which stated: There is no need to quibble about the yes or no of violence. […] Violence is here, self-legitimated, because it is the logical form of expression of those who are denigrated and scorned by capitalist modes of production. (Action directe, 1982, p. 13)

The group had been divided by debates since the summer of 1981; some favoured returning to legality, others to armed struggle. The group had just carried out its first assassination, that of Gabriel Chahine, a police informer who had infiltrated it, on 13 February. The crisis came to a head in August and the group split up into four factions, including two, a minority, that decided to continue the attacks: the Maoist ‘Lyon branch’, led by André Olivier*, who had come from the GP, and which concentrated on national issues such as unemployment or the far right (it carried out an attack on the far-right daily Minute in April 1985); and the focalist ‘Paris branch’, which included Rouillan*, Ménigon*, Cipriani, and Aubron* and favoured anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist actions. AD was officially dissolved by a government decree of 19 August 1982 while the rivalries between the branches engendered competitive violence between the two. Comparing actions previous to and after 1983 shows a stability in the number of actions but also their clear radicalization. Hold-ups for the purpose of financing the organization declined by half between the first and second periods. On the other hand, attacks with explosives, rockets, and machine guns rose to more than 42 per cent of the second generation’s actions, versus 37 per cent for the first (see Table 13). Assassinations or assassination attempts went from 1 to 4. Post-1983 was much deadlier, as it featured nine of the fourteen AD victims, i.e. 64 per cent, more than half of which were accidental during hold-ups, attacks, or shootings (see Table 14). Deprived of a base, AD turned to what remained of its European counterparts. These, having also become very weak, now held an ‘internationalist’ line. A monthly publication, L’Internationale, appeared in autumn 1983,

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Table 13 Types of actions committed by Action directe on French territory (19791987) (percentage) Type of action

AD pre-1983

AD post-1983

Total

Hold-ups Attacks Assassinations or assassination attempts Total actions

10.86 (N = 10) 36.95 (N = 34) 1.08 (N = 1)

4.34 (N = 4) 42.39 (N = 39) 4.34 (N = 4)

15.21 (N = 14) 79.34 (N = 73) 5.43 (N = 5)

48.9 (N = 45)

52.17 (N = 47)

100 (N = 92)

Source: Author’s calculations based on police data and militant sources. Some data may be missing as it could not be confirmed due to the rivalry between the two branches.

Table 14 Number of victims of Action directe on French territory (1979-1987)

Accidental, during hold-ups and attacks Accidental, during shoot-outs Assassinations Total

AD pre-1983

AD post-1983

Total

3

5

8

1

2

3

1 5

2 9

3 14

Source: Author’s calculations based on police data and militant sources. Some data may be missing, as it could not be confirmed due to the rivalry between the two branches.

publishing texts on the armed struggle in Europe. The previous year, the group had already carried out two actions with a Turkish organization against a Turkish far-right locale in February and against Israeli interests in March 1982. But these foreign collaborations intensified from 1983, initially with Italians of COLP (Comunisti organizzati per la liberazione proletaria, or Communists Organized for Proletarian Liberation), with LARF (Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Factions), and ASALA (Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia), two organizations with which it claimed joint responsibility for several bombings in Marseille on 30 September 1983, but especially with the German RAF. It was also connected with the Belgian CCC (Communist Combatant Cells). AD’s targets were institutions that it considered as symbolizing imperialism: the Inter-Allied Military Circle (September 1983), the Atlantic Institute of International Affairs (July 1984), an operation that launched the ‘Unity of revolutionaries in Western Europe’ offensive, the European Space Agency and the Western European Union in August, the International

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Monetary Fund in April 1985, Interpol in May 1986, the OECD in July 1986, etc. Responsibility for the first political assassination, of General René Audran on 25 January 1985, was claimed jointly with the RAF, which a few days later killed the CEO of the German aerospace industry, Ernst Zimmermann. The two groups had already led a joint attack in Bonn against the technical armament mission of the French embassy on 31 December 1984, another on 8 August 1985 against the US Air Base, and on 15 January 1985 they issued a joint statement calling for a ‘single political-military front of Western Europe’. Four other operations were coordinated: attacks against anti-terrorist agencies (Interpol by AD on 9 July, the Bundesgrenzschutz (Federal Border Guard) by the RAF on 11 August, and against the OECD by AD on 21 July 1986) while the RAF announced an operation against the Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation; assassinations of industrialists (AD’s attempt on Guy Brana, vice-president of the employers’ council CNPF on 15 April 1986, assassinations by the RAF of an executive of the engineering company Siemens on 9 July and of a senior official at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs on 10 October; and assassination by AD of the CEO of Renault, Georges Besse, on 17 November). AD also had strictly French targets: the Ministry of Industry (July 1984), the Ministry of Defence and the Socialist Party headquarters in August, and weapons companies (Messier-Hispano-Bugatti and Dassault in October 1984, Thomson and Air Liquide in July 1986). But they claimed to link French issues with a broader level, as declared by Régis Schleicher* in connection with the attack on the Ministry of Industry in July 1984: By attacking one of the pillars of NATO and by attacking French imperialism head-on, the organization Action directe has once again demonstrated the working class’s ability to strike imperialism at the appropriate time and its will to disarticulate the phase of transferring to the military field the political project of a global reorganization of production through imperialist war. By attacking the Ministry of Industry, the organization Action directe expresses its determination to oppose the massive layoffs in the automobile and the iron and steel industries, and the increasingly greater exploitation of millions of proletarians. (Action directe, 1997, p. 8)

These strictly French actions were often carried out by the Lyon-based group, as in September 1985 against the companies Péchiney and Renault, and the following month against Radio France, public television network Antenne 2, and the High Authority of Audio-visual Affairs, or, on 1 November 1986, against an airline company and the national immigration bureau as a reprisal

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against ‘government’s unfair policy with regard to immigrants’, explained the official statement of responsibility.18 André Olivier’s* personal records, discovered in his home when he was arrested in March 1986, would establish that the Lyon branch committed, between 1981 and 1986, twelve attacks and 21 armed robberies, twelve of which had been successful. On 21 February 1987, the historical leaders of the Paris branch (Jean-Marc Rouillan*, Nathalie Ménigon*, Régis Schleicher, Joëlle Aubron*, and George Cipriani) were in turn arrested after the ‘Pierre Overney commando’ (named after a GP activist who had been killed in Billancourt in 1972) assassinated Besse three months previously. Japan By calling for a world revolution, the Japanese Red Army chose the international field from the start. Its ‘Declaration of War’ of 3 September 1969, under the banner of ‘Marxism-Leninism-Maoism’, was addressed to the ‘bourgeoisie’ the world over: We publicly declare war against you, the bourgeois, and will swallow you up into the revolutionary war and sweep you off the world. We notify you, the bourgeois, that we will unite all the proletarian forces from around the world in the world party – the World Red Army – world revolutionary front and that we will destroy you in spite of your call for a general mobilization of all the world’s police: the US army, the NATO army, the Japanese-American coalition army or allied armies in Vietnam, and in spite of the mobilization of the army of the Warsaw Pact itself, transformed and degenerated by you. Your crimes in history are all too well known. Your history is smeared with blood. With World War I, with World War II, these wars of mutual plundering, you misled and mobilized our comrades, you made them kill each other, and, in the end, you filled your pockets well. You killed our comrades in your plundering of colonized countries. You enrolled our comrades by promising to share the spoils of this plundering, and you sent them to underdeveloped countries to kill other comrades. That’s not all. You also pushed our comrades to kill each other in wars of mutual plundering with the only purpose being to carve up colonies already plundered by you. […] You, the Japanese bourgeois! You can lie no more. With your slogan ‘economic and military reinforcement’, you never cease to make wars of plundering: the Russo-Japanese War, the 18 See http://le.raid.free.fr/action-direct.htm, last accessed 31 January 2018.

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Sino-Japanese War, World War I, World War II. You will neither enlist nor mislead us again. Not only will you no longer be able to, but we curse you, we hate you because of the past, and we are preparing to thwart your plans. Since you take the right to massacre our Vietnamese comrades according to your whims, we also have the right to massacre you according to our whims. Since you have the right to kill our Black Panther comrades and to crush the ghettos with your tanks, we have also the right to kill Nixon, Satō, Kissinger and De Gaulle, and to blow up the Pentagon, the Defence Agency, police headquarters, and your very own houses.19

The Japanese militants’ internationalism led the original members to turn to North Korea and those of the JRA to the Middle Eastern field. The URA, the only one of the groups to operate on Japanese soil, was, as discussed above, completely discredited and had fallen apart since the Asama-Sansō incident of February 1972. As for the militants who had carried out the first hijacking of a plane to North Korea (known as the Yodo group, from the name of the hijacked plane), they remained in North Korea and adopted ‘Kim Il-sung thought’. They would appear publicly on 1 May 1972. One would become a spy, and another would be arrested in Seoul and be accused of fostering an attack during the Olympic Games. All are suspected of having taken part in the explosion of Korean Airlines Flight 858 on 29 November 1987, killing 115 people. In fact, both Red Armies are assumed to have met on several occasions in Beijing and in Eastern Europe (Hungary and Romania). This leaves the JRA, which in the course of its long, violent career would not lead any attacks on Japanese soil. Founder member Fusako Shigenobu* went to Beirut in 1971 to establish contact with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and to shoot a documentary, Red Army – PFLP: Declaration of World War, before jointly authoring a booklet with the PFLP, The Arab Guerrillas and the World Red Army. The two groups worked together until the mid-1970s. After 1974, Shigenobu turned to Europe in order to be less financially dependent on the PFLP, where she established a network of about 50 militants for the purpose of kidnapping high-profile Japanese people. There, too, she met Carlos and began working with him. Of all the armed organizations under consideration here, the JRA is something of a special case. In contrast to its counterparts, who remained in the realm of traditional violence, the JRA was responsible for only one assassination, on 18 September 1986 against the French military attaché 19 The full text is available (in French) at http://etoilerouge.chez-alice.fr/docrevinter4/arj1. pdf, last accessed 31 January 2018.

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Christian Goutierre in Beirut. But the JRA also introduced two essential innovations, making it an undeniable precursor of a new kind of terrorist action. First, it invented the kamikaze action when it attacked Tel Aviv’s Lod Airport on 30 May 1972 with hand grenades and light machine guns, leaving 26 dead and 80 wounded. Of the three militants forming the lead commando group, two blew themselves up deliberately, and the goal was obviously to create the greatest possible number of victims. The action was probably set up to gain the trust of the PFLP, which was perplexed at the URA’s purge in the Asama-Sansō lodge. This action marked the beginning of the JRA’s pure, extreme violence by privileging the most deadly modi operandi: airplane hijackings (three), collective hostage-taking (three), and bombings, rocket attacks, car bombs, and mortar attacks (seven). Second, the JRA’s actions were de-contextualized; they all had a transnational dimension that went well beyond the occasional collaboration between the RAF and AD, or the RAF and the Italian BR-PCC (Brigate rosse per la costruzione del partito comunista combattente, or Red Brigades for the Construction of the Combatant Communist Party), for example. There are several elements to this decontextualization. As discussed above, almost no action was carried out on Japanese soil until 1988 (even including the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front, which was responsible for an attack on Mitsubishi in Tokyo on 20 August 1974, which left 8 dead and 300 wounded, and was connected to the JRA). Several attacks were carried out jointly or coordinated with other organizations. With the PFLP, the JRA headed the commando that hijacked a Japan Airlines (JAL) airplane over the Netherlands on 20 July 1973 and made it land in Libya. On 31 January 1974, it attacked a Shell refinery in Singapore and took five hostages (who were exchanged for ransom and safe conduct to Yemen) while the PFLP occupied the Japanese embassy in Kuwait. On 13 September 1974 came the turn of the French embassy in The Hague, where hostages were taken, while two days later Carlos threw two bombs into a Publicis drugstore in Paris, killing 2 and injuring 36, to support the JRA’s demands in the Netherlands. Responsibility for the operation was claimed in a statement sent to Reuters news agency from Damascus: French and Japanese imperialists, conspiring with the Zionists, who are the vanguard of the world imperialist structure, to deprive the Arab people of their resources, you should know what follows: [i]f you imprison our comrades, there is no doubt that we will take them from your hands. Even if you imprison ten or one hundred of our comrades, we will respond a hundredfold with our reprisals. As long as you continue your dirty

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repression against our comrades and our friends, we will organize other reprisals against you. Such is our law for the struggle and the spirit of the revolution. (Quoted in Prazan, 2002, p. 145)

The hostages were freed in exchange for the release of a member of the JRA imprisoned since July, a $ 300,000 ransom, and a plane to allow the militants to escape to South Yemen, then Syria. There is one further element to the JRA’s innovative approach: the JRA militants found refuge in a Middle Eastern country while others, imprisoned, were freed under an agreed exchange of prisoners also in the Middle East (such as in May 1985 for Kozo Okamoto*, the survivor of the 1972 Lod Airport operation, who would then serve a three-year prison sentence in Lebanon between 1997 and 2000 for document forgery, before being granted political asylum there). In September 1977, acting on its own, the JRA hijacked a Japan Airlines plane and forced it to land in Dhaka, Bangladesh; the Japanese government yielded to the JRA’s demands, releasing six imprisoned militants (three of whom would refuse to go back to the JRA) and handing over a $ 6 million ransom. The group then went into a period of self-interrogation: Was it still one of the armed branches of the world revolution or had it become a PFLP back-up force? No other action was then claimed by the JRA until 1986. In an interview in the early 1980s, Shigenobu* announced that the JRA had ‘temporarily give[n] up absolute terror’ after having failed to gain sympathy and new recruits (in Baudelaire, 2011). Several intelligence services suspected the JRA of having contacts, if not ties, with armed groups in various places of the planet (in Southeast Asia in July 1980, with the guerrillas in Kashmir in 1981, with the Colombian M-19 in 1982, etc.). The JRA settled in Libya in the 1980s and in Syria after 1989. It was suspected of having taken part in the Tupac Amaru’s hostage-taking in the Japanese embassy in Lima on 18 December 1996 and of having links with Hezbollah. The group went back to its activities in May 1986 under the name Anti-Imperialist International Brigade when it fired mortar rounds at the Japanese, Canadian, and United States embassies in Jakarta, Indonesia. An identical operation was launched in June 1987 against the United States and British embassies in Rome. On 14 April 1988, the JRA bombed a US military recreational club in Naples, killing five. Two days earlier, one of its militants was arrested in the United States carrying explosives and suspected of planning a similar attack on US soil. The JRA did not survive the end of the Cold War, and the Oslo Accords between the Palestinians and Israelis; neither Syria nor Libya wished to continue to openly shelter groups of this kind. In Lebanon, Fusako Shigenobu*

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founded the Kakumeito (Revolutionary People’s Party) in 1991 as a legal party; in fact, its Japanese branch, which is estimated to have had 400 sympathizers, was planning to sabotage military objectives and published a manifesto of urban guerrilla warfare intended for its militants. In addition, the same year, the JRA issued a 23-page document, ‘The Anti-imperialist and Anti-monopoly People’s Revolution’.20 After having recalled the ties that after World War II, according to the JRA, had been established between the United States and ‘Japanese imperialism’ to turn the country into a ‘fortress of anti-communism and counter-revolution in Asia’, then denounced the ‘monopoly capital’ that controlled the state, the document clearly called for a socialist revolution under the umbrella of the JRA ‘party’, united around the ‘working class’, which they saw as ‘70 per cent of the working population’ undergoing ‘a 300 per cent exploitation rate’. The call clearly marked the group’s ambition to be anchored, from then on, in the country and its discovery of the ‘working class’. But the goal remained the same: The nature of the revolution is to be an anti-monopoly and anti-US people’s revolution against monopoly capital and its alliance with US imperialism. The people, by presenting a united front, elevate this revolution to its higher, socialist stage through the fullest exercise of democracy, knowing that this revolution is a link in the chain of world proletarian revolution.21

20 The full text is available (in French) at http://etoilerouge.chez-alice.fr/docrevinter2/ja.pdf, last accessed 31 January 2018. 21 Ibid.

6

The End of a Cycle

The end of a cycle of protest does not automatically mean the end of the actions committed by the groups that had been directly or indirectly a part of it. All the groups prolonged it, sometimes quite extensively, like the Red Army Faction and the Japanese Red Army, which disbanded in 1998 and 2001, respectively. The BR-PCC (Brigate rosse per la costruzione del partito comunista combattente, or Red Brigades for the Construction of the Combatant Communist Party) remained, 20 years after the founders of the Red Brigades had declared their history closed, and continued to perpetrate attacks such as the assassinations in 1999 of Massimo D’Antona, a law professor and advisor to the Ministry of Labour, and in 2002 of Marco Biagi, also a law professor and economic advisor to Silvio Berlusconi’s government. Of all the far-left armed organizations, only the Weather Underground Organization chose its own end, the others disappearing as a consequence of the arrests of their members.

Anti-Terrorist Policies The United States States initially react to protest by reinforcing police and intelligence staff. The 1968 Columbia University occupation gave the FBI the measure of the dangerousness of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). A congressional inquiry was opened the following year, and the FBI’s COINTELPRO (an acronym for Counter Intelligence Program), which had been reactivated in 1967 against the Black Panthers, was enlarged. Its role had remained unchanged since its institution in 1956 to fight against the Communist Party. Its goals were threefold: to disrupt the Black Panthers by spreading false rumours about it and by infiltrating it to make trouble; to discredit it through a propaganda campaign, notably intended to exaggerate the threat it posed; and to destroy it, by force if necessary. Between 1968 and 1973, 28 Black Panthers were simply assassinated. Japan Japan expanded its special riot unit, Kidotai, by 50 per cent to 3137 officers in 1969, and to 5200 (plus a 4200-man reserve) in 1971. At the time, the country had a police force of about 177,000, that is, 1 per 593 citizens (versus

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1 per 572 in the United States and 1 per 407 in West Germany) (Farrell, 1990, pp. 180-182). The threat disappeared from Japanese soil when the United Red Army was dismantled in February 1972. The country would have to wait for the geopolitical upheavals of the end of the century to bring down the JRA, whose members, having lost all foreign support, would be progressively arrested from 1995 onwards (in Romania, in Peru, in Nepal, and in Lebanon, which in 2000 would expel four members of Sekigun). Fusako Shigenobu* was arrested in Osaka in November 2000, and she officially dissolved the group the following year, when her trial began. She was handed a 20-year prison sentence in 2006. Eight other militants were jailed in Japan and two in the United States for JRA membership. Some are still being sought. France The final blow would also be brutal in France. In March 1986, the Lyon branch was decapitated. The AD founders’ arrest on 21 February 1987 swept away an organization that was highly personalized around Jean-Marc Rouillan*, as well as around the two chief couples, Jean-Marc Rouillan and Nathalie Ménigon* and – until they separated – Régis Schleicher* and Joëlle Aubron*. By 1989, 22 of the organization’s 25 known members were behind bars, the police estimating that there were about 180 potential activists. Less than 50 were closely surveyed (Dartnell, 1995, p. 173). In December 1987, the AD prisoners started a hunger strike to protest their solitary confinement, to demand that they be grouped together, and to be recognized as political prisoners. The hunger strike lasted four months. In January 1989, they were sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole before eighteen years had passed. Following a new hunger strike from 20 April to 21 July, they were granted normal detention conditions, but two years of solitary confinement had produced permanent physical damage among many of them. Germany Germany and Italy would have a much harder time bringing revolutionary violence to an end. They finally managed by means of emergency legislation and exceptional practices condemned several times by Amnesty International. In January 1972, West Germany adopted the Berufsverbote, which barred sympathizers of ‘organizations undermining fundamental order’ from public office; 100,000 people were subject to checking for their political convictions. Police rights were extended with regard to searching vehicles and homes, and to their use of weapons.

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The RAF was affected by a series of arrests in June 1972, including those of Baader*, Meinhof*, and Ensslin*, who were immediately placed in solitary confinement. Their detention conditions – in acoustically insulated, permanently lit cells with no openings – were regarded as ‘white torture’ based on sensory deprivation. The prisoners went on several hunger strikes in January and in May 1973, then from September 1974 to February 1975, before their demand to be placed in ordinary detention conditions were met. A fourth 53-day hunger strike caused the death of Holger Meins in November 1974. As previously discussed, prison became the centre of the conflict opposing RAF and the German state, which in December 1974 took several measures to restrict the rights of defence. The law of 1 January 1975 authorized the exclusion of defence lawyers, for instance, and in May 1975, the main RAF leaders stood trial without access to counsel. Their exhaustion from their detention conditions was such that they could only be in court two or three hours a day. A few days later, defence lawyers Klaus Croissant and Hans Christian Strobele were arrested, triggering an intense campaign inside the country and outside, particularly in France with Sartre’s support. In all, between 1975 and 1978, nearly 30 lawsuits were filed against lawyers. The suspicious deaths of the RAF leaders between 1976 and 1977 – which would come under the scrutiny of international investigation commissions – put a stop to the group’s activities until the mid-1980s. A great many secondgeneration activists were arrested in former East Germany in June 1990. Italy In Italy, emergency legislation was further expanded. The Reale Act of May 1975 increased police powers, and the executive order of 21 March 1978 increased the length of prison sentences, removed time limits on phonetapping authorizations, made it mandatory for landlords to report their tenants’ names within 48 hours, and took initial measures in favour of the ‘repentants’ (see below). The Cossiga executive order of 15 December 1979 militarized the anti-terrorist fight, made sentences even worse, introduced ‘terrorism’ as an offence and replaced ‘armed group’ with ‘military association with use of weapons for political ends’, and adopted new measures for the ‘repentants’. The second Cossiga Act of 6 February 1980 increased the duration of custody. This all led to the arrest of one-quarter of the 4087 far-left prisoners in 1980, and another quarter two years later. The leaders of AutOp (Autonomia operaia, or Workers’ Autonomy), including Toni Negri* and Oreste Scalzone, were arrested on 7 April 1979, and the BR leader Mario Moretti* was arrested in 1981. In January 1982, the release of NATO general

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James Lee Dozier held by the BR-PG (Brigate rosse-Partito guerriglia del proletariato metropolitano, or Red Brigades-Guerrilla Party) was followed by the second dismantling of the BR after three BR members spoke under torture, for which five police officers would be sentenced. Though this repressive policy dealt some very hard blows against the armed groups, it was unable to stop new members from joining. It also considerably inflated the prison population, and clogged up the country’s legal proceedings. At the symbolic level, a democratic state cannot be satisfied in the medium term with purely coercive solutions to a problem that is inherently and ultimately political. For this reason, two new legal entities were subsequently introduced to indicate the start of ‘reconciliation’: those of ‘repentants’ and the ‘dissociated’. With the law of 29 May 1982, the Italian state took the initiative of creating the legal entity of ‘repentant’. In exchange for providing information on their organization, repentants were handed highly reduced sentences, and even, in some cases, ‘forgotten’ sentences. Indeed, this is how the BR Genoa column fell, as a direct result of the confessions of a Turin leader, Patrizio Peci. The legal entity of the ‘dissociated’ arose from the very ranks of the protest movement, on the initiative of Toni Negri. In contrast to ‘repentants’, the ‘dissociated’ would not explicitly denounce their former comrades; instead, they would make a deal for a shorter sentence by admitting all the offences with which they were charged, and committing to give up the use of violence as a means of political struggle. Out of the 429 ‘red prisoners’ in 1988, 161 were deemed ‘irreducible’, 170 ‘dissociated’, 34 ‘repentants’, and 64 were not classified (Sommier, 1998, p. 126). The initiative also had the effect of dividing the prison community. Moreover, the founding ‘dissociation’ text, ‘Terrorismus? Nein, danke’, published by Negri in March 1981, did not hide the fact that the initiative was directed against the BR, and was based a dichotomy of political prisoners: between the ‘terrorists’ and the others, who were the victims of the ‘Stalinism’ of the former (reproduced in Negri 1985, p. 117). The goal of ‘beating terrorism’ was explicitly declared. In this way, part of the deviant community expressed its refusal of the ‘terrorist’ label by affixing it to the other part, and presenting itself as best capable of fighting it. The very formulation of the letter of dissociation is revealing of the process of ‘detachment’ that the act supposes: I […] hereby state to have definitely left any organization or any movement of a terrorist or subversive nature; to be willing to recognize activities effectively accomplished with a terrorist and subversive goal; to repudiate violence as a method of political struggle; to wish to submit my own

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behaviour for examination by the proper authorities, by objectively and unambiguously holding them as incompatible with the maintenance of any sort of associative tie of a terrorist or subversive nature; to be consequently dissociated from terrorism in the sense of Article 1. (Franceschini, Buffa, and Giustolisi, 1988)

A Farewell to Arms Italy It is legitimate to think that the Italian groups’ defeat was more political than military. Repression certainly struck hard; its initial effect was to favour a process of concentration around the organizations that were considered to be most resilient: PL (Prima linea), and especially the BR. The disappearance of the latter was however the result of a process of implosion, caused by divergent views over the response to these anti-terrorist policies. PL was the first, as early as 1980, to feel the consequences of the cooperation with the police of several ‘repentants’ (the existence of whom pre-dated their legal formalization); PL responded by assassinating its ‘traitors’. This led to an internal crisis, which resulted in departures, especially to the BR. PL dissolved itself in the spring of the following year. In 1983-1984, the imprisoned militants would engage in a debate on ‘dissociation’, which they would almost all end up requesting. It was at this time also that the BR underwent an internal process of exclusions and splintering. The kidnapping of Aldo Moro and its failure, which led to his assassination, raised the question of what strategy to follow: What should be done after such an operation? The inf lux of militants from other groups, explained variously by the BR’s aura or the repression experienced by these groups, brought other, logistical difficulties. Divergences were initially expressed in the Milanese column and ended in its autonomization under the name of BR-Walter Alasia Column. From then on, every operation would also be an occasion for voluntary departure: that of the BR-PG in September 1981, which came about essentially from the Prison Front; that of the Neapolitan column, Colonna 2 agosto (named after the violent confrontations that had opposed Porto Marghera port workers and the police in 1970); and that of the Venetians, in December. In October 1981, to avoid quarrels over names, most groups adopted the name Brigate rosse per la costruzione del partito comunista combattente, or Red Brigades for the Construction

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Figure 3 Red Brigades Scissions

Scission or Exclusion BR 1970

Walter Alasia Column

BR-Party of the Guerrilla

BR-Combatant Communist Party

2nd of August Column

November 1980 February 1983

September 1981 December 1982

October1981 October 1988

December 1981 March 1982

Union of Communist Combatants October 1985 June 1987

of the Combatant Communist Party (BR-PCC). After the failure of the kidnapping operation of NATO general James Lee Dozier, held captive from 17 December 1981 to 28 January 1982, the BR-PCC decided to go into ‘strategic retreat’, which became a point of strategic divergence between two groups. This led to a splintering in October 1985, giving rise to the Brigate rosse-Unione dei comunisti combattenti, or Red Brigades-Union of Combatant Communists (BR-UdCC). Obviously, this process of successive fragmentations considerably weakened the organizations, whose members were dwindling, as shown in Table 15. Each new group would rapidly disappear following arrests: the Partito guerriglia died out in December 1982, the Alasia Column in February 1983, and UdCC in the spring of 1987, barely two years after its foundation. In fact, the BR’s break-up mostly followed the centripetal autonomization logics of the various columns, which conferred on the groups a particular territorial and correlatively social marking (see Tables 16 and 17). The irreversible decline of the BR came with an overall evaluation of their past made by their historical leaders. In February 1987, some prisoners,

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Table 15 Number of militants imprisoned for membership in the various BRs Number of militants

BR

BR Walter Alasia

BR-Partito guerriglia

BR-PCC

BR-UdCC

1337

911

113

147

93

73

Source: Progetto memoria, 1994

Table 16 Regions in which BR members were charged (percentage) Number of militants

BR

BR Walter Alasia

BR-Partito guerriglia

BR-PCC

BR-UdCC

Lazio Piedmont Lombardy Ligury Tuscany Veneto Campania Abroad Other Total

16.4 159 14.7 14.6 10.8 12.3 0.4 1.6 13.1 99.8

– 2.7 96.5 – – – – 0.9 – 100.1

15 21.3 1.4 – 49.6 – 2.7 0.7 10.3 101

65.6 3.2 4.3 2.1 11.8 9.7 – 3.2 – 99.9

37 4.1 1.4 11 11 12.3 5.5 12.3 5.5 100.1

Source: Progetto memoria, 1994

including Curcio* and Moretti*, launched a ‘campaign for freedom’ aimed at being granted clemency and declaring the ‘end of the political cycle of the armed struggle’: Moving on means taking note of the non-repetitiveness of past experience […]. This means, therefore, recognizing a discontinuity between this experience and our present. To persist in imagining the present as an unshakeable repetition of the past is in fact only a symptom of a rather alarming metaphysical sclerosis among those who do not intend to give up fighting for the transformation of the current forms of social relations, for communism. (Sommier, 1988, p. 138)

Only a few were opposed to the text; in response, they assassinated Christian Democrat senator Roberto Ruffilli on 16 April 1988. The action triggered a new wave of repression, resulting in multiple arrests, making the autumn of 1988 the swan song of what remained of the BR.

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Table 17 Italian militants’ profession (percentage) Profession

Total

BR

BR Alasia

BR Guerriglia

BR-PCC BRUdCC

NAP

PL

Small business owners or artisans Unemployed or holding insecure jobs Extra-legal Salaried employees Teachers or professors Workers Selfemployed professionals Tertiary sector Students Other Missing data Total

3.9

4

0.9

0.7

5.4

8.2

3

3.8

5.6

3.5

1.8

2.7

7.5

8.2

3

7.4

1.5 7.3

1.3 8.9

– 13.3

2.7 8.2

– 10.8

– 8.2

32.3 9.2

0.2 6.7

4.3

3.9

5.3

1.4

2.1

–

1.5

4.3

16 3.7

23.5 3.8

44.2 1.8

8.8 1.4

11.8 –

12.3 1.4

4.6 1.5

18.1 2.6

4.6 16 5.2 31.9 100 N = 4087

5.8 12.2 6.5 26.4 99.8 N = 911

8 3.5 1.8 19.5 100.1 N = 113

4.1 12.9 4.2 53 100.1 N = 147

12.9 14 4.2 31.1 99.8 N = 93

9.6 9.6 6.8 35.6 99.9 N = 73

1.5 18.5 1.5 23.1 99.7 N = 65

4.4 18.3 4.5 29.6 99.9 N = 923

Source: Progetto memoria, 1994

In an interview by correspondence when he was still permanently imprisoned, Curcio* wrote on 16 October 1988: We are not asking to be pardoned. We are not dissociated from our history. We continue, in forms compatible with our condition, to fight so that the historical truth on the social conflict of the 1970s is not buried in silence behind prison walls and bars or under the difficult conditions of exile. (Sommier, 1988, p. 180)

This initiative was late in coming, he explained (even while saying he had duly noted ‘the exhaustion of the armed experience’ in the early 1980s), because prison conditions had made it impossible, until the ‘Moro 3’ trial of February 1987, to meet the other detained militants and therefore to start a discussion with them:

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There was a heavy defeat. A defeat that cut the roots of the movement that starting in the 1960s fought for radical social change. The main figure of this movement, the mass worker, ended its history in 1980 [the year of the defeat of a very long Fiat workers’ struggle opposing the company’s reorganization, which would lay off 20,000 workers]. (Sommier 1988, p. 180)

Germany In a document dated 18 March 1998 and titled ‘Why We Are Stopping’, the imprisoned RAF militants announced, in turn, the end of their history: Nearly 28 years ago, on 14 May 1970, the RAF was born in an action of liberation: today we terminate this project. Urban guerrilla warfare in the form of the RAF is now part of history […]. We take responsibility for this history. The RAF was a minority’s revolutionary attempt – in the face of the tendency of this society – to contribute to the reversal of capitalist relations. We are glad to have been part of this attempt. The end of this project shows that we were not able to make it along this path. But this says nothing against the need and legitimacy of our revolt […]. The RAF led the struggle against a state that, after liberation from Nazi fascism, had never broken with its National-Socialist past. The armed struggle was a rebellion against authoritarian social relations, against isolation and competition. It was a rebellion for another social and cultural reality.22

The cause of their failure was attributed to ‘a strategic error, which was to not have set up, alongside the armed, illegal organization, a political-social organization’.23 France The imprisoned Action directe militants did not make a collective statement but also declared the armed struggle over, with some (such as Nathalie Ménigon* and, after a time lag and some polemics, Régis Schleicher*) recognizing its failure. On 29 February 2004, Ménigon declared: 22 ‘Fraction Armée Rouge: Pourquoi nous arrêtons’, http://lesmaterialistes.com/fractionarmee-rouge-pourquoi-nous-arretons-1998, last accessed 31 January 2018. 23 Ibid.

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The context in which we fought has passed. It is not up to us to start out again in this kind of history. For us, the adventure of the armed struggle is finished. It was an enthralling adventure and we have no regrets. This is what annoys them. They would like us to disavow ourselves. But our discourse will not change.24

The latter responded on 17 March: Because we were the result and continuity of revolutionary acting in this country, because we are potentially the bridge between yesterday and today, there is a strategic stake in using us as a vector of dissuasion, not only by ‘exhibiting’ us in our shrouds of concrete and steel, but also by ‘turning us around’ and making us admit that yes, it was ‘a beautiful adventure’, but that ‘there are no more reasons to fight’ and that ‘all is finished’. Obviously, we, who by the force of repression are held far from the reality of the exploited and from the heart of the struggles, are not able to make a statement on ‘what it would be advisable to do’. We do not have, objectively, the capacity nor the means to do so. On the other hand, save for abdicating our conscience, save for becoming mindless puppets in the hands of a security-driven political project aiming to contain and repress all the emancipating catalysts running through the social fabric today, it is our duty to refuse the infamous bargain of disavowal in exchange for our release. This has been duly noted.25

In an interview by correspondence from Clairvaux high security prison, published in the daily Libération in October 2005, Schleicher, though still claiming to be a ‘communist militant’, reached the same conclusion as Ménigon the previous year: Twenty years later, we have no choice but to note that the hypothesis we were defending failed. Unless afflicted by mental clouding, intellectual blindness, and the inability to understand the real movement of things, it is advisable to accept that the revolutionary movement and the social movement showed us to be wrong. So was fighting, or fighting the way 24 Cited in Laurent Wolf, ‘Action directe, Brigades rouges, le souvenir des années de plomb refait surface en France’, Le Temps, 3 March 2004, https://www.letemps.ch/monde/action-directebrigades-rouges-souvenir-annees-plomb-refait-surface-france, last accessed 28 November 2018. 25 Schleicher, letter from Clairvaux, 17 March 2004, full text at http://prison.eu.org/spip. php?article4541, last accessed 31 January 2018.

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we and thousands of others fought, an aberration, ‘nonsensical’? In terms of ethics, one is always right to wish to fight injustice and oppression, destitution. In addition, our commitment was a function of the knowledge, the experience, and the legacy that were those of the revolutionary movement then. Some asserted that power grows out of the barrel of a gun. I adhered to this idea. Others, who professed this, left us to take responsibility for it. That being said, it is an undeniable fact that our practice had terrible consequences. On both sides, death, the weight of absence, broken existences, the suffering of loved ones. The human toll is heavy. In any case, responsibility for the deaths is ours and in ‘ours’ there is also mine.26

To the journalist’s question about how he now regarded the Avenue Trudaine shooting of 31 May 1983, which ended with the death of two police officers and for which Schleicher* was sentenced to life imprisonment, he answered: Two men died. The only ones who remember are their loved ones. Undoubtedly too ‘anonymous’, not ‘noble’ enough for the system that had commissioned them to be troubled by their deaths 20 years later. One of my comrades was killed in rather similar conditions. No one was moved, except his loved ones. In both cases, these are chance encounters between two groups of armed persons, each of which, wrongly or rightly, thinks that it represents legitimacy and what’s right. When weapons are pulled, morals, justice, or anything else are no longer the issue. Those who survive are those with the best reflexes and some luck. It’s terrible, but that’s how it is.27

In fact, the armed groups’ self-dissolution declarations, when there were any, did no more than effectively formalize the prior dissolution of militant ties. In high-risk commitment, there is no passive or ordinary defection; not, as is sometimes said, because departure is punished by death (except in the case of the Japanese United Red Army), but because after a certain level of involvement, going back appears, if not impossible, at least extremely costly in terms of the individual’s biographical consequences. Excluding the case of the ‘repentants’, we can see that attachment to the cause and/or the group is maintained, undoubtedly due to the importance of the emotional bonds within the group; for reasons of clandestinity, these bonds are not offset by 26 ‘L’hypothèse que nous défendions a failli’, Libération, 22 October 2005. 27 Ibid.

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relations outside the group that might be able to weaken or counteract them. In a situation of repression, the underground militant loses touch with those alternate spheres of life that could compete with or counterbalance their choices, thus considerably reducing their potential for cognitive dissonance. Demobilization was therefore played out ‘upstream’, in the radical reduction of the number of activists willing to go down the path of armed struggle – out of fear, perhaps, of losing control and of overcommitment for some, or for others because they hoped for non-violent conflict resolution offered by the prospects of political change. For those who had chosen armed struggle, their ‘career’ was interrupted by three circumstances: by imprisonment; by exile, for those who escaped arrest (in Italy, this was also the case for the least sought, low-level group members); and by drug addiction. Amongst underground militants, loyalty was maintained despite a progressive loss of feeling that their action was effective. In the growth period of the cycle of protest, even where social support is very limited, this support enables activists to resist pressure and avoid burnout; group solidity enables members to ignore the cognitive dissonance revealed by the absence of new entrants, reflecting the consequent failure of group propaganda. But the compensations of activism decline with the erosion of solidarity, while the appearance of internal divergences both affects the organization’s cohesion and produces the break-up of emotional ties; collective identification within the group thus declines, as is well illustrated by the trajectory of the BR from the early 1980s. The labelling effects of moving militants from ‘revolutionaries’ to ‘terrorists’ also destroy established certainties, as they also involve the rejection of the notion of the militant’s sacrifice for an ideology of salvation (which, moreover, is not producing the anticipated results). Nonetheless, in high-risk commitment, doubts are seldom the antechamber of voluntary departure, and arrest can be to some extent welcomed with relief by militants worn out by years of clandestinity. Indeed, although repression increases the cost of commitment, it does not necessarily induce demobilization, as it makes costs of withdrawal appear even higher. This is why it is necessary to examine the ‘exit offers’ or ‘possible laterals’, to use Fillieule’s term, that are available for ‘post-commitment’ (2005a, p. 28). By comparing the careers of ultra-left militants in France and in Italy, we can see that the relative benevolence offered to French activists (both in legal terms and in terms of subsequent available professional opportunities) was a key factor enabling their return to ordinary life, and in halting the radicalization processes that were current in Italy at that time (Sommier, 1998).

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The case of the Weather Underground Organization also reinforces this point. The WUO continued its actions until the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, even though many had already stopped believing in them for two years; from then on, the organization sank into internal quarrels. A split followed in 1977 between those who gave up their commitment (the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee), and about 20 members of the May 19th Communist Organization, who maintained it. In 1980-1981, together with the Black Liberation Army (BLA, the armed wing of the Black Panthers) and the Republic of New Africa, the May 19th Communist Organization set up the Revolutionary Armed Task Force, which would make one attempt at armed robbery (against a Brink’s armoured security van in October 1981, in which two police officers and a security guard were killed in a shoot-out). Of all the former WUO members to be arrested, only David Gilbert is still in prison, serving a 75-year prison sentence given to him in 1983 for his role in the Brink’s attack. From 1981, the other began progressively to turn themselves in, but were not given prison sentences because of the FBI’s many violations in their indictment. Some, like founding couple Bernardine Dohrn* and Bill Ayers*, had children. Some chose to continue fighting a losing battle, demonstrating their continued adherence to the role of professional revolutionary; yet the social conditions of the surrender of most militants ensured that they would avoid years of incarceration. Many have been able to return to an almost ordinary existence, leading stable and rewarding lives.

7

Conclusion to Part 1

This journey through the history of the groups that pursued an ideological commitment born in the 1960s to engage in armed struggle shows the considerable variety of their trajectories, despite initial similarities. Perhaps the most prominent particularity is provided by the Italian case, whose scale was unique, even compared to Germany. In 1989, nearly 400 far-left militants in Italy were in jail (including 60 with life sentences), compared to 40 in West Germany in 1992. Nearly 5000 people in Italy were detained for crimes of ‘subversion’, 20,000 were charged, and a thousand were on the run in 1980, numbers which dwarf the few dozen militants of the groups in the other countries. The JRA is singular from the very different point of view of strategy. The fact that the JRA undertook violent action is not in itself a distinguishing feature, especially as the use and representation of violence varied across time and space. However, the extreme left’s deployment of revolutionary violence was in general governed by a set of rules, which the Japanese breached from the start, in two ways: by immediately deterritorializing their actions, and by their modus operandi, where the target was unconnected to the group’s military objectives. We can thus regard the JRA as a forerunner (along with the PFLP branch of the PLO, with which it had such close links) of a radically new kind of strategy that distinguishes it from its apparent counterparts. Thus, the evolution of the JRA towards a sectarian and decontextualized mode of action (which the group sought to compensate for through the spectacular nature of its actions) anticipated the ‘third age of violence’ of the twentieth century, which began symbolically with the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989. The end of the bipolar world order brought about deep transformations in this area: the abandonment of the reference to Marxism, which had legitimated the use of violence; and the disappearance of material support (both financial and logistical) which had been provided to armed groups by each bloc, seeking to use them to serve their power games. A new rhetoric has appeared, taking the path of identity-based mobilizations, stressing ‘traditional’ values and opposed to Western modernity. This includes fundamentalist groups from all the monotheist religions, groups which resist the separation of political space from religious space: radical Islam, of course, but also a Protestant fundamentalism flirting in the United States with a far-right hostile to federal power. These groups have in common a properly revolutionary ideology that does not consider their action to be restrained by moral boundaries. But this violence is radically different from the violence that we have discussed here.

Part 2 Civil Disobedience Graeme Hayes and Sylvie Ollitrault

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Introduction to Part 2: Civil Disobedience in Perspective

At around 6 p.m. on Thursday 1 December 1955, Rosa Parks boarded a National City Lines bus in Court Square, Montgomery, Alabama. State law mandated racial segregation on all public transportation: on buses, the front rows were reserved exclusively for Whites; black passengers were routinely required to pay their fare at the front of the bus, but could only board at the back, where they frequently had to stand behind empty rows of seats. Parks sat down with three other black passengers in the fifth row, at the front of the seats reserved for blacks; but as the bus began to fill with Whites, the driver told the passengers in Parks’s row to move, so that all the white passengers could sit down. Reluctantly, three of the four moved; Parks refused. She later described the ensuing conversation with the bus driver: When he saw me still sitting, he asked if I was going to stand up, and I said ‘No, I’m not.’ And he said, ‘Well, if you don’t stand up, I’m going to have to call the police and have you arrested.’ I said, ‘You may do that.’ (Quoted in Williams, 1987, p. 66)

Parks was arrested under city and state segregation laws, and bailed to appear in court the following Monday, 5 December. The racial segregation practised by Montgomery City Lines had for some time been strongly opposed by local black organizations, including the Women’s Political Council, whose president, Jo Ann Robinson, taught English at the black-only Alabama State College. Following Parks’s arrest, Robinson spent the night at the College, making thousands of copies of a tract calling for a boycott of the buses: the following day, she and her students distributed 35,000 copies of the call across Montgomery. On Sunday, black churches relayed the call, whilst the local newspaper, the Montgomery Advertiser, carried it on the front page. In court, Parks was found guilty of breaking the segregation laws, handed a suspended prison sentence, and fined $ 10 (plus another $ 4 in court fees). But the boycott was exceptionally successful: almost the entire local black community participated. In the afternoon, the Montgomery Improvement Association was established to coordinate the continuation of the boycott; Martin Luther King, Jr., a young minister recently appointed to the city’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, was nominated president.

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Originally planned to last one day only, the boycott was eventually to run for thirteen months, in spite of increasing repression from city hall, the state police, and Montgomery’s white population. The White Citizens’ Councils (a network of local groups formed across the Southern states of the US in opposition to the Supreme Court’s May 1954 decision to desegregate public schools) saw their membership grow from 800 to 75,000 within a year; 13,000 to 14,000 members were from Montgomery alone (McAdam, 1982, pp. 142-145). Ninety boycott leaders were indicted by a grand jury on charges of conspiracy to boycott (though King alone was tried, and fined); the houses of King and E. D. Nixon, president of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), were firebombed (as would be the home of Baptist minister and co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Ralph D. Abernathy, after the end of the boycott). Yet the boycott ended in success: blacks began to ride the buses again on 21 December 1956, following a Supreme Court ruling that segregation on buses was unconstitutional. In its wake, the boycott spread rapidly across the South, from Birmingham to Atlanta, Chattanooga, New Orleans, Tallahassee, and Mobile. The Call to Boycott Montgomery City Lines28 This is for Monday, December 5, 1955. Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown into jail because she refused to get up out off her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down. It is the second time since the Claudette Colbert case that a Negro woman has been arrested for the same thing. This has to be stopped. Negroes have rights, too, for if Negroes did not ride the buses, they could not operate. Three fourths of the riders are Negroes, yet we are arrested, or have to stand over empty seats. If we do not do something to stop these arrests, they will continue. The next time it may be you, or your daughter, or mother. This woman’s case will come up on Monday. We are, therefore, asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial. Don’t ride the buses to work, to town, to school, or anywhere on Monday. You can afford to stay out of school for one day if you have no other way to go except by bus. You can also afford to stay out of town for one day. If you work, take a cab, or walk. But please, children and grown-ups, don’t ride the bus at all on 28 The text should read Colvin, not Colbert.

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Monday. Please stay off of all buses Monday. (Reproduced in Williams, 1987, p. 68)

In 1955, non-violent direct action tactics were already well established in the civil rights movement’s repertoire; for fifteen years or so, they had been central to the actions carried out by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), an organization that was heavily influenced by Quaker thought. Yet the Montgomery bus boycott was a ‘transformative event’, a moment of rupture and relaunch in the US civil rights movement (Morris, 2000, p. 452; McAdam and Sewell, 2001, p. 111). Parks’s initiative, and the actions which followed it, introduced two new dimensions to these tactics. First, the actions ought to contest the legitimacy of state legislation on segregation by appealing to precedent in place at the federal level: as noted above, the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education the preceding year had ruled the doctrine of separate but equal unconstitutional. Second, the massive and sustained support for the boycott demonstrated the unity and strength of the South’s black population, but also the determination and organizing capacity of black organizations. The passing of the Civil Rights Act, in 1964, and the Voting Rights Act, in 1965, formally marked the successful end of the struggle for black citizenship rights; but the US civil rights campaign developed forms of action which continue to mark our contemporary grammar of protest: sit-ins, Freedom Rides, electoral registration campaigns, non-violent resistance to police brutality, and so on. Why begin this discussion of civil disobedience with the widely known story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott? In many ways, this action brings forward the themes which we will return to and develop in our discussion of civil disobedience: the tensions between individual and collective action; between violence and non-violence; between conscience and politics; between lawful and unlawful action; between resistance and disobedience; between cultural specificity and global audience; between local context and global diffusion. Perhaps the most theoretically determined of all modes of protest action, civil disobedience is never free of the material circumstances in which it develops; rather, it is located in the cultural, relational, and material circumstances of action, in which collective social actors – protest movements, countermovements, public institutions, political and economic elites, media organizations – seek to define the nature of struggle, establish and reinforce asymmetries of power and legitimacy, and exploit the weaknesses of their adversaries. The study of civil disobedience thus confronts us with crucial questions about the nature of collective action, and does so across disciplines,

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particularly law, political theory, philosophy, and sociology. Each discipline adopts a particular perspective. In philosophy, discussion of civil disobedience is predominantly understood in terms of the ethics and legitimacy of the individual subject’s right to revolt; as Quill (2009, pp. 25-38) underlines, the tensions between conscience and consent, individual moral agency and collective social duty, are central to the dilemma of Sophocles’ Antigone, the political thought of Plato, the actions of Socrates. In mid-sixteenthcentury France, Étienne de La Boétie’s clandestinely published Discours de la servitude volontaire (Discourse of voluntary servitude, or The AntiDictator) articulated an argument that has proved central to its subsequent significance within liberal (and indeed anarchist) political thought: as a tyrannical regime depends on the complicity or tacit acquiescence of its subjects, withdrawal of this ‘voluntary servitude’ is consequently fatal to the regime. The withdrawal of this acquiescence to authoritarian rule has been a central feature of multiple mass civil resistance campaigns of the twentieth (and already, twenty-first) century, whose aim has been to overthrow a regime in conditions of asymmetrical conflict; probably the most well-known of these is Gandhi’s campaign against British colonial rule in India. Resistance through non-compliance is however a staple feature of numerous other movements, against Cold War authoritarian and their illiberal successor regimes (the Polish Solidarity movement, Serbia’s Otpor student movement, Czechoslovakia’s Velvet, Georgia’s Rose, and Ukraine’s Orange revolutions); in Myanmar, the Philippines, East Timor, China; in Madagascar, Kenya, Palestine, Iran (see Chenoweth and Stephan, 2011; Shock, 2015 for further discussion). The conditions under which the withdrawal of consent to authority may be justified as consistent with the operation and values of liberal democracy has, in contrast, been a key focus of political theory since the publication of John Rawls’s Theory of Justice in 1971, which we will discuss in greater depth in the next chapter. Rawls’s arguments re-established normative theory at the heart of political science, orienting the task of theory towards establishing the conditions under which political institutions could be considered to be just within liberal democratic societies (Bauböck, 2008, p. 42). His highly influential discussion of civil disobedience was developed within this framework: as a decontextualized, internally consistent, ideal theory relevant to conditions of legitimately established democratic authority, and whose prescriptions do not, axiomatically, apply to other forms of regime. On this point, critical theorist Jürgen Habermas concurs: the problem of civil disobedience is, by definition, the problem of the tension between

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legality and legitimacy within the modern democratic constitutional state; indeed, it is the ‘litmus test’ of constitutional democracy. For Habermas, the paradox of the constitutional state is that it provides its citizens with the capacity, in transitional and exceptional situations, to ‘act illegally out of moral insight’ (1985, p. 103). The central problem, as both Rawls and Habermas define it from their contrasting standpoints, is thus the problem of the moral basis of democracy, and of the location of sovereignty between the constitution and the citizen. For Rawls, membership of democratic society depends on our tacit consent to the social contract; our consent is tacit, because we accept the social benefits that membership of democratic society brings us. If we are to maintain the social contract, derogation from our obligations can only be justified in specific and exceptional cases, and within a framework of obedience to the law; in such circumstances, at what point, Rawls asks, ‘does the duty to comply with laws enacted by a legislative majority (or with executive acts supported by such a majority) cease to be binding in view of the right to defend one’s liberties and the duty to oppose injustice?’ (Rawls, 1971/1999, p. 319). Rawls’s arguments, like the development of social movement studies as a sub-field of political sociology, were strongly influenced by the US student, anti-war, and civil rights movements of the 1960s; Habermas, similarly, writes about civil disobedience in the context not just of his continuing theoretical work on deliberative democracy and the role of civil society within an ‘activist’ public sphere, but following the emergence in West Germany in the late 1970s of the Neue soziale bewegungen, ‘a new protest movement […] with a different composition, with new objectives, and with a colorful spectrum of newly fashioned, differentiated forms of expression of will’ (1985, pp. 97-98), and specifically the protests against the deployment in West Germany of Pershing II nuclear missiles by the US Army in 1983. Our approach is rooted in political sociology: our aim here is to analyse the practice of civil disobedience as it is formulated and deployed within social struggle, as a form of collective action. As such, our analysis is not (or at least, not just, not predominantly) located within the type of abstract, theoretical framework that depends on the articulation of prevalent definitional boundaries (as is the case in political and legal theory); rather, our perspective starts from the discussion of disobedient actions and actors who are themselves involved in struggle. As such, our goal is, primarily, to situate the material and representational practices associated with civil disobedience within the specific times and spaces of the claims and actions of social movements, and thus to understand civil disobedience from the

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bottom up, as an embodied practice. We seek therefore to trace how civil disobedience is shaped by the political objectives, collective identities, and tactical choices of the movements who enact and make claim to it, but also by the cultural, discursive, and institutional contexts in which it is articulated by these movements. Our discussion thus aims to develop answers to questions at the heart of contemporary (Western) societies in particular: how can we account for the current importance of this form of action, of publicly, non-violently, and deliberately breaking the law, to social movement campaigns? How can we account for its widespread adoption not just by what Jasper (1997) refers to as citizenship movements (those movements mobilizing on behalf of constituencies deprived of, and seeking to acquire, basic civic rights, such as, classically, the US civil rights movement, but also, clearly and more generally, social movements in authoritarian regimes aiming to effect democratic transition); but also by post-citizenship movements, in particular the anti-war, environmental, global justice, and anti-austerity movements, which already formally enjoy civic rights and which, increasingly, mobilize within national and transnational regimes qualified by Crouch (2004) as post-democratic? (In a recent study by Ratliff and Hall (2014), indeed, civil disobedience actions were found to comprise 7 per cent of all protest activities that took place in the United States and were reported in either the LA Times or the New York Times between 2006 and 2009.) More widely, should we think of it as an ‘ethical’, civic form of political engagement, adapted to the demands of our age; following Norbert Elias (1939/2000), as an indicator of a general tendency towards the pacification of political contest in Western societies? Or rather, should we see it as a new, mutated form of resistance whose power is precisely derived from its capacity to place itself within a tradition of legitimized political action whilst enabling the expression of radical social critique? In the following pages, we therefore first discuss the emergence and genealogies of civil disobedience as a form of social protest. First, we set out normative and performative approaches to understanding civil disobedience, discussing its treatment in political theory, before discussing understandings of disobedience as direct and indirect action, the importance of conscience, and key moments in the genealogy of its practice. We then develop the idea of specific histories of practice by focusing on its development in France, and its importance to the environmental movement more generally, discussing how the practice of civil disobedience has spread beyond its predominantly religious and pacifist movement roots to be adopted by ‘citizen’ movements. We thereafter pursue our discussion of civil disobedience as repeated

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performances, focusing on both the multiple and regular practices of disobedient action and the relationship between forms of action and the meanings that activists aim to express by using these forms. Equally, we discuss the importance of trials for civil disobedience, highlighting the importance of the courthouse for communication and for political challenge; we then explore how boundaries between violence and non-violence are constituted and negotiated in actions of property destruction. Finally, we reflect on the key elements of civil disobedience, and the reasons for its importance in contemporary liberal democratic societies.

9

Definitions, Dynamics, Developments

Conceptual approaches to civil disobedience in law, political theory, and philosophy typically depend on the determination of a stable and universal set of categories against which collective action can be evaluated; in this way, an action which meets the requirements of a predetermined number of categories can be said to be an act of civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is thus constructed normatively, as an exclusive regime of classification, enabling it to be understood as a particular form of social and political action; this correspondingly enables civil disobedients to be recognized in specific practical ways (such as, for example, by the criminal courts), and to place their action within a historical canon of similar actions. In this chapter, we discuss the implications of approaching civil disobedience in this way, tracing its development as a form of action, and considering the relationship between normative and performative understandings of what civil disobedience is. Whilst normative approaches seek abstract, stable, and universal understandings of civil disobedience, a performative approach pays attention to the ways actors develop and legitimize their own action, to the claims they make about it, and to the interactions that shape and surround it. In this sense, civil disobedience is an unfixed and malleable form of action, whose historical and theoretical referents are available to actors for re-signification within the context of their own action. In order to make this argument, we start by discussing the major theoretical approaches to civil disobedience, focusing on the arguments of John Rawls and Hannah Arendt in particular, before placing their arising conceptual understandings and distinctions in the context of key moments in the genealogy of civil disobedience as an activist practice, discussing the importance and contributions of Quakerism, Thoreau, Gandhi, and the US civil rights movement.

Theorizing Civil Disobedience In one of the earliest formulations of civil disobedience in political theory, Bedau (1961, p. 661) defines an act of civil disobedience to be committed if, and only if, a given person acts illegally, publicly, nonviolently and conscientiously with the intent to frustrate (one of) the laws, policies, or decisions of his government.

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In his landmark Theory of Justice, the liberal political theorist John Rawls proposes a similar definition: civil disobedience is a public, nonviolent, conscientious yet political act contrary to law usually done with the aim of bringing about a change in the law or policies of the government. (Rawls, 1971/1999, p. 320)

In these terms, a civilly disobedient act is civil because it is non-violent and public, and therefore expresses respect for the civil rights of the majority, and because its intended outcomes are directed towards the furtherance of the common good; it is disobedient, because though the act necessarily breaks the law (and does so regardless of whether the given law is at some future point shown to be unconstitutional), the infraction is undertaken within the bounds of fidelity to law. Rawls and, like him, Cohen, claim that to be truly public, a disobedient act must be announced in advance: for Cohen, the civil disobedient characteristically notifies government officials of the time and place of his actions and attempts to make clear the point of his protest. (1972, p. 284)

For both Rawls and Cohen, the public nature of the act is further guaranteed by the willingness of the disobedient to accept the legal consequences of the disobedient act (Rawls, 1971/1999, pp. 320-322). If Rawls is prescriptive concerning what constitutes an act of civil disobedience, he is equally so concerning the nature of the problems that might justifiably be addressed by it. For Rawls, justice is the primary condition of social cooperation; it concerns the social contract, or the reciprocal rights and duties which provide the basis of the organization of society. As such, it has two dimensions: the equitable distribution of material resources within society so that equality of opportunity is ensured, and the recognition of citizenship rights, so that groups and individuals are not arbitrarily excluded from the fair distribution of material resources through characteristics over which they have no control (class, sex, ethnicity, and so on). For Rawls, in a society which is liberal and democratic, and therefore ‘nearly just’, recognition is the key to the inclusion of minorities in the equitable distribution of resources; civil disobedience is therefore justified where it addresses failures of recognition, or to put it another way, failures in the distribution of citizenship rights. He thus recommends civil disobedience be justified where (and only where) it applies to instances of ‘substantial and clear

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injustice, and preferably to those which obstruct the path to removing other injustices’ (Rawls, 1971/1999, p. 326). Rawls therefore restricts the justification of civil disobedience to actions which seek to secure fundamental civic freedoms, extending them to minorities hitherto deprived of them. In this way, civil disobedience is not just consistent with the rule of law; it has the potential to act as a stabilizing force for the rule of law, as it enables the correction of fundamental injustices whilst forestalling the development of anti-systemic (and thus, in a liberal democracy, potentially illiberal or anti-democratic) dissent. In these terms, civil disobedience is thus not an act of political opposition to government per se: on the contrary, through the terms of its enactment, it expresses fundamental support for democratic majority rule, on condition that it also supports legitimate claims for inclusive recognition. Hannah Arendt, writing from a within a civic republican tradition, similarly argues that this form of dissent, because it is exceptional, also implies consent to be the general, accepted rule: civil disobedience, far from posing a systemic challenge, is thus the sign of a stabilizing social force (Arendt, 1972). Further, it assumes the superiority of law in political conflict resolution, as the legitimate expression of the general will. For Arendt, civil disobedience does thus not destabilize the social contract: if through a deliberate public act of lawbreaking citizens express their opposition to a given law or public policy, they do so as citizens who publicly recognize the legitimacy of, and act within the defining principles of, the prevailing legal and political frameworks. Civil disobedience therefore paradoxically depends on the recognition of obedience to law as the normal condition of democratic relations, confirming this normality through its own exceptional character. In both Rawls’s and Arendt’s understandings, the goal of civil disobedience is to advocate specific and limited reforms to law or public policy. Rather then seeking overthrow of a democratic regime or the rule of law (and here it is conceptually distinct from civil resistance, associated with non-violent systemic opposition to authoritarian regimes), it aims, in this understanding, to correct the non-systemic problems within the prevailing, already formally democratic regime. As noted above, Arendt writes on civil disobedience from a civic republican standpoint. Broadly speaking, where liberal theories of justice emphasize the equal moral worth of all citizens (within the nation-state, or in cosmopolitan frameworks, on the global scale), republican theorizing emphasizes the principle of collective self-determination, and thus of the effective participation of citizens in decision-making procedures. As

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Markovits (2005) notes, liberal conceptions of disobedience, structured by the inalienable nature of rights, were highly consonant with the demands of the US civil rights movement. However, Markovits also argues that such conceptions of disobedience are inadequate to the task of theorizing and justifying dominant contemporary trends in the practice of disobedience. Here, Markovits argues, movement practices – such as those of the global justice movement – emphasize not liberal rights to equal treatment or basic liberties, but democratic dysfunctions. Drawing on republican political theory emphasizing the importance of active citizenship and collective civic authorship of the sovereign will, he therefore proposes an alternative model of disobedience, which he terms ‘democratic disobedience’. This model differs from ‘liberal’ civil disobedience in that its objective is to create democratic engagement in conditions where citizens are faced with democratic deficits, themselves caused either by the capture and subversion of representative democratic processes by special interests, or by inertial political decision-making (as a result of path dependencies) for which there is no longer a democratic mandate. Its focus is thus procedural (engaging democratic deliberation) rather than substantive (securing specific group rights). Where, writing in the 1970s, Arendt saw civil disobedience as a continuation of the North American tradition of the voluntary association, identifying it particularly within the model of the mass campaign, for Markovits (2005, p. 1944) it has now become the preserve of ‘momentary coalitions rather than entrenched constituencies’; in other words, the preserve of short-lived alliances and temporary organizational structures, rather than long-running campaigns led by institutionalized organizations, such as in the US civil rights movement. Conscience and Collective Action, Direct and Indirect Disobedience Within their definitions, both Rawls and Arendt differentiate between individual acts of conscientious refusal and collective acts of civil disobedience. Rawls distinguishes between the two in that where both are acts of non-compliance with a legal injunction or administrative order, the former is not necessarily a public act seeking to address the concerns of the majority; rather, it is a private act seeking to preserve the moral integrity of the individual (Rawls, 1971/1999, pp. 323-326). Somewhat similarly, Arendt argues conscientious objection to place the interest of the individual over the interest of the collective: such acts are ‘unpolitical’, in that they do not engage with the repercussions of the act upon the community. For Arendt, civil disobedience is necessarily a collective act located in a mass movement,

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or as she puts it, the preserve of ‘organized minorities, bound together by common opinion’; the civil disobedient ‘never exists as a single individual [but] can function and survive only as a member of a group’ (1972, p. 56, p. 55). Equally, both differentiate between direct and indirect cases of civil disobedience in legal terms. Direct cases of civil disobedience occur where disobedience breaks the specific law held to be unjust, such as in cases of the denial of equal civil rights. Such cases would therefore include Parks’s refusal to change seats on the bus, or the lunch counter sit-ins first organized by NAACP Youth Councils in Wichita, Kansas, and Oklahoma in 1958 and then by college students in the spring of 1960, sweeping across the cities of the Southern states of the United States, breaking the taboo against inter-racial dining, and leading to the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) (Andrews and Biggs, 2006). In these paradigmatic cases, the legitimacy of a particular law or laws is directly challenged through the (more or less) organized and deliberate non-compliance with the law in question, undertaken by collective actors mobilizing on behalf of social constituencies who are explicitly disadvantaged by the particular law. In contrast, there are unjust laws or policies which can not be practically disobeyed through non-compliance (such as, Rawls argues, in the case of foreign affairs). In such circumstances, disobedience can only be indirect, as it is unable to breach the law that is being protested. Rawls does not however consider the distinction between direct and indirect disobedience to be significant, as a logical result of the abstract (and tightly defined) terms in which he delineates civil disobedience. Arendt, in contrast, sees the distinction between direct and indirect forms of disobedience as primordial, because whereas direct disobedience may derive from a question of conscience (the non-compliance with a specific law on moral grounds), it would be absurd to commit an indirect act of disobedience for this reason. For Arendt, indirect disobedience is axiomatically a political act, a question of ‘opinion’, itself necessarily located in the public sphere of action and exchange (1972, p. 56). Civil disobedience is thus consonant with her procedural conception of the public, where public space is not a fixed location but an interactive process, brought into being through social mobilization, through informed debate and mutual, collective action (Allen, 2003, pp. 52-59). As we have already underlined, reflection on the conditions in which deliberate collective acts of public, non-violent lawbreaking can be considered just, were first comprehensively developed in political theory in the 1960s and 1970s under conditions of fidelity to the Western constitutional democratic state. We can argue that this rationalization of civil disobedience

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within political theory has had three broad functions: foremost, it has served to legitimize an increasingly widespread form of action which appeared to threaten the functioning of democratic regimes, bringing it instead within the terms of political agreement as already understood and promoted by such regimes, particularly through its normative emphasis on non-violence. Thus, Hall argues, civil disobedience fulfils a vital social function in liberal regimes, because it acts as a device that stabilizes government, promotes order rather than chaos, and productively ameliorates the tensions of pluralism. Most directly, civil disobedience constitutes a stabilizing or corrective device, allowing a democratic system to rectify its mistakes. (Hall, 2007, p. 2095)

Second, in doing so, political theory set a series of highly restrictive conditions under which an action can be considered to be an act of civil disobedience, governing each stage of action (from the nature of the grievance and the moment in a protest campaign at which such action could be legitimately undertaken, to the way a civilly disobedient person should properly act when challenged by police). It thus enables persons engaged in such actions to be treated in particular ways in public discourse and by the criminal justice process and, not least, to place their own actions within a historically and socially legitimated tradition of such action; the practice of civil disobedience has, in fact, long been associated with a high degree of reflexivity. Finally, by establishing universal criteria of practice, the theorization of civil disobedience – undertaken not just by political theorists, to be sure, but by movement leaders and intellectuals – has at least in part facilitated its diffusion across time, space, and campaign.

Civil Disobedience as ‘Performative’ This theoretical, normative approach also leaves us with a number of problems from the perspective of action, however. Foremost, though the (Rawlsian) theorization of civil disobedience essentially assumes conditions of liberal constitutional democracy, its abstract nature tells us little about the practice of civil disobedience, the importance of specific contexts, the motivations of actors, or the ways that organized collective actors adopt, adapt, and pursue civil disobedience as a mode of action. The terms of theorization of civil disobedience are not therefore necessarily helpful for understanding the trajectories of civil disobedience

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actions when considered from the material perspective of action itself, from its multiple enactments and performances. The understanding of action as ‘performance’ is familiar from Tilly’s celebrated discussion of social movement tactical forms (what he called ‘action repertoires’) as the ‘set of performances available to any given actor within a regime’ (2003, p. 45), such that social movements make claims using forms of action that are the result of large-scale structural changes in society (industrialization, urbanization, the development of national markets and power centres, and so on). Equally, the sense of social action as performance is familiar from the micro-sociology of everyday interactions, where performance denotes ‘all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way any of the other participants’, as Goffman (1959/1990, p. 26) defines it. In our analysis, understanding action as performative is to see it within the given conditions of a particular encounter: the critique that the action performs (of democratic terms, for example) is a question of the conditions of its intervention within a specific debate and the meanings that actors give to it; as Offerlé underlines, ‘every performance is the object of multiple investments’ (2008, p. 189). Thus even though social movement forms of action may appear similar from the outside (such as when viewed from the aggregate perspective of action repertoires), this is unlikely to be the case when we approach the meanings that collective actors negotiate and give to the actions that they undertake, or how they may understand what constitutes an act of disobedience, whether it is ‘civil’ or not, whether it is non-violent, whether the action can be qualified as direct or indirect action, what value we should give to these conditions, and so on. An understanding of action as performative necessarily places these issues at the centre of analysis. Direct and Indirect Disobedience Reconsidered The distinction between direct and indirect disobedience is a case in point. If Rawls does not make different claims for the validity of direct and indirect disobedience, this is in part because he assumes civil disobedience to be confined to matters of non-compliance with authority, rather than with such questions as obstruction, trespass, or property damage, for example. However, activists taking public, non-violent, illegal direct action against the manufacture and sale of weapons, the transport of nuclear waste, the cultivation of genetically modified plants, or the extraction and use of coal to generate electricity, cannot (by definition) undertake civil disobedience through acts of non-compliance designed to break the laws regulating these

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activities, for each activity does not legally depend on the disobedients’ cooperation or participation in order for it to continue. In such cases, activists can only engage in acts of civil disobedience by breaking associated, general laws which are nonetheless fundamental to the exercise of the opposed legal activity; laws governing trespass, taxation, obstruction, the destruction of private property. It may frequently be the case therefore that activists who conceive and claim their actions as civil disobedience do not directly target ‘unjust’ laws; in such cases, they target laws which they may or may not consider to be just or legitimate in principle, and which they may wish to see upheld in other circumstances in order to protect the general public (and indeed perhaps their own personal) interest. Differentiating between direct and indirect disobedience in terms of the law being disobeyed may therefore divert attention from what Della Porta and Diani (2006, pp. 163-78) term the logic of action being deployed by collective actors. Let us look at a range of examples from the USA, UK, and Spain. For example, the lunch counter sit-ins, or (in the UK) the April 1932 mass trespass of enclosed land by around 400 activists at Kinder Scout, in the Pennines in northern England, directly challenged exclusion laws enforcing restrictions on the freedom of movement or of assembly of specific constituencies of people, reflecting and perpetuating prevalent relationships of power and entitlement. In the case of lunch counter sit-ins, state trespass laws were used to enforce policies of racial segregation in public and private cafes and restaurants, and hundreds of students were arrested and convicted under these statutes across the Southern states of the US (Carl, 1961; Johnston, 1965). In the Kinder Scout case, private landowners had since the Victorian era been closing public rights of way across moorland for grouse shooting, with ramblers denied access by various means (gamekeepers, injunctions, by-laws) (Mayfield, 2010; Hey, 2011). As cheap rail and bus fares in the inter-war period opened up the Pennines to the working-class residents of Manchester and Sheffield seeking clean air and physical exercise, the British Workers Sports Federation (a subsidiary of the Young Communist League) staged a mass civil disobedience action; the outcry after five were arrested and imprisoned for breach of the peace and unlawful assembly is widely considered to have played a significant role in the creation of national parks in the aftermath of World War II, and remains a totemic act in British working-class activism (Hattersley, 2007; Toft, 2012). Equally, the deliberate illegal occupation of public space (and vacant housing) has been central to the ‘movements of the squares’, from the Movimiento 15-M to Occupy Wall Street, within the post-2011 anti-austerity protest cycle; the protest camp, emblematic of these struggles, is an exercise in mass civil

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disobedience and disruption, a forum for the critique and contestation of neoliberal economic and political structures (Flesher Fominaya, 2017; Hayes, 2017). In Spain, further to the occupation of public squares, housing and healthcare activists placed civil disobedience tactics at the heart of their respective struggles against mortgage foreclosures and evictions, and the privatization of the public healthcare system. Established in 2009, PAH (Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca, Platform for People Affected by Mortgages) sought to prevent evictions through collective occupation tactics at successive stages of the process: occupying branches of banks foreclosing on homeowners, occupying flats and houses to stop bailiffs carrying out repossession orders, and reoccupying vacant houses post-eviction and repossession (Romanos, 2014; Berglund, 2018). The Marea Blanca, or White Tide – named after the white coats worn by doctors and nurses, though the movement includes technicians, cleaners, patients – used the sit-in (alongside demonstrations, petitions, and multiple other forms of action) to resist the privatization of healthcare centres and hospitals (such as the successful mobilization in 2012 against the Madrid regional government’s plan to turn the city’s Hospital de la Princesa into a specialized healthcare facility for the over-75s). Understood normatively, these cases – sit-ins and open land trespass, housing and healthcare – can be categorized as conceptually different forms of civil disobedience: in some cases direct (as housing occupations directly challenge the eviction laws that are being protested, and state trespass laws were one of the instruments through which racial segregation was enforced in Jim Crow US states); in some indirect (the occupations of hospitals by healthcare professionals makes little sense in direct terms, as the healthcare professionals already enjoy the right to be in the hospital, and are not protesting against their physical exclusion from their workplace per se). Yet, understood from a social mobilization perspective, these distinctions make little a priori sense: the occupation of healthcare centres, like the occupation of bank branches, share the same symbolic logic of action as the lunch counter sit-ins and the Kinder trespass. In these cases, social movement activists are reclaiming space, defending the public sphere (understood in various ways as equal public entitlement and access to basic needs) against the exclusionary encroachment of privatization; and are doing so using their bodies, materially, to openly signify their collective commitment, and to challenge the legitimacy of the laws and policies (or, in the case of the Kinder Scout action, established arrangements) that produce these exclusionary dynamics. Rather than seeing them as variants of direct or indirect civil disobedience (where the direct or indirect nature of action refers to the precise legal statute being challenged), therefore, we might see

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them in common as performances that (i) are taken in defence of the civic sphere; (ii) are rule-breaking; and (iii) have the power to enact a critique of prevalent representative democratic arrangements, depending on the way that actors imbue them with meaning. In these cases, making the distinction between direct and indirect disobedience is (at best) marginal to our understanding of the logic of action undertaken, and threatens to mislead analysis if we aim to grasp its motivation, character, and meaning. Indeed, we can argue that civil disobedience is a potent act precisely because, unlike lawful action, it has the capacity to perform its own critique: by staging a public and unlawful act, movement actors make claim to collective legitimacy in the name of the civic sphere which it embodies and demands to call forward; and this symbolic capacity does not depend on assumptions about the direct or indirect character of the given legal infringement. Yet, if the distinction between direct and indirect disobedience is overspecified in legal and political theory, it is also under-specified when we consider it in terms of the contextual and relational dynamics of movement action. For one thing, it fails to differentiate as to whether the disobedient action is a form of what in social movement terms would be called direct action, in that it seeks to intervene directly and physically upon another actor or object (such as by blockading an entranceway, or by pulling crops out of the ground); or whether it is a form of indirect action, seeking to persuade a third actor (state, media, corporation) themselves to intervene to defuse the situation. Further, the abstract and universal nature of normative theorizing obscures the cultural stickiness of disobedient action. Arendt saw civil disobedience as a peculiarly American form of action, influenced by the cultural form of the voluntary association and the legal framework set by potentially conflicting law at state and federal level (thus opening up a space for political action to challenge apparent inconsistencies between the two); she also appears to suggest that civil disobedience actions are produced not from an activist culture of specific practices, but from the existence of objective environmental conditions, which may be relevant to any citizen grouping – as in her contention (1972, p. 74) that disobedience arises when a significant number of citizens have become convinced either that the normal channels of change cannot be acted upon, or that, on the contrary, the government is about to change and has embarked upon and persists in modes of action whose legality and constitutionality are open to grave doubt.

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From our own perspective, nearly 50 years on, we can see how civil disobedience has both generalized across contexts and, perhaps paradoxically, also become more particular and rooted. Thus civil disobedience has, on the one hand, become tied to specific movements and networks, particularly those of the post-1960s ‘new social movements’, and become associated by activists from these movements and networks with specific material practices and techniques, with particular and meaningful ways of ‘being’ disobedient; and, on the other, how practices of disobedience, as they have spread and taken hold, have become refashioned and variegated through the specific traditions and practices of protest in each cultural context, such that the meaning of ‘civil disobedience’ may be different in Italy than it is in France, different in Spain than it is in the United States. Some foundational practices of disobedience – such as the refusal to pay war taxes, which dates back to the establishment of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in the wake of the English Civil War in the mid-seventeenth century (Ollitrault, 2007) – remains an available (and often used) form of action, but only in political cultures where individuals pay direct taxes to the government through individual self-declaration. From a bottom-up, movement-centric, performative perspective, we might also see how movements invest practices with meanings; thus how the construction of arrest as a noble and dignif ied act played a vital role in the development of consciousness within the US civil rights movement, where African Americans experienced criminalization as historic oppression and indignity; or for Quakers protesting nuclear arms, how arrest and punishment for public witness is a profound act of connection with an enduring faith tradition, with what it means to be a Quaker. Of course, from this perspective, the distinction between direct and indirect civil disobedience can, contra Rawls, be highly salient. If we are to attempt to understand the material conditions and consequences of civil disobedience, we need to conceptualize how unlawful action can be expected to bring social movement actors into contact with what Jasper and Duyvendak (2015) identify as different institutional arenas of action, and specifically into contact with differentially constituted criminal justice processes (Doherty and Hayes, 2014, 2015). In performing civil disobedience actions, activists must deal with material configurations of power and with differentially structured political and judicial norms and cultures; they are also, evidently, social agents who are capable of experiential learning and tactical adaptation, and in constructing meanings for their actions. The 1960 lunch counter sit-ins – which, unlike Parks’s individual action,

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constituted a mass, participatory campaign of civil disobedience – was launched in the very specific context: the US Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation in public schooling was unconstitutional had created wider expectations of change, but this change had failed to materialize. Student civil rights activists sought to seize the initiative, bypassing the NAACP’s litigation strategies, and create direct, local, tangible achievements by forcing lunch counter owners to desegregate. Equally, NAACP lawyers saw the opportunity to test the uncertainty reigning in the wake of Brown by using student arrests to force resolution on the issue of whether sit-ins (and thus by extension, segregation on the basis of race) were lawful or unlawful, winning a series of important legal victories (Schwelb, 1961; Schmidt, 2015). Within different liberal democratic regimes, there are nonetheless significant differences in the way, for example, the courts allow activists to enter pleas when arrested for acts of conscious, deliberate, public, non-violent lawbreaking. In terms of legal rationality, the distinction between direct and indirect forms of civil disobedience is consequential, as it affects the type of defence that activists may be permitted to present, the configuration of the court that rules on the case, the range of probable trial outcomes, and thus both the material consequences for the individual activists and, more widely, the symbolic success chances of the initial action itself. Finally, as we shall see below, the ways in which civil disobedience has developed as a practice have at times been both far from the type of ideal action as it is represented in political theory, both regarding socio-political context and the contours of activist conduct. From the standpoint of the sociology of collective action, our task here is to analyse and explain the deployment of civil disobedience within the history of social and political struggle, in an attempt to understand its operationalization, signification, originality, and even its contradictions. A historical overview of civil disobedience demonstrates, in fact, that rather than deploying a single internally coherent conceptualization of action, collective social actors construct, negotiate, and reconstruct their civil disobedience in action, making strategic claims to legitimacy. In the following sections, we aim to give a brief overview of foundational civil disobedience campaigns – from the Quakers to Thoreau, Gandhi to King – in order to highlight the development of civil disobedience as a matrix of representational practices which can be mobilized by contemporary social actors.

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Conceptual Distinctions in Historical Overview Liberal theorizations of civil disobedience, as we have seen, depend on the development of reciprocal relationships between individual and collective interest. The individual may be considered to act justly where they withdraw their consent to existing law, and do so publicly and collectively, and on the basis of an appeal to the sense of justice of the community, in order to improve and strengthen the rule of law. Civil disobedience is thus held to be categorically distinct from other non-violent forms of action, such as conscientious objection (in that its goal is the amelioration of the public good and not the defence of private moral integrity) and civil resistance (in that it is proper to constitutional democratic regimes, and not to authoritarian, non-democratic ones). These conceptual distinctions, between acts of conscience, acts of resistance, and acts of disobedience, create a problem, however. We may ask, for example, how we should understand the importance of individual conscience within collective acts of non-compliance with law, particularly given that conscientious objection (more clearly, non-compliance with the state’s demand for conscription) has been a significant source of social struggle, and has been fundamental to the historical development of civil disobedience. Moreover, the concept of bearing witness, or ‘recording moral or ethical opposition or disapproval by calling attention to an event through a person’s presence’ (Acosta, 2014, p. 113), has through multiple appropriations and reinventions become a key element of indirect disobedient action; it is fundamental to the foundational actions of groups such as Greenpeace (who adopted Quaker practices of bearing witness on the first voyage to Amchitka, in the Aleutian Islands in 1971, and subsequently developed them into highly media-friendly ‘moral crusade’ campaigns in the 1970s, such as against French nuclear testing and Soviet whaling in the Pacific, and the harp seal hunt in eastern Canada), as it is to faith-based pacifist and anti-nuclear disobedient movements. Quakerism The problem of conscience is particularly acute when we consider the importance of Quakerism, and of Henry David Thoreau, to civil disobedience actions and traditions. An egalitarian and nonconformist interpretation of Christianity, according to which each individual harbours an inward, or inner light, which is the direct experiential knowledge of the divine, Quakerism developed a doctrine based on direct personal revelation of the Truth, rejecting the necessity of the mediation of clergy for salvation, and

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promoting an egalitarian, non-violent, spiritual humanism. As Bauman argues, the understanding that the inner light resides in the soul of every being led Quakers to place the individual at the centre of the relationship with God, such that every person was potentially responsive to Truth; revelation was an ‘ongoing and progressive process, to be realized in every man’ (1974, p. 145). Consequently, early Quakers privileged individual conscience and – in the name of equality – rejected slavery, developing abolitionist positions on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1688, Quakers in Germantown, a German-speaking settlement in Pennsylvania, organized the first petition in North America against, as they put it, ‘the traffik of men-body’. Slaveholding was common in Pennsylvania at that time; the petition compared it to the oppression experienced by Quakers in Europe, aiming to convince the Quaker community as a whole to abandon the practice on ethical grounds, though it was not until the 1750s that Pennsylvanian Quakers outlawed slaveholding in their own community (Gerbner, 2007; Carey, 2010). Opposition to slavery developed formally within the Quaker community in the second half of the eighteenth century: in 1775, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society was established, and a similar society was founded in New York, half of whose members were Quakers (Newman, 2002). In 1787, the Quakers introduced a rule forbidding slaveholding, which became integral to their identity, structured through the networks of the Society of Friends. North American members organized conferences in Britain, in which they detailed the lives of plantation slaves. Notable abolitionists, like Mary Ann Shadd Cary (1823-1893), developed their consciousness and positions through Quaker education; Shadd Cary writes of the importance of the openness and strict equality of Quakerism, which enabled her, as a black woman, to become a journalist. Though all Quakers were by no means abolitionists, Quakers were integral to the development of the ‘underground railroad’ support network for escaped slaves, as well as education networks, petitioning, and political pressure. Though civil disobedience as a concept was as then unknown, Quakers had a history, on both sides of the Atlantic, of running physical risks and enduring imprisonment for their beliefs (as well as associated personal and moral risks, such as social exclusion). Three elements were central to their action. First, disobedience to the law was justified by their religious faith. Second, the subordination of political to moral choices in Quaker thought and practice implied not just a readiness to break the law, but the necessity of forming support networks, not just within religious groups but between believers and non-believers. Third, a strict commitment to non-violence led Quakers to refuse to take up arms, and to participate in

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the financing or prosecution of armed conflict. There is therefore not just a series of characteristics here that become broadly common across civil disobedience actions, but an intimate correspondence between affairs of conscience and those of collective political will, and between the private sphere of religious commitment and the public sphere of social action. Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) We owe the use of term ‘civil disobedience’ itself to the nineteenth-century naturalist, Henry David Thoreau (or, rather, to his publisher). Thoreau’s early thinking was highly influenced by his membership of the Transcendental Club, a sort of intellectual and literary salon (of which Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne were also members) in New England in the late 1830s. The club was opposed to what it saw as the ‘intellectual exhaustion’ of Harvard, and sought to establish itself as a forum for new ideas and social aspirations, including sexual equality, an aesthetic understanding of nature as wilderness, and a thirst for discovering the culture of the American ‘Indians’. Thoreau was also highly influenced by Eastern philosophy, particularly Buddhism. In July 1846, Thoreau was arrested for non-payment of two taxes: a church tax in 1839, and the Massachusetts poll tax, in 1842. Subsequently, he spent one night in prison, before his aunt, Maria Thoreau, paid his arrears the next day (against, by all accounts, the wishes of her nephew). But it was only eighteen months later, in January 1848, that Thoreau openly explained his reasons for not paying his taxes, in a public lecture entitled ‘The Rights and Duties of the Individual in Relation to Government’. An edited version of his talk was published the following year, under a new title, ‘Resistance to Civil Government’. When his complete works were published in 1866, after his death, the title had changed again, with the text now appearing under the heading ‘Civil Disobedience’. Thoreau’s arguments in ‘Civil Disobedience’ often appear confused and inconsistent. In his opening sentence, Thoreau (1996, p. 1) allows his readership to believe that his act of tax refusal can be explained by his principled opposition to the very idea of government: I heartily accept the motto – ‘That government is best which governs least’; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe – ‘That government is best which governs not at all’; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

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Yet this position is unstable in the subsequent text, becoming a critique of governmental complicity with slavery, and of the annexation of Texas (1845) by the US and the American invasion of Mexico in the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). Famously, Thoreau writes: I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I could name, – if ten honest men only, – aye, if one HONEST MAN, in this state of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefore, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once done well is done forever. […] Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. (1996, p. 10; italics in original)

This tension, between abstract reasoning and proximate cause is, however, left unresolved, not least because the rationale that Thoreau gives is incompatible with the taxes he refused to pay, which were local and not federal (later, Thoreau writes with controlled anger of Massachusetts’ compliance with the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act), and which pre-dated the annexation of Texas and the Mexican-American War by a number of years. The significance of Thoreau’s argument is nonetheless widespread. Like the Transcendental Club, Thoreau promoted a philosophy of self-reliance and individualism, spending two years leading a life of voluntary simplicity in isolation from ‘civilised society’, living in a hut he built at Walden Pond; it was on one of his rare visits to the town of Concord that he was arrested in 1846. His tax refusal was only considered after the event as a public act, and was never conceived as a collective action, with the objective of creating a mass movement, or of placing pressure on the state government to change its policies. Rather, it was an act of what Morrow (1998) terms ‘democratic individualism’. For Thoreau, civil disobedience was an act of the preservation of the moral integrity of the ‘just individual’ faced with governmental injustice. Rather than seeking legislative reform or policy change, his conception of civil disobedience concerns the autonomy of the individual as the sole source of justice and morality. The individual is, for Thoreau, consequently not bound by the social contract, or by the will of the majority; indeed, to accept the social contract is to accept complicity with a process of collective decision-making which is axiomatically unjust. As Bingham (2008, p. 52) notes, Thoreau’s critique of government is thus founded on the rejection of social institutions, which are subordinate to individual conscience: because government can have no conscience,

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the only obligation an individual really had was to do what he or she thought was morally correct, not what the government stated was right.

For Thoreau, citizenship, and respect for the law, were secondary to the liberty of the individual to take morally autonomous decisions: ‘The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right’, he argues (1996, p. 2). In material terms, placed in a situation in which his choice was either to resist or to comply, Thoreau chose the former, refusing to pay his taxes. Rosenwald (2000) argues that in so doing, Thoreau achieved a synthesis of two traditions already deeply rooted in American political culture: the nonconformist Christian pacifism of the Quakers, and the political liberalism of Locke. In Arendtian terms, because Thoreau’s act was one of individual conscience unconcerned with the life of the collectivity, it may be considered inherently unpolitical, and as such, can not be considered to be an act of civil disobedience (see Arendt, 1972, pp. 60-61). Nonetheless, Thoreau’s action had profound consequences for movement activism: both King and Gandhi write of the influence of Thoreau on their conception of action, for example. For King, the lesson of Thoreau concerns the moral obligation of the individual; rather than a duty of obedience to an unjust law, the individual has an obligation of non-compliance, as ‘non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good’ (King, 2001). Even from these early, and well-known examples therefore, we can see that the separation between the private sphere of conscience and the public sphere of political action maps awkwardly onto the development of civil disobedience as an avowedly political practice. There is, moreover, a profound sense in which questions of conscience and morality are integral to the performance of civil disobedience, as filtered through ideas of sacrifice and salvation, and of its ‘heroic’ nature. For both King and Gandhi, nonviolent disobedience emerged from a spiritual commitment and religious discourse stressing the necessity of sacrifice, and which required the radical implication of individuals not naturally predisposed towards heroism or the willingness to subject themselves to violence and physical harm. Satyagraha According to Gandhi: Resistance of Body and Soul As noted above, Thoreau did not conceive of his action as the basis for a collective mobilization; Gandhi, however, transformed deliberate lawbreaking into a key tactic of mass struggle and a specifically political act, as part of a series of campaigns he led between 1920 and 1942 against British rule in

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India. At a general level there are numerous similarities between the two; in some senses, the means employed by Gandhi are not that different from Thoreau’s, including the principal instrument of tax refusal (in this case, the British salt tax) and the primacy placed on self-reflexivity in struggle. The objectives were also similar, in that they were structured on resistance to a politico-economic system founded on racial segregation and colonial power. We also know that, from as early as 1907, Gandhi was strongly influenced by Thoreau’s writings (Hendrick, 1956). Yet in Gandhi’s case, struggle was located within a repressive, imperial, non-democratic regime, with the express goal of overthrowing the regime; in this case, a regime whose particularly brutal response provoked what Hess and Martin (2006) call ‘backfire’, such that the public response to state violence contributed to the regime’s own loss of legitimacy (see Chapter 11 for further discussion). Prior to the campaign against British rule, Gandhi had already developed extensive experience of actions which have since become staples of the repertoire of civil disobedience, in an eight-year campaign against the Asiatic Law Amendment Ordinance, or ‘Black Act’, introduced by the South African state of Transvaal in 1907. Born to an affluent family in Porbandar in Gujarat in 1869, Gandhi studied law in London, before moving to South Africa to set up practice in Johannesburg in 1894 (though remaining active in Indian politics, notably through the Indian Opinion newspaper); as a member of the Indian minority in South Africa, Gandhi was subject to the act’s requirement that Indians register with the ‘registrar of Asiatics’, and carry an identity card bearing fingerprint data. Those who did not comply risked a series of punishments, from fines to deportation. Gandhi led highly effective calls for passive resistance to the act, and was arrested and imprisoned for two months in January 1908, before trying to negotiate a compromise solution; when that failed, he led a mass burning of registration certificates in August 1908 and, five years later, a 36-mile march from Newcastle in Natal to Charlestown in Transvaal, for which he was again arrested, and sentenced to nine months in prison with hard labour (Power, 1969). The elements of this campaign are familiar to Gandhi’s subsequent campaign to end British rule in India. It is in South Africa that he developed voluntary simplicity, the concept of satyagraha (from the Sanskrit, satya (truth) and agraha (life force)), non-violence, and the acceptance of legal punishment (practising satyagraha, in fact, meant accepting prison with joy). In South Africa, too, the excessive response of the authorities to the Newcastle to Charlestown march prompted widespread strikes, the release of Gandhi from prison, the establishment of a government commission and, eventually, the repeal of the Black Act; an object lesson in backfire.

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More widely, Gandhi developed a philosophy of sacrificial form of political commitment with a strong moral core, based on the encounter between his own spiritual beliefs and his readings of Thoreau, John Ruskin, and Leo Tolstoy, and distanced himself from developing European forms of disobedience, notably the suffragettes. In India, Gandhi adapted this register of action to both the caste structure (notably in the struggle against ‘untouchable’ status) and to Hindu culture, adopting the figure of the charismatic wise elder. The campaign against the salt tax focused on an omnipresent and everyday symbol of injustice, extending the struggle to the poorest members of society; the march from Ahmedabad to Dandi enabled the construction of a mass social movement through village recruitment, combining non-cooperation, boycott, and acceptance of legal sanction (as many as 60,000 Indians were imprisoned during the campaign). The influence of this activist practice was felt not just in India, but in South Africa, where the African National Congress, founded in 1912, adopted a non-violent and disobedient conception of action, building relationships between the black and Indian political minorities in the campaign against the pass laws. It is, equally, felt in the US civil rights movement, as the Gandhian repertoire of action is constantly modified as it travels from South Africa to the Indian nationalist movement and then to the United States (Chabot and Duyvendak, 2002). Gandhi’s Activist ‘Career’ 1893: Gandhi arrives in Durban, South Africa, as a young lawyer. Faced f irst-hand with the experience of racial discrimination, he notably refuses to give up his first-class seat in a train (he is thrown off the train at Pietermaritzburg); and refuses to take off his turban in court. His first campaign is for voting rights to be extended to the country’s Asian population; later, he advocates participation in the Boer War, with the goal of gaining citizenship rights. 1904: Founds the Indian Opinion newspaper. 1906: Launches a campaign against Transvaal state’s ‘Black Laws’. 1909: Writes Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule), setting out his thoughts on non-violence and his debt to Thoreau and Tolstoy. 1918: Returns to India and wages campaign in favour of peasant farmers who cultivate indigo instead of food crops; uses the boycott as a tactic against the British regime. Sets up an ashram, in which men and women follow strict norms of abstinence and simplicity (chastity, vegetarianism,

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non-violence, poverty) as a rupture with the colonial market economy. Is given the name of Mahatma (‘Great Soul’ in Sanskrit). 1922: Following a mass non-cooperation campaign structured around the boycott of British goods, is arrested and sentenced to six years in prison at Ahmedabad (he serves two years before he is released). 1930: Launches the Salt March, defying the British regime’s monopoly of production and taxation. 1942: Gandhi is arrested following the ‘Quit India’ campaign launched in the middle of World War II. In contrast to his previous positions, he advocates the non-cooperation of all Indians with the war effort.

The US Civil Rights Movement (1955-1965) and Beyond To these elements in the repertoire of civil disobedience – conscience, non-cooperation, non-violence, sacrifice, boycott, tax refusal, the importance of embodiment, the acceptance of legal penalty, the production of backfire, the construction of a collective movement – the US civil rights movement added a series of further tactics, though its main importance lies in the development of civil disobedience as what McAdam and Sewell (2001) refer to as a ‘master template’ of action in democratic states. As Arendt underlines, the US politico-legal system is particularly propitious for the development of civil disobedience. As we have already seen, the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-1956 took place in the specific context of a Supreme Court decision ruling racial segregation in the education system to be unconstitutional. The radicalization of the civil rights movement by a series of organizations – principally, the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference), NAACP, CORE, and SNCC – was initially based on the testing of this constitutionality of segregation in multiple domains of social life (public transport, high schools, restaurants, the electoral register, etc.), in order to produce the intervention of the federal government in protection of constitutional rights. In this regard, and in stark contrast to its use by Gandhi, civil disobedience is imagined as a ‘conservative radicalism’, undertaken by ordinary citizens in order to benefit from the collective citizenship rights afforded by the federal regime, judged to be legitimate in its founding myth as origin and arbiter of democratic rights. Movement strategy was thus centred on the demand for collective rights, with the aim of turning dispossessed individuals into citizens. Political strategy went hand in hand with both consciousness raising and a series of practical programmes to develop numeracy and literacy for poor rural black populations, such as the Citizenship Education Program founded by

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Septima Clark at the end of the 1950s, and coordinated by the SCLC; after its foundation in 1957, the SCLC developed a coordination network across the Southern states, adopting the role played by the Montgomery Improvement Association in 1955-1956 (Robnett, 1996). Churches, the institutions of black identity, thus enabled more than the anchoring of struggle within a culture of sacrifice and salvation: they provided leadership, communication, finance, spaces for mobilization, and spaces of community monitoring and solidarity building (Morris, 1981). As institution, network and culture, churches played a central role in the movement, providing material and symbolic resources, whilst integrating the struggle within a powerful, culturally legitimizing discourse of biblical injustice. The paradoxical legalism of a struggle for rights enabled church hierarchies to support an overtly political and transgressive campaign, structured around disobedience to the law; moreover, the churches themselves acted as symbolic guarantors of respect for the law (Calhoun-Brown, 2000). As McAdam shows (1990), the civil rights movement socialized and energized a generation of activists. Beyond the USA, this model of action became a reference point for social movement action in general, and for the developing peace, environmental, and Third Worldist movements in particular. It also had much wider effects within the United States, as this action template became diffused and reworked across movements. In California in the mid-1960s, César Chavez led a Mexican agricultural workers movement, demanding (and successfully obtaining) the legal recognition of the union he founded, the United Farm Workers of America. Many of the forms of action were from the classical repertoire: agricultural production strikes to mobilize for wage increases and the recognition of agricultural workers’ rights, and in winter, the collective national boycott of grapes produced by the DiGiorgio Fruit Corporation. The methods developed by Chavez also included key elements familiar from the civil rights movement, themselves adapted from the Gandhian and civil rights repertoires: registering Mexican immigrant populations to vote, grounding action in (Catholic) faith and faith-based conceptions of social justice, building collective identity in order to maintain solidarity and action in the face of social and economic injustice, provoking mass arrests for non-cooperation with orders to disperse, hunger strikes (for example, Chavez fasted for 25 days in February 1968), non-violence in the face of often brutal police repression, and in March 1966 a 300-mile protest march, from Delano in the fruit-producing San Joaquin Valley to the state capital, Sacramento (Ganz, 2000). King and Chavez crossed paths as movement intellectuals, participating in the development of social movement leadership and the transmission

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of techniques between struggles. Frequently, the description of activist techniques underestimates the importance of the representational practices that underpin them; this process of cognitive liberation, the development of consciousness which makes action possible, desirable, or even necessary, is itself underpinned by the writings and teachings of movement leaders and entrepreneurs. For example, the writings on non-violence by Richard Bartlett Gregg (1885-1974) had a strong influence on King, as well as Aldous Huxley and civil rights leader Bayard Ruskin; in the 1920s, Gregg (a former lawyer) spent four years in India alongside Gandhi, subsequently publishing The Power of Non-Violence in 1935, for which King wrote the preface for its republication in 1960, and The Value of Voluntary Simplicity. Equally, the sociologist Saul Alinsky (1909-1972) championed Gandhian resistance techniques in his work on neighbourhood opposition to organized crime in Chicago, developing a committed public sociology in defence of poor communities, with the goal of raising consciousness and developing capacity to resist class domination. Grassroots labour organizer Fred Ross, founder of the Community Service Organization (CSO), was especially influential in Chavez’s approach to worker organization in California, introducing Chavez to Alinsky and developing a method of identifying potential movement leaders and building their capacity to defend and organize community interests. Alongside his commitment to social justice, Alinsky proposed ‘recipes’, or tactics of non-violent action designed to force an opponent to enter into negotiation. Though some considered Alinsky too moderate, his books Reveille for Radicals (1956) and Rules for Radicals (1971) in particular had significant influence on numerous movements in the 1960s and 1970s, and even on the Democratic Party (Hillary Rodham Clinton, for example, wrote her undergraduate thesis on Alinsky’s community action model).

Conclusion This chapter has set out to make two broad points. First, civil disobedience has strong cultural and political roots in social mobilization in the United States and has been theorized predominantly within and as an outcome of these mobilizations. This theorization has enabled the stabilization of the concept within both liberal and republican understandings of justice, producing a set of universal criteria against which action can be recognized and appraised. Yet social movement actors constantly redevelop and rethink action in the light of previous action, adopting and adapting disobedient techniques to their own cultural and ideological circumstances. Second, the

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process of theorization produces a series of exclusions as well as inclusions, differentiating between what may and may not be considered to be civil disobedience (the contrast between individual conscience and collective action), or the differentiation between direct and indirect forms of disobedience. Yet considered from the perspective of action itself, these differentiations are unstable, in that they risk misrecognizing the way that disobedience is developed within local cultural frameworks, and the distinctions between types of actions that movement participants themselves may make. In the following chapter, we explore these issues in more detail.

10 Genealogies and Justifications in Contemporary Movements As highlighted in Chapter 9, civil disobedience actions are currently especially prolif ic in the liberal democracies of North American and Western Europe. Here, we discuss the genealogies and justifications of the contemporary practice of civil disobedience, focusing on the elements that have contributed to its adoption by multiple movements. We do so by placing it within two time frames. First, we look at the relatively long history of the development of disobedience in France. Focus on civil disobedience within a political culture which has, historically, not been propitious for the development of this kind of action enables us to trace the contours of the movements which commit acts of civil disobedience, their integration of new modes of action within political struggle, and the reasons that they put forward to justify acts of non-violent lawbreaking; it also allows us to see continuities in movement networks (the genealogies of civil disobedience) and shifts in the basis of adoption and enactment, as disobedience moves from a marginal to more central element of social movement action. Second, we look at a much shorter history of civil disobedience, focusing on the importance of climate justice and global justice problematics to the increased adoption and importance of civil disobedience as a mode of action, which also allows us to place the cultural particularity of the French case within a wider transnational context of movement activism. As we shall see, the question of urgency, of humanitarian or environmental action undertaken within a condition of emergency, is – in common with similar movements outside France – a key argument advanced by campaign groups to explain and legitimize this course of action, though it is articulated in contrasting ways. We observe how the practice of civil disobedience has spread beyond its predominantly religious and pacifist movement roots to be adopted by ‘citizen’ movements across both continents, and has, beyond the emphasis on the securing of formal rights, been integral to recent global waves of protest against neo-liberalism, most notably the global justice movement, Occupy, and the ‘movements of the squares’. We start by discussing the development of disobedience in France.

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Civil Disobedience in France The first example of an explicit call to undertake civil disobedience in France was made in February 1997, when the left-leaning daily newspapers Libération and Le Monde published a manifesto calling on French citizens to openly resist and defy a government bill seeking to limit the rights of non-French nationals. The bill (subsequently passed in to law and known as the Debré Act, after the minister of the interior who sponsored it) required French citizens to make a formal declaration to the local authority when inviting non-French nationals to stay in their house, and to inform the local authority of their departure. On 4 February 1997, under a regulation dating back to 1945, a woman had been prosecuted and found guilty in Lille of harbouring an ‘unregularized’ foreign national (by allowing a friend of her Zairean husband to stay in their house); five days later, Catherine Mégret was elected mayor of Vitrolles, making it the fourth French city council (after Martigues, Toulon, and Orange) to be run by the far-right Front national. Two days after Mégret’s victory, a group of 59 film-makers published a text, or ‘manifesto’, in which they publicly declared their intention to disobey the Debré Act and called for a mass campaign of ‘civic disobedience’ against it.29 Affirming their ‘citizen solidarity’ with the woman convicted in Lille, the film-makers declared they had also invited a foreign national to stay in their home, and demanded to be prosecuted for their actions. Award-winning film director Bertrand Tavernier explained that their action was also a result of what he called the ‘resignation’ of the parliamentary left: ‘We need to act, even if it is political parties who ought to be acting in our place’.30 When the group of film-makers formally disbanded on 27 February, a final text demanded that ‘political parties take responsibility for their serial failings’ (see Hayes and O’Shaughnessy, 2005). Call to Civic Disobedience of 11 February 199731 We, French film-makers, declare: We are, each one of us, guilty of recently having – for personal and for professional reasons – harboured unregularized foreign nationals. We did not denounce our foreign friends. And we will continue to invite foreigners

29 Subsequently called the ‘Manifeste des 66’ after a further seven film-makers signed it. 30 Quoted in ‘Polémique sur une ‘rébellion caviar’, Le Figaro, 13 February 1997. 31 As published in ‘Cinquante-neuf réalisateurs appellent à désobéir’, Le Monde, 12 February 1997.

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into our homes, to not report them to the authorities, to socialize and work with our colleagues and our friends without checking their papers. Following the court’s decision of 4 February 1997 to find Madame Jacqueline Deltombe ‘guilty’ of having harboured a Zairean friend who did not have the correct papers, and following the principle that the law must be applied equally to all, we demand we too be investigated and tried. We call on our fellow citizens to disobey the law, and not allow ourselves to be subjected to such inhumanity. We refuse to allow our freedoms be constrained in this way. Olivier Assayas, Jacques Audiard, Mathieu Amalric […] Claire Simon, Michel Spinoza, Bertrand Tavernier, Marion Vernoux, Sandrine Veysset, Yolande Zauberman [and 50 others].

As a political practice, civil disobedience is widely seen in abstract terms, as a set of portable principles that can be generalized across and applied within multiple and various settings. The French film-makers’ manifesto, however, points to the strength and importance of cultural particularisms when attempting to understand both forms and meanings of civil disobedience. Here, the call to disobey the law was formulated within a specifically French tradition of action and appeals by artists and intellectuals: consciously, it evoked both the ‘Manifesto of the 121’ of September 1960, and the ‘Manifesto of the 343 Sluts’ of April 1971. The Cultural Importance of Manifestos The first of these manifestos was drawn up in 1957 by prominent intellectuals Dionys Mascolo and Maurice Blanchot, and published in the magazine Vérité-liberté (Truth-freedom); it brought together writers, academics, artists, film-makers – amongst them Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone Signoret, Claude Sautet and Alain Robbe-Grillet – to defend the ‘right of desertion’ during the 1954-1962 Algerian War, claiming non-compliance as a ‘sacred right’. During the war, compulsory military service was extended from 18 to 32 months; at the same time, men who had completed their military service less than three years previously were also called up, increasing the number of troops mobilized in Algeria from 150,000 to 200,000 by spring 1956. These call-ups were punctuated by a series of serious, if short-lived, incidents in trains, railway stations, and barracks, as conscripted soldiers protested their enforced mobilization in actions qualified by some parts of the press as ‘mutinies’ (Quemeneur, 2001); for Buton (2008), these were acts

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of disobedience within a framework of military obedience. By 1957, as news spread of the use of torture by the French army, and of numerous incidents of desertion and rebellion within the military, opposition widened beyond established pacifist networks to the general public at large. Two main pacifist networks developed: conscientious objectors supported by both Catholic and Protestant organizations; and a minority political opposition which considered the war in Algeria to be unjust and damaging for France. This latter network was essentially composed of communists, libertarians, and human rights activists, inspired by the previous generation’s engagement in the wartime resistance, opposed to the use of torture, and supportive of the Algerian people’s right to self-determination. Above all, they argued the war to be unjust, doomed to failure, and antithetical to France’s historic identity as champion of human rights. In early 1960, leading members of an ‘underground railroad’ set up by the journalist and former resistant Henri Jeanson, which moved men, money, weapons and false papers for Algerian FLN (Front de libération nationale, or National Liberation Front) activists through France, were arrested; film editor Cécile Decugis (at the time working with François Truffaut on Shoot the Pianist) was sentenced to five years in prison, serving two, for harbouring members of the FLN in her flat. On 5 September, the trial on charges of treason of 23 members of the Jeanson network (known as the porteurs de valise, ‘suitcase carriers’) opened in a French military tribunal. The next day, the ‘Manifesto of the 121’ announced the signatories’ support for refusal to take up arms against the Algerian people, and for assistance given by French men and women to Algerians in their struggle against the colonial French state. The signatories justified this position in moral terms, but also as a continuation of France’s culture of resistance: In these circumstances, many French men and women have started to question the meaning of traditional values and duties. What becomes of our civic responsibilities when they turn into shameful acts of submission? Are there not moments when refusal is a sacred duty, when ‘treason’ is a courageous respect for the truth? When the army, under the control of those who use it as an instrument of racist or ideological domination, is in a state of open or latent revolt against democratic institutions, does not revolt against the army take on a new meaning? The question of conscience was posed at the very start of the war; as the war has continued, it was only to be expected that moral dilemmas should find material expression in an ever increasing number of acts of insubordination and desertion, as well as acts of protection and assistance

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given to Algerian combatants. Free movements have developed outside of and without the help of the official political parties, and indeed, in spite of their disavowal. Once again, outside pre-established frameworks and watchwords, a resistance is born in France; it is the result of a spontaneous moral awakening, seeking and inventing forms of action and means of struggle which are equal to this new situation, whose true significance and requirements have been ignored by political organizations and the press, for reasons of inertia or doctrinal timidity, or nationalist or moral prejudice.32

Fourteen years later, artists and intellectuals were also integral to the ‘Manifesto of the 343 Sluts’, drawn up by De Beauvoir and published in the Nouvel Observateur on 5 April 1971. A key moment in the struggle for abortion rights in France, the manifesto turned abortion into a public act; by declaring that they had had an abortion, the signatories openly admitted to having broken the law, risking criminal prosecution. In a context where abortion was subject to formal legal prohibition and social stigmatization, the manifesto underlined its widespread practice, claiming that the law effectively turned all women into potential delinquents: Every year in France, one million women have an abortion. Condemned to secrecy, they do so in dangerous conditions, even though it is one of the simplest procedures when carried out under medical supervision. We are silencing these millions of women. I declare that I am one of them. I declare that I have had an abortion. Just as we demand free access to contraception, we demand the freedom to have an abortion.33

Two years later, the manifesto of the 343 was followed by a further manifesto, this time signed by 331 doctors, calling for abortion to be freely and publicly provided. Film was to play a further role in the campaign to liberalize abortion rights, following the decision of the minister of culture, Maurice Druon, to prohibit the screening of a documentary, Histoires d’A, by Charles Belmont 32 Our translation. For the full text, see ‘Algérie, Manifeste des 121. Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie’, reproduced in Libération, 12 January 1998. 33 Our translation. This is an abbreviated version; for full text in English, see ‘manifesto343’, https://web.archive.org/web/20160611012314/https://manifesto343.wordpress.com, last accessed 31 January 2018. The Manifesto’s unoff icial name – ‘of the 343 sluts’ – was given to it by the satirical magazine Charlie-Hebdo, which subsequently asked, ‘Who Got the 343 Sluts Pregnant?’

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and Marielle Issartel. Shot in black and white, the film demonstrated the Karman ‘super coil’ abortion technique, publicized the illegal abortions organized by the MLAC (Mouvement pour la liberté de l’avortement et de la contraception) and was ‘effectively a denunciation of the situation of abortion in France’ (Lecler, 2007). Both the film and its poster, featuring a quote from Wilhelm Reich, were banned in November 1973; in response, illegal screenings and debates multiplied, initially within the MLAC’s feminist networks, and subsequently by the main labour unions and minority left-wing political parties, and post-68 radical leftist networks. Within three months, an estimated 30,000 spectators had watched the documentary, illegally; after a further three months, 70,000 had done so. On the fringe of the May 1974 Cannes film festival, the PSU – a small radical reformist left-wing political party – organized a screening; the riot police broke it up; a demonstration was rapidly organized the next day, featuring numerous film stars. Focusing on media actions, using criminal trials as rallying points for mobilization, and publicizing the illegal practice of abortion, the MLAC developed a ‘mass illegalism’ drawing on the repertoire of civil disobedience actions, underpinned by the mobilization of healthcare professionals, artists, and intellectuals (Zancarini-Fournel, 2003). The campaign of 1973-1974 is widely seen as decisive in securing governmental support for abortion rights, subsequently passed in the Veil Act of January 1975. Conscientious Objection and Anti-militarism A third key source for the genealogy of civil disobedience in France lies in the development of conscientious objection networks, from the 1950s onwards. As we have seen, the mobilization of intellectuals played a central role in shaping the culture of disobedience in France; but this mobilization already drew on existing pacifist movements, which supported and publicized the actions of deserters through the Algerian War. Perhaps the best known is the ACNV, Association pour la communication non violente, set up in conjunction with the Communauté de l’Arche at the height of the war, in 1957. In April that year, the group organized a ten-day fast against the use of torture by French troops in Algeria; in 1959, the ACNV organized a demonstration outside the military camp on the Larzac plateau in south-west France, denouncing the round-ups of Algerians in mainland France, and demanding to be interned as suspects themselves. The ACNV mobilized around numerous trials of would-be conscientious objectors, including the case of Jean Pezet. Having already served eighteen months in prison for refusal to be conscripted into the army in 1960, Pezet was immediately

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re-arrested on his release for continued refusal to serve; his second trial, at a Paris military tribunal in January 1963, resulted in a further sentence of eighteen months. Pezet went on hunger strike; sympathizers sent their military service books to the Ministry of the Armed Forces, protesting that they were not available to be called up in times of war, nor postable to a military barracks in times of peace. The campaign intensified until the government formally recognized the status of conscientious objection in December 1963. In May 1964, the ACNV re-oriented its campaign towards general disarmament and tax refusal; these pacifist orientations prefigured many of the new ecologist and anti-nuclear demands that emerged following the student and worker movements of May 1968. The actions and ideas of the poet-philosopher Lanza del Vasto (19011981), a follower of Gandhi’s teachings, are equally influential in the bridge between these movements, and to the development of particular networks of non-violence in France. The use of fasting, petitions (against the Algerian War, against the nuclear bomb from 1958, and against the extension of the Larzac military camp) are central to the action repertoire developed by Del Vasto and his followers in the Communauté de l’Arche. Del Vasto has set up the Communauté de l’Arche in 1948, on the model of Gandhi’s ashrams, to provide support for conscientious objectors; pacifism and non-violence were absolute principles. In many ways, these communities were much closer to Gandhi’s spiritual conception of action than were the North American movements whose action focused on the defence of the poorest, or the socially, economically and politically marginalized. From Larzac to Notre Dame des Landes Del Vasto’s Gandhian spiritualism significantly influenced the development of pacifism in France in the 1960s and 1970s, intersecting throughout the Larzac peasants’ campaign of the 1970s with post-1968 leftist radicalism, counterculture, and the Catholic social activism of organizations such as Jeunesse étudiante chrétienne, Jeunesse ouvrière chrétienne, and Jeunesse agricole catholique (student, worker, and agricultural youth movements, respectively). These currents were central to the meeting of anti-militarism, radical environmentalism, and a rejection of the ‘internal colonialism’ of the French state after the government unilaterally announced in 1971 that it would expand a military camp on the Larzac plateau near Millau in south-west France – the same one that had served as an internment camp during the Algerian War – dispossessing 103 sheep farms. The campaign against the military camp ran until the project was cancelled by the newly

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elected President Mitterrand in 1981; over the ten years of its course, activists developed a series of non-violent forms of struggle, influenced by the teachings of the Communauté de l’Arche, from fasting to occupations and other forms of blockade, leading to the establishment of a centre for the teaching of non-violent resistance methods, the CUN. Notable actions included: sending back military identity papers (from 1972), an income tax strike, occupying the Champ de Mars by the Eiffel Tower in Paris with sheep, mass meetings and demonstrations, the construction of an illegal sheepfold, and so on. Again, criminal trials provided a key focal point for mobilization: in June 1976, 22 activists (seventeen of whom were sheep farmers) broke into the administration block of the military camp, and destroyed 800kg of documents, having photographed the most sensitive and sent them to the local press. Prison sentences handed down to a number of the defendants created a wave of solidarity amongst the local population, before being eventually reduced on appeal to suspended sentences of five months. Developing far beyond religious and spiritualist networks, massive gatherings on the plateau socialized a generation of activists to non-violent methods, and connected the Larzac campaign to anti-nuclear struggles throughout France, particularly the campaign in Brittany against the proposed construction of a nuclear power station at Plogoff. Here, leftist and countercultural radicals mobilized alongside peasant farmers, trawlermen, and other inhabitants of the Finistère peninsula, again rooting the struggle in the rural Catholic subculture; the area’s churches were a notable site of solidarity and relay for the campaign. As we write, a long-running campaign has successfully forced the French government to cancel the construction of a new airport at Notre Dame des Landes, just north of Nantes in southern Brittany. This campaign clearly reproduced the central elements of the Larzac and Plogoff campaigns: a major infrastructure project planned on a territory with specific geological character (Larzac’s limestone plateau, Notre Dame des Landes’ bocage, or hedged and ditched farmland); the defence of small farmers and peasant farming, threatened by the project; an often uneasy coalition of activists and local inhabitants; the charge that the project’s authorization ignores the accepted ‘rules’ of local democracy (for Larzac, the central state was widely seen as overriding the rights of the local population; at Notre Dame, the centripetal power of the Nantes metropolitan area, the backing of the project by a public-private partnership between the state and the infrastructural development and communications firm Vinci and the role played by JeanMarc Ayrault, successively mayor of Nantes and prime minister under President Hollande, were all identified by opponents as limiting democratic

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participation); the strength of state repression (including the extraordinary mobilization of police and army in November 2012, in a failed attempt to evict the autonomous community squatting the Notre Dame site). Above all, the Notre Dame des Landes and Larzac campaigns are similar in their engagement of public opinion beyond the narrow confines of the specific issues that seemingly define them (the extension of a military camp, the construction of a new airport; a national project, a regional project), producing and defining narratives of collective social struggle at a particular moment in time, affording multiple points and layers of resistance. In spite of their specific differences and their contrasting political and social contexts, it is striking to note how the earlier struggle inhabited and structured the latter. The post-war struggle for conscientious objection and anti-militarism runs like a filigree through the Larzac campaign, which itself provided a breeding ground not just for the environmental movement, but for the global justice movement beyond it, and especially as a countercultural, resistant, laboratory of alternative social practices. The collective social memory of Larzac remained central to opposition to Notre Dame des Landes. The reference is, of course, symbolic: it enabled activists to believe in a route to victory as long as they were able to sustain resistance over a long enough period (as long as they, in the words of the anti-airport campaign, ‘never give in’). Thus a speech at the end of a ‘tractor and bike’ rally from Notre Dame des Landes to Paris in November 2011, Christian Roqueyrol – one of the leaders of the Confédération paysanne (Farmers’ Union) and a former activist in the Larzac campaign – reminded the assembled activists that, ‘At Larzac 30 years ago we won, we succeeded in getting the construction permit torn up… the same is possible today!’ At the same rally, the anti-globalization campaigner José Bové, whose activism dates from his own participation in the Larzac campaign, declared, ‘If we have to lie down in front of the bulldozers, of we have to destroy the construction tools, we will! We will disobey to put an end this outrageous project! No one will take us for a ride!’34 But Larzac functioned not just as a legitimizing discursive resource: it also brought activists a technology of effective struggle, developed through the particular form of previous campaigns: the importance of occupying and refusing to be dispersed from the site; the creation of a squat on the site; the mobilization of legitimated rural identities through tractor parades; the establishment of a national network of local support committees; the use of hunger strikes, and so on (Hayes, 2013). In this way the Notre Dame des Landes disobedience campaign, of refusal to accept a legalized process of 34 Fieldnotes, Notre Dame des Landes, July 2012.

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decision-making, drew on the particular characteristics of prior struggle, rather than on an abstracted template of universalized forms of action. Nonetheless, if the specific cultural and intellectual inheritance of struggle can be expected to vary according to its place within a particular political culture, the emergence of civil disobedience across Western democracies is marked by two dominant elements: the centrality to struggle of the idea of a collective social response to a situation of emergency; and the importance of civil disobedience as a resistance to neo-liberalism. It is to each of these two elements that we now turn.

Civil Disobedience in a Situation of Urgency As we discussed in Chapter 9, Rawls (1971/1999) holds that in a democratic constitutional society, the primary obligation of the citizen is to respect the terms of the social contract as guaranteed by the operation of just institutions and government reflecting the will of the majority. For Rawls, it is only when the conditions of cooperation between free and equal subjects are violated – as in the case of a grave injustice – that disobedience to the law may be justified. In this understanding, civil disobedience is an action of last resort, which may be legitimate only when all other forms of recourse provided by the democratic system have been exhausted. The question of last resort is, however, challenged by the character of the social problem, particularly where the questions of reversibility and necessity are central to justifications of action. In the genealogy of disobedience in France, the Faucheurs volontaires campaign plays a key bridging role between Larzac and a series of contemporary struggles. Launched by long-standing non-violence activist and member of the Communauté de l’Arche JeanBaptiste Libouban at a mass counter-globalization festival held on the Larzac plateau in August 2003, the Faucheurs volontaires brought together peasant activist, pacifist, environmentalist and global justice problematics in a highly successful campaign against genetically modified crops. Structured as mass, open, public, accountable, ‘civic’ disobedience, the campaign systematically targeted open field trials of GM crops as well as, in the summers of 2006 and 2007 in particular, commercial plantations of GM maize as well as, if much less frequently, the experimental development of transgenic plant stock in research institutes. According to the group’s charter, this is necessary because GM crops ‘enable the irreversible contamination of other vegetal varieties [and] cause harm to the common heritage of humanity’. These actions are, nonetheless, ‘non-violent [and] benefit from wide popular support because

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they respect the physical integrity of people’ (Faucheurs volontaires, 2004). Actions are carried out ‘unmasked, and in broad daylight’ – even though, in the summer of 2007 in particular, many actions were in practice covert, carried out under cover of darkness (Hayes, 2007). The material and political effectiveness of these actions was such that, following a series of environmental consultations known as the ‘Grenelle de l’environnement’ and a short and widely mediatized hunger strike undertaken by fifteen activists (including José Bové) in the first months of Nicolas Sarkozy’s presidency, the French government agreed in January 2008 to invoke the European Union’s ‘safeguard clause’ in order to prohibit the commercial cultivation of a variety of GM maize developed by the US ‘life sciences’ conglomerate Monsanto. This decision effectively brought to an end the commercial development of GM crops in France; meanwhile, following an action at the French Institut national de la recherche agronomique, or National Institute of Agricultural Research (INRA) in Colmar, Alsace, in August 2010, when 62 Faucheurs destroyed an eight-year research programme into transgenic vine root stock, French public research on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) was also effectively halted. Rather than undertaking illegal action against an infrastructural project in the name of democratic accountability, the Faucheurs volontaires campaign opposed the development and cultivation of genetically modified crops as an ‘act of necessity’. The Faucheurs justified the act of destroying transgenic crops through the potential risks they pose for human and environmental health; the level and nature of this risk varies for each crop, and is a question of the potential circulation of genetically spliced material into other organisms (such as conventional or even organic crops) through cross-pollination. For crops such as maize, the moment of pollination within the plant’s life cycle is consequently a crucial boundary point, as it is this moment which activates the potential ‘contamination’ process. For anti-GM campaigners, the precautionary principle set out in the 1992 Rio Declaration and subsequently translated into French law lends legitimacy to the action of intervention in this process. According to the Barnier Act of February 1995, indeed, ‘the absence of certainties, in consideration of extant scientific and technical knowledge, must not delay the adoption of effective and proportionate measures whose objective is to forestall the risk of serious and irreversible environmental harms at an acceptable economic cost’.35 35 Law 95-101 of 2 February 1995 concerning the reinforcement of the protection of the environment, https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte=JORFTEXT000000551804&cate gorieLien=id, last accessed 5 January 2018.

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In such circumstances, the question for activists becomes less oriented towards the abstract requirement to respect the democratic process until it can be said to be exhausted, and more towards the temporal requirements of action. The time of democratic, institutional action is relatively long, whether it takes the form of legal proceedings (to launch litigation, demonstrate standing, appeal to a higher court, and so on) or legislative action, even where potential allies within a governmental majority are available (commissions, consultation, drafting, amendments, application, appeals, and so on). Equally, though the complexity of specific social issues may require a long-term solution, the conflict of interests and power frequently produces only short-term solutions. Undertaking an action of civil disobedience means foremost taking action in the present, imminently, through the exercise of citizen counter-power in order to short-circuit the institutionalized decisional process, and thus produce a material reconfiguration of the policy or law that is being protested. Action and Emergency The centrality of urgency to action is not new. Thoreau, justifying his act of tax refusal, underlined both the exceptional urgency of the situation in Mexico, and the importance of the relationship between urgency and injustice: action becomes an obligation when one can no longer tolerate a situation which one recognizes to be unjust. His quarrel is not therefore with ‘a hundred thousand politicians at the South’, but rather with those who, wrapping themselves within the covers of the democratic process, do nothing to end injustice; with those hundred thousand merchants and farmers here [in Massachusetts], who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not prepared to do justice to the slave and to Mexico, cost what it may. (Thoreau, 1996, p. 5)

Equally, the question of urgency is central to the legitimizing discourses of the US civil rights movement. For example, the Nashville Christian Leadership Council, an affiliate of the SCLC, argued in its founding statement in 1958 that: there must be efforts to try to capture the loyalty of the many people of the city through iniatory Christian action which makes the Kingdom of God possible now rather than a future kind of hope. If we are to see the

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real downfall of segregation and discrimination it will be because of a disciplined Negro Christian movement which breaks the antiquated methods of resolving our fears and tensions and dramatically applies the gospel we profess.36

Most famously, King insisted on the importance of the centenary in 1963 of the formal abolition of slavery in the US as a symbolic moment, both for measuring the lack of social and political progress for African Americans and as a political opportunity to be seized, a moment beyond which they could not wait. In ‘Why We Can’t Wait’ and ‘Letter from Birmingham City Jail’, King made 1963 a point of rupture, the moment for an immediate break with segregation rather than (as even many white movement allies in the North believed) a simple staging post in the slow disintegration of discrimination as attitudes ‘evolved’. A century after abolition, waiting was no longer tolerable. The Urgency of Disobedience in King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham City Jail’ (1963) I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, ‘Wait’. But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos: ‘Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?’; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile 36 Emphasis in original; see ‘Toward the Beloved Community: Story of the Nashville Christian Leadership Council’, available at http://www.crmvet.org/docs/61_nclc.pdf.

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because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading ‘white’ and ‘colored’; when your first name becomes ‘nigger’ and your middle name becomes ‘boy’ (however old you are) and your last name becomes ‘John’, and when your wife and mother are never given the respected title ‘Mrs.’; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’; then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of injustice where they experience the blackness of corroding despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. (King, 1986, pp. 292-293)

The justification of action through temporal constraint, the importance of urgency, is thus central to the practice of civil disobedience and its historical conceptualization by movement leaders; it is also fundamental to the distribution of justice, and of equal rights. Urgency has indeed been a key component of the legitimation of civil disobedience actions since the 1960s, and particularly since the development of organized campaigning against nuclear weapons. The British philosopher Bertrand Russell became the first president of CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) on its launch in February 1958, before quitting the organization two years later to set up the Committee of 100, dedicated to carrying out non-violent direct actions; notably, 4000 protesters carried out a sit-in outside the Ministry of Defence in London in February 1961, and 1300 were arrested in Trafalgar Square (and a further 350 at the Holy Loch nuclear submarine base in Scotland) in disobedience actions in September that year. Four years previously, in August 1957, thirteen activists of the Committee for Nonviolent Action – including Quaker and former US Navy commander Albert Bigelow – had broken into the Camp Mercury nuclear test site in Nevada to stage a silent vigil against nuclear testing; the following year, Bigelow skippered a boat, the Golden Rule, in an attempt to stop a US nuclear test in the Pacific, but was arrested at Hawaii. Though unsuccessful, the voyage was highly influential, notably for Greenpeace and for similar actions, such as the attempts of French activists (including the retired general Jacques de Bollardière) to stop nuclear tests in French Polynesia, at Moruroa, in 1973. In contemporary struggles, these questions of urgency, justice, and rights characteristically remain central. To take two examples: in November 2004,

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the French network RESF (Réseau éducation sans frontières, or Education without Borders) launched a campaign of civil disobedience to protest the criminalization of giving help to undocumented migrants (by, for example, providing shelter). This network typically mobilizes its members and supporters to block deportations, sometimes by seeking to physically obstruct attempts by the French state to ‘reconduct’ undocumented migrants outside French territory. RESF argues that by making citizens who act conscientiously vulnerable to prosecution, French law creates a ‘crime of solidarity’, forestalling humanitarian action; deliberate illegal intervention is justified by the emergency of the time frame (the need to stop an immediate deportation) as by the conscientious nature of action and the protection of citizenship rights it embodies.37 Similarly, the Faucheurs volontaires campaign is not simply constructed around the denunciation of environmental and human health risks allegedly posed by transgenic plant science, but by the (supposed) urgency of the need to act in the immediate (before the ‘uncontrolled’ dissemination of transgenic material into the environment), by the dictates of individual conscience, and by the action as a defence of the rights of small farmers to develop their own seed, both in France and worldwide, as peasant farmers across the Global South struggle against transnational corporations. These various cases demonstrate that, for activists engaged in civil disobedience, the decision to act is not solely produced by the scale or importance of the problem being protested, but by the perceived material urgency of the time frame: the fundamental objective is to prevent the instigation or completion of an action considered socially harmful (even life-threatening). We need therefore to make a distinction between two different understandings of the urgency of action. In the conceptualization or urgency fundamental to the type of appeal set out by King, urgency is a question of the accumulated denial of rights. In this situation, to act illegally is legitimate because the existing democratic process has demonstrated itself incapable of resolving the issue; the role of disobedience is to create a systemic crisis, forcing a resolution. Here, the status quo can no longer endure, because the burden of harms already caused is intolerable. But in the cases of the actions discussed above – removing GM crops, stopping a deportation, making a nuclear test impossible to carry out – the intervention seeks primarily to prevent future harmful material effects before they can be caused (and may also, of course, stop rights being taken away, as in the case of preventing a deportation flight). 37 ‘M. Besson pourra-t-il encore nier l’existence du délit de solidarité? Deux ‘aidants’ doivent être jugés prochainement’, Joint LDH/RESF press release, 15 June 2009.

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This consideration is crucial, not simply because it provides a potentially legitimating discourse for action, but because the urgent prevention of future harms demands a specifically physical, corporal, and interventionist form of action. This type of action therefore requires action which goes further than collective non-compliance with an existing obligation. As we shall see in Chapter 11, this type of action may also as a consequence call into question the boundaries between violence and non-violence. This is not to say that such an intervention can not be symbolic; indeed, even where an intervention is direct, it may remain an act of bearing witness, because it remains designed (by scale or by function) to draw attention to an alleged problem, rather than to conclusively ‘rectify’ the problem by shutting down or removing the object of supposed injustice. Thus even if an intervention is direct, embodied, and physical, it may remain an appeal for publicity (directed towards the media) or for remedial action to be taken by another, legitimated actor (such as the state). A good example of this is provided by the anti-militarist direct actions of Plowshares (in the US; ‘Ploughshares’ in the UK). These actions go far beyond tax refusal, or the destruction or return of military conscription documents; rather, they seek to ‘disarm’ missiles or air force fighter planes. Yet these actions arguably remain primarily symbolic. On the one hand, Plowshares activists actively disarm warheads; their actions are therefore direct, and designed to produce an immediate prevention of harm. On the other hand, Plowshares actions are rarely, if ever, equal to the scale of the assumed problem (such as the development by a state of massive nuclear capacity, or foreign military intervention); their logic therefore remains a symbolic one, calling attention to a problem rather than seeking to provide a conclusive or comprehensive ‘solution’ to it. Plowshares Plowshares was set up in the United States in 1980. The key founding activists were often religiously inspired, including Daniel and Philip Berrigan, both Catholic priests. In actions protesting the Vietnam War, Philip Berrigan had notably taken part in an action pouring human blood on draft records in Baltimore in October 1967; both brothers were among a group of activists who burnt draft records with napalm in Catonsville, Maryland, in May 1968. The first Plowshares action took place in September 1980: eight activists, including both brothers, broke into General Electric’s nuclear missile plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, damaging nuclear warheads with hammers and pouring blood onto

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security documents. The group’s press release quoted the Book of Isaiah: ‘Nations shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; one nation shall not raise the sword against another, nor shall they train for war again.’ Plowshares originated in the US Catholic Worker Movement, a fertile mixture of socialism, anarchism, pacif ism, and social justice, the movement advocated a form of solidarity with the poor which required activists to take a vow of voluntary simplicity. The group’s commitment to non-violent direct action against military expansionism and nuclear proliferation found expression in a series of disobedient actions in North America in the 1980s and 1990s, before the movement spread to Europe (Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, the UK, and Ireland) and Australia, with differences in the internal organization of the groups and precise forms of conduct adopted in actions. In Sweden, for example, the movement is much more ecumenical and more oriented towards defending secular values; in the UK, the movement split due to disputes over faith and over the importance of prison terms to activist identity. In all, about 200 activists have participated in approximately 80 actions across the world (Berrigan, 2003; Nepstad, 2008, 2009).

Urgency and Environmental Disobedience The question of urgency is equally important to justifications of environmental disobedience, particularly with relation to climate change and the notion of ‘planetary crisis’. Indeed, disobedience has emerged as a prevalent form of action in the climate justice movement over the last ten years or so, with assertive tactics adopted by radical groups and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as ‘reasonable approaches’ given the state of urgency, on the one hand, and the failure of institutionalized approaches to convince elites, states, corporations, and publics alike to take the kind of action necessary to forestall its production or provide just remuneration, on the other. Disobedience is enacted in multiple ways: from the individual climate ‘hoaxes’ perpetrated by Tim DeChristopher in the USA, or by Jonathon Moylon in Australia (Rimmer, 2017), through the establishment of climate camps to discuss and diffuse ideas and tactics (Schlembach, Lear and Bowman, 2012), and numerous collective actions and occupations, such as Greenpeace activists scaling a chimney at the Kingsnorth coal power station in the UK in 2007 (Hayes, 2013), the long-running campaigns against the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines in the USA, or the ‘Climate Games’ and ‘Red Lines’ actions before and during the December 2015 United Nations

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Climate Change Conference in Paris (COP 21) (Routledge, 2017; Wahlström and De Moor, 2017), and the Ende Gelände mass occupation of an open strip coal mine in western Germany in 2015, 2016, and 2017 (Jordan, 2015). These actions are of course not alike: some are indirect appeals to media and states to intervene; others, direct actions of obstruction or prevention. An example of the latter type of action is the auction hoax carried out by Tim DeChristopher in Salt Lake City on 19 December 2008. On that day, DeChristopher entered the Federal Bureau of Land Management to participate at an auction of oil and gas permits for public land in southern Utah. Posing as a legitimate buyer, DeChristopher successfully bid for over $ 1.8 million of leases; unable to pay, he successfully disrupted the sale, contributing to its subsequent invalidation. Found guilty by a trial jury in March 2011 of having knowingly and fraudulently broken the Federal Onshore Oil and Gas Leasing Reform Act, DeChristopher was sentenced to two years in prison, ultimately serving 21 months. In contrast, other actions – though ostensibly similar in their motives – have indirect goals, in that they constitute appeals to others to intervene. Thus during one fortnight in summer 2011, 1253 activists were arrested in Washington, DC, for their participation in a series of sit-ins and other assorted disobedient actions to protest TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline, designed to connect the tar sands in Alberta, Canada, to existing oil pipeline infrastructure in Nebraska, nearly 2000 kilometres away, and from there to the Gulf of Mexico. For its opponents, the pipeline presents three types of problems: its proposed route, and the risks of oil leaks and the potential contamination of sensitive habitats; its energy costs and pollution costs caused by its extraction and combustion; its significant implications for the future energy policy of the United States. In terms of arrests, it was the US’s largest civil disobedience action since the mobilizations of the 1970s against nuclear power stations; it was, nonetheless, not a series of actions designed to physically obstruct construction, but to attract media attention and pressure President Obama into not approving the project. The way activists talked about these actions nonetheless reveals a shared emphasis on familiar themes. For DeChristopher, his action was a response to ‘a confluence of three injustices: the lack of a transparent and democratic process for using public land, the threat of climate change and the destruction of our natural heritage’.38 Key here is the idea of irreversibility: whilst a public policy may at any time be reformed, a law annulled, a decision overturned, or even rights rescinded, unexploited land cannot be returned 38 ‘DeChristopher Trial: Q&A with a Monkey-wrencher’, Salt Lake Tribune, 25 February 2011.

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to its prior state of integrity once its resources have been extracted. For Humphreys (2006), it is the nature of the goods that environmental activists seek to protect that may justify direct action: whereas reversibility is a central principle of the democratic process, on questions like climate change, or the protection of biodiversity and natural habitats, the impossibility of future democratic remediation may act as justification for the intervention of active citizens in situations of emergency. In contrast to DeChristopher’s direct, impromptu, and individual action, the sit-in campaign against Keystone XL was organized by established and major environmental NGOs, and followed an open letter signed by the executive directors of 350.org, Greenpeace USA, and Rainforest Action Network in September 2010. Castigating the refusal of the US Senate to act on climate change, the letter called for a non-violent mass disobedience campaign in the spirit of Gandhi and King, as ‘[h]istory suggests […] that one way to effectively communicate both to the general public and to our leaders the urgency of the crisis is to put our bodies on the line’.39 Revelations concerning the close links between TransCanada and the US State Department run by Hillary Clinton and the extent of the company’s financial donations to members of the House of Representatives reinforced the NGOs’ critique of the perversion of the democratic process by fossil fuel interests. 40 According to Maplight (a non-profit which tracks the influence of money in politics in the US), fossil fuel corporations donated some $ 12 million to representatives between July 2009 and June 2011. 41 In both cases, therefore, activists drew a direct line between ecological crisis, the crisis of representative democratic institutions, and the crisis of the temporal process of democracy, in similar terms to the model of ‘democratic disobedience’ outlined by Markovits (2005). Central to the critique formed in these cases is the notion of ‘tipping point’, a climate system threshold beyond which even small systemic perturbations can produced a qualitatively new system state. In the natural sciences, tipping points are located in sub-systems such as the Amazonian rainforest, the Australasian coral reef, and the west Greenland ice sheet. According to the climatologist and activist James Hansen, greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere, coupled with feedbacks already in the climate system 39 Bill McKibben, Phil Radford and Becky Tarbotton, ‘We Need Your Ideas: A Call for Direct Action in the Climate Movement’, YES! Magazine, 14 September 2010. 40 ‘Keystone XL: l’oléoduc qui éclabousse la Maison Blanche’, Le Monde, 12 October 2011. 41 ErnstFriedman, Jeffrey, ‘How Much Would “Huge Political Consequences” from the Oil & Gas Industry Cost?’, MapLight, 11 January 2012, https://maplight.org/story/how-much-wouldhuge-political-consequences-from-the-oil-gas-industry-cost/, last accessed 22 November 2018.

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and with future warming ‘have brought us to the precipice of a planetary tipping point’; even a moderate increase in global temperatures may cause the collapse of the Arctic ice sheet, in turn producing the ‘transition to an environment far outside the range that has been experienced by humanity, and [from which] there will be no return within any foreseeable future generation’ (Hansen, 2008). The question of reversibility remains therefore key. But this is also linked to the longer perspective of the distribution of rights through intergenerational justice, the principle that (broadly put) ‘we should leave our descendants enough to meet their basic needs and lead worthy and satisfying lives’ (Rendall, 2011, p. 884), or that ‘unless people in the future can be held responsible for the situation that they find themselves in, they should not be worse off than we are’ (Barry, 1997, p. 106). Indeed, it is in these terms that Hansen justified his own participation in the anti-Keystone sit-ins: for Hansen, construction of the pipeline would signal ‘game over’ for the climate, confirming US energy policy as carbon intensive, and abandoning any serious environmental action. Hansen argues that intergenerational justice is a moral question of comparable importance to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s; in such circumstances, breaking the law becomes a civic duty. 42 Urgency and Undocumented Migrants Disobedience campaigns in defence of the rights of undocumented migrants also typically use urgency arguments to justify taking illegal action. As noted above, the French network RESF, founded in Marseille in 2005, is designed to provide an immediate response to the deportation by the French state of people whose immigration status is irregular. The range of actions deployed by the network is familiar to many human rights organizations (petitions, media events, the ‘godfathering’ of undocumented migrant children to create links between citizen and non-citizen, and silent vigils across French towns and cities, which also create opportunities for distributing information on deportations and detentions centres). The fate of children is prominent within activist discussions and actions: RESF particularly criticizes ‘hunting children’, the detention of children and the break-up of families. 42 McGowan, Elizabeth, ‘NASA’s Hansen Explains Decision to Join Keystone Pipeline Protests’, InsideClimate News, 29 August 2011, https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20110826/james-hansennasa-climate-change-scientist-keystone-xl-oil-sands-pipeline-protests-mckibben-white-house, last accessed 22 November 2018.

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Humanitarian arguments are omnipresent, as are wider arguments about the denial of citizenship rights by and within democratic states, and the consequent effective exclusion of individuals from education and housing. Urgency is also, necessarily, at the heart of action. Deportation can be a rapid and often brutal process, 43 producing local micro-mobilizations where emergency action is required to protect an individual and their place in the community, in the face of a legal system alleged to be repressive and iniquitous. Activists and sympathizers are often alerted by social media and email and called to intervene urgently: [D.] is currently being deported. He is being put onto a flight at 12 o’clock to Point-a-Pitre, from where he will be conducted to Haiti. He should have been set free today at 16h55. A flight full of tourists and returning holidaymakers, used to snatch a father away from his two children – what an idea. […] If the father is deported, the mother and children will be placed into poverty. Beyond the appalling inhumanity of these deportations, they are also incredibly stupid: the father was working, was providing for his family and raising his children; his deportation will traumatize his children and make his whole family a burden on the local authority. Those who promote such policies are both inhumane and imbecilic. We have an hour and a half to stop this machine that is splitting up families. Remember: no verbal abuse or defamation. 44

In this case, the speed of the deportation process justifies the disobedient reaction: actions aiming to stop deportations even take place on board flights prior to takeoff, sometimes spontaneously, led by passengers. Those involved are sometimes prosecuted on disorder charges, risking two months in prison and substantial fines (Plantet, 2009). If the question of obtaining rights unjustly denied is therefore central to this and like it, a series of contemporary campaigns outlined here, there is also a sense of urgency is a legitimizing condition of action, irrespective of its framing within rights terms. Disobedient action is not therefore restricted to terms consonant with liberal interpretations of just cause, 43 There have been, for example, numerous arrests of schoolchildren at the school gates, though the practice is officially prohibited. Notably, the prohibition did not stop the arrest in eastern France of an undocumented 15-year-old Roma schoolgirl who had been living in France for five years, whilst on a school field trip in October 2013; see Jacquez (2017). 44 ‘IMPORTANT ET URGENTISSIME: un père expulsé dans une heure et demie’, email, RESF. info, 19 July 2009. The person concerned has been anonymized.

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but is often consonant with republican notions of active citizenship as a necessary corrective to the misuse or abuse of democratic mandate by political institutions and their agents, in the context of temporal constraint and irreversible action. Thus the urgency of critical moments is held to justify bypassing the democratic process (acting directly, in the here and now, rather than through indirect appeal to power holders, often held themselves to be prisoners of major corporate interests); further, democratic institutional processes are held to be neither capable of taking our future obligations to our descendants into account nor of acting quickly enough to prevent the harmful social consequences of policies and decisions already taken.

Disobedience and Neo-liberal Globalization Critique of and resistance to neo-liberal economic globalization has equally been a key feature of the spread of civil disobedience, in Western democracies in particular, over the last 20 years or so. As discussed above, in France, the Faucheurs volontaires (2006) consider that the patenting of transgenic plants by transnational corporations means ‘the subjectification of the agricultural world to industrial lobby groups, and the disappearance of crop and landscape diversity from our soils’; in this respect, the Faucheurs campaign is part of a wider movement against the advance of neoliberal norms and practices into civic culture and space, critiquing the doctrine that the market is the guarantor of individual liberties and that the role of the state is to assure the conditions of capital accumulation by domestic and transnational corporations (see Harvey 2005 for discussion). The result of this redrawing of the relationship between state, market and society is, according to union activist Christophe Aguiton (2001, p. 26), an erosion of institutional legitimacies and a generalized feeling of the powerlessness of political actors in the face of economic fetishes, as confusedly expressed by the notions of the ‘democratic deficit’ and the ‘crisis of citizenship’ and, more generally, by the discredit of the political process.

Whilst therefore the Faucheurs campaign can be understood within the specific genealogy of disobedience networks in France, it also emerged in a particular political context which is structurally different from that in which previous related struggles developed in France, such as the Larzac campaign.

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Disobedience and Global Justice A key difference here is that the civil disobedience campaigns of the late 1990s and the first decade of this century did not necessarily develop through resistance to the centralized state and critiques of its failure to grant and guarantee citizenship rights, but rather through resistance to private, transnational interests. Moreover, a repeating aspect of these movements is that their orientation towards the state is not a withdrawal from it, but rather an appeal to it to intervene further. The opposition between direct and indirect forms of action as highlighted above is thus nuanced: in numerous campaigns, the role of disobedient action is simultaneously the direct obstruction of corporate interest, and an indirect appeal to the state to play a greater role as arbiter of the general, collective, public interest. The action against a McDonald’s fast food restaurant in Millau in summer 1999, when peasant activists peacefully ‘dismantled’ a part-built fast-food restaurant, depositing the removed sections in front of the town hall, is emblematic of this tendency. 45 For the activists, McDonald’s symbolized the uniformization of consumption, the loss of food sovereignty, and the marketization of everyday life; the actions of dismantling and depositing can be read as first a symbolic attempt to disconnect market consumption from local civic territory, and second to re-forge a political connection over the legitimate space of sovereignty and citizenship. Equally, the Faucheurs volontaires campaign sought the introduction of much more restrictive (indeed, prohibitive) legislation on GM plants, and a break with the dominant doctrine of ‘co-existence’ between transgenic, organic, and conventional cultivation. By the same token, the anti-advertising group Déboulonneurs, which developed from Stopub, a loosely organized group which had carried out a number of ‘subvertisement’ actions in the Paris metro in 2003-2004 (Gattolin and Lefebvre, 2004), demanded that the state use the powers already at its disposal to regulate advertising in public space much more stringently, and introduce new regulations limiting commercial publicity to the same conditions imposed on political and associative advertising; a maximum poster size of 50cm x 70cm. In each of these cases, disobedient action against corporate power is claimed by activists as legitimate because citizens must act where political institutions fail to do so. These actions and campaigns developed immediately before or directly after the landmark global justice protests against the WTO meeting in Seattle, in November 1999. Numerous groups claiming and enacting 45 Including José Bové, who served 44 days in prison for the action.

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anti-capitalist direct action emerged after Seattle, adopting the tactics of militant confrontation and property destruction (the ‘Black Blocs’), and more widely, affinity group formation, jail solidarity, and protest puppetry (Wood, 2004; Juris, 2005b). Not all confrontational direct action followed the ‘performative violence’ of the Black Blocs, however. In Italy, the Tute bianche, or White Overalls, developed an embodied, interventionist form of civil disobedience in the Genoa G8 Summit protests of 2001, blocking access to conference rooms through a series of die-ins and sit-ins, and physically opposing police barricades; as David Graeber puts it, the White Overalls are a ‘mock army’ of ‘men and women dressed in elaborate forms of padding, ranging from foam armour to inner tubes to rubber-ducky flotation devices, helmets and chemical-proof white jumpsuits’, pushing back against riot police and the global elites they protect (2002, p. 66). For Graeber, this was a ‘new language’ of civil disobedience, composed not of familiar Gandhian non-violent activism, but rather characterized by confrontational and derisive street theatre and ‘non-violent warfare’, derived from the struggles of the Global South – notably, the Zapatistas and the Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement. Theatricality was a central aspect of the non-violent direct action of the global justice movement: for example, in the US, Direct Action Network, and in France Aarrg!! (Apprentis Agitateurs pour un réseau de résistance globale, Apprentice Agitators for a Global Resistance Network), established in 2001, notably adopted playful and theatrical intervention techniques, whilst the BAC (Brigade activiste des clowns) made its first appearance in France during the 2005 Euromayday protests, adopting the same strategies of derision and physical performative theatre as the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (CIRCA), which had greeted the visit of President George W. Bush to the UK in November 2003. Disobedience and Professional Identities In the specific French context, civil disobedience campaigns also developed in an occupational setting, as part of a collective mobilization to defend public services against encroaching neo-liberalization (Weissman, 2010). In sectors as diverse as education and forestry, individuals and organizations refused the introduction of new management and organizational techniques, opposing their professional conscience and their understanding of the values of their vocation to new procedures which they considered socially harmful and detrimental to their capacity to carry out their jobs properly. Thus, during the mass mobilizations against the liberalization of gas and electricity services in France in 2004, public sector workers calling

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themselves the ‘Energy Robin Hoods’ illegally reconnected supply to homes which had been cut off for reasons of non-payment of their bills (Béroud, 2005). For one local organization set up in Lyon in 2006, Together, we share a vision of energy and water as fundamental needs integral to the exercise of citizenship rights, and which can not be jeopardized for economic reasons. Accordingly, we act to ensure that no one is deprived of water, electricity or gas for reasons of social exclusion or poverty. 46

Professional mobilization in the education sector was also marked by civil disobedience campaigns. In November 2008, Alain Refalo, a primary schoolteacher and a longstanding member of the anti-militarist Mouvement pour une alternative non-violente (MAN), circulated an appeal for ‘pedagogic disobedience’, publicly refusing to apply the government’s education reforms. For Refalo, the reforms championed by the education minister, Xavier Darcos, which included the establishment of a pupil database and the introduction of individualized evaluation, were a process of dismantling education as a public service, and tantamount to the ‘disengagement of the state and introduction of a school system oriented towards competition’ (Refalo, 2010, p. 27; see also Meirieu, 2008). Clearly undertaken on the basis of conscience, his individual action produced a collective echo: in spring 2009, 3000 teachers followed his example, with teachers refusing to apply the reforms or provide the required information for the database. Education professionals are, as noted above, also central to RESF, as individual teachers, parents of pupils, and teaching unions have been at the heart of mobilizations actively resisting or refusals to comply with the identification and deportations of undocumented families with school-age children. Equally, professionalized resistance to neo-liberal reforms was apparent in the health sector in France, and particularly in psychiatry, where healthcare professionals mobilized against budgetary reductions and reforms to patient care which, they argued, both severely weakened their capacity to fulfil their public service mission and contravened professional ethics. In summer 2011, François Fillon’s conservative government introduced a new law enabling the imposition of psychiatric care without consent in the home, a law vigorously opposed by all of France’s numerous psychiatric healthcare unions, 47 and 46 ‘Les Robins des bois de l’énergie débarquent à Lyon!’, http://www.local.attac.org/rhone/ article.php3?id_article=952, 13 November 2006, last accessed 27 July 2011. 47 ‘La réforme de la loi sur la psychiatrie entre en vigueur, dans un climat de fronde’, Le Monde, 1 August 2011.

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by a ‘Collective of the 39 against the dark night of security’, who called for a professionalized disobedient opposition: Disobedient Psychiatrists Collective of the 39 against the dark night of security and the law of 5 July 2011 Declaration of 1 August 2011 Citizenship, liberty, psychiatry: declaration of an entry into resistance The law of 5 July 2011 concerning ‘the rights and protections of people receiving psychiatric treatment and the arrangements of care’ and its associated procedures are now effective. The campaign against this law can and must be continued after its enactment. This law – in the same vein as those on foreigners, immigration, repeat offending, preventive detention, youth justice, homeland security, and so on – is part of a significant attack on our freedoms and social rights. The law organizes social surveillance of vulnerable and precarious people, stigmatized as ‘dangerous groups’. Following the introduction of generalized data collection and monitoring of potential troublemakers, this law introduces a ‘psychiatric record’ of the ‘mentally ill’, without creating a ‘right to be forgotten’. This law is fundamentally unacceptable because it imposes constraint and social control as the organizing principle of psychiatric care, both in the hospital and at home, under the absurd new designation of care without consent. The relational role of care is consequently regraded as ‘expertise in dangerousness’, exacerbating the current problem of psychic distress and disillusion in many healthcare teams, and consequently increasing errors in the provision of care at home. […] As a result, from 1 August, the date the law comes into effect, we propose an ethical programme of action and resistance: – The refusal of psychiatrists and carers, wherever possible, to implement measures of constraint. And, notably, the refusal of healthcare teams to activate ‘constraint care’ at home, to the extent that it is contrary to fundamental human rights and professional ethics. Equally, no medical opinion must be given without an examination of the patient. – Systematic referral of such cases to the relevant courts, with the patient examined in person rather than by videoconference. – The processing of information within 72 hours, so that individuals do not fall into the psychiatric trap created by this law, but can access the psychic care that to which they have a right.

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– Support for legal actions undertaken by patents subjected to ‘care without consent’, and for the action in Parliament which will inevitably follow. Establishing a dedicated collective of lawyers and judges is essential for this. – The establishment of a national body for monitoring the implementation of the law and its data collection procedures, and alerting people subjected to ‘care without consent’ of their rights, to report to Parliament, to the Controller General of Places of Deprivation of Liberty, to the National Consultative Commission on Human Rights, and to the public, of all infringements to human rights and to the ethics of psychic care. We are and remain mobilized to accomplish a task both democratic and professional.

The organization of political activism within professional settings was a key feature of anti-austerity protests in Spain in 2011, during the Marea Blanca, or White Tide, protest. In France, such activism was less prominent than the highly public occupations of hospitals and healthcare centres in Spain; it remained nonetheless structured by a professionally rooted call to disobedience in the name of the public sector, even as the state promoted and enacted measures of neo-liberal management and surveillance identified with wider global shifts and processes. In some cases, the occupational context of mobilization specifically promoted the social values associated with the sector, and the expertise of professionals within it, such as primary teachers who refused to introduce individual testing on the grounds that it had no pedagogical value; indeed, a sceptical view might argue that by ignoring the political, the professional framework of disobedience defended entrenched sectoral power and knowledge over the democratic general interest (see Ramus, 2014). In other cases, nonetheless, professionalized activism provided a framework for social solidarity, such as where employees of the Agence nationale pour l’emploi, or National Employment Agency (ANPE), found methods not to withdraw social security payments, even where constrained to do so. In many cases within the public sector, such actions belonged to the sphere of daily, material practice rather than to overt political campaigning. More widely, the financial crisis of 2008-2009, and the subsequent bailout of financial capital from public funding, followed by the imposition of fiscal retrenchment policies by European governments from spring 2011, saw a massive transfer of wealth within these states from poor to rich and from the public to private sectors. The resulting reforms to state health and

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education services and pensions provisions, together with housing evictions (in Spain in particular) and loss of employment, produced a series of mass social mobilizations across the continent, most notably in the movements of the squares of southern Europe (and, belatedly, the French Nuit debout of 2015). These mobilizations allied opposition to austerity policies to a critique of the representative democratic institutions and processes that produced them, and the resulting inter-generational crisis of youth unemployment; following the critiques of global neo-liberalism advanced by the global justice movement in the late 1990s and 2000s, they also marked a return to the nation state as the dominant organizational and ideational framework for mass social movement mobilization (Hayes, 2017). In Athens, Barcelona, Lisbon, and Madrid, these ‘movements of the squares’ correspondingly advocated an active citizenship predicated on the disobedient reclamation of civic public space, as prolonged occupations sought to establish deliberative democratic procedures, new forms of solidarity, and a sustained collective challenge to the privatization of the social. As Gerbaudo (2017) argues, these movements were characterized above all by ‘citizenism’, a radical and popular appropriation of the idea of citizenship in response to the imposition of fiscal austerity. For the Spanish Indignados and Greek Aganaktismenoi activists interviewed by Gerbaudo, the imposition of austerity measures supposed the prior erosion of citizenship; accordingly, they called for a re-appropriation of citizenship, as these rights had effectively been taken away from them. The demands of the squares for ‘real democracy now’, encapsulated in the development of new forms of direct and participatory democracy, expressed an acceptance of the legitimacy of the state as an organizing principle and source of social cohesion, whilst emphasizing its capture by an oligarchy. In some cases, civil disobedience was an explicitly claimed form of action, such as in the multiple resistances against housing evictions in Spain, or in Greece, the 200,000 strong movement Δεν πληρώνω (Den plirono, or I Do Not Pay), which organized from 2008 against road toll charges, price increases on public transport, and – subsequently – the conditions imposed upon Greece by the ‘troika’ of the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Central Bank. Tax refusal was widespread, from the call by Athens municipalities to resist payment of new property taxes, to the mobilization of electricians’ unions against the disconnection of electricity to households who could no longer pay their bills. The municipal authority of Patras, Greece’s third-largest city, called on its citizens to support all actions of collective fiscal disobedience, and ordered its municipal services to re-establish electricity to all households who had been cut off. In the

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United States, equally, the launch of the ‘Occupy Our Home’ campaign in December 2011 in the wake of Occupy Wall Street’s occupation of Zuccotti Park provides a further example of the centring of disobedience campaigns on social solidarity, creating a network of organizations aiming to protect citizens from loan foreclosure and dispossession, supporting families and individuals in their struggles against expulsion from their homes.

Conclusion In the Occupy and anti-austerity protests, the figure of the citizen was central: where activists felt that their voices were heard neither in the ballot box nor in traditional forms of protest such as demonstrations, the occupation of public space was a key method for making visible their political claims, their distress at the deterioration of the conditions of social organization, and their critique of representative democratic systems and processes. Here, political and institutional austerity – the exclusion of a real democracy from the public sphere – is allied to the imposition of fiscal austerity, and the repressive responses of state authorities which seek to make (as in Spain) widespread forms of protest illegal. Where, in the classical formulation of civil disobedience, the US civil rights movement mobilized for the extension and recognition of citizenship rights unjustly denied, civil disobedience actions in global justice and anti-austerity protests have typically been legitimized by activists in the name of the defence of a public civic sphere captured by private corporate interests. Action remains urgent, but in a different sense than that implied by King and his followers: urgency is frequently a logistical matter of stopping an action before it happens, from fossil fuel exploitation to housing evictions, rather than a moral question of justice too long denied. In the next chapter, we discuss the means and tactics of disobedience, and its capacity to embody radical positions in action.

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Since the mid-1990s, and following the movements of the squares in 2011 in particular, collective actions of civil disobedience appear to be increasingly normal aspects of political life within Western liberal democracies. For many activists, the decision to commit acts of civil disobedience comes not (or not just) from conscience, but from their understanding of their duties as citizens (and in some cases as professionals). In such cases, disobedience is felt as less a choice than an obligation: to act otherwise is an impossibility. If the range of types of action undertaken are now familiar from numerous movements, disobedient actions remain particular because of the specific set of techniques and risks that they require and entail for activists, and because of the way that they frequently mobilize media and judicial arenas in order to demonstrate commitment, influence public opinion, and beyond that, convert institutional centres of power. Accordingly, disobedient action also frequently entails the development of specific forms of organization, such as affinity groups. In this chapter, we discuss the multiple different ways that disobedience actions are carried out (the ‘repertoire’ of civil disobedience action), how they are deployed to create specific effects and to form and reflect group identities, and how they become communicative vehicles, both within movement networks and in order to connect with publics and influence opponents and allies. We then discuss the judicial consequences of these actions, focusing in particular on the case of antinuclear campaigners in northern France.

The Constraints of Illegal Action What, in the terms defined by Tilly (2003), we can call the repertoire of disobedient action is overwhelmingly drawn from theories of non-violent action, with the specific distinction that it is designed to challenge or disrupt the prevailing legal framework. Different groups can be expected to use different types of action, and these actions can be expected to be broadly influenced by the identities and goals of the groups, the resources they command, the cultural contexts in which they operate, and the responses and counter-strategies of public authorities and political opponents. As discussed above, at the most basic level, we can categorize disobedient actions as either actions of non-cooperation (especially though not exclusively associated with the private sphere of action, such as the refusal to pay tax),

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or of active interventions in public space (occupations, physical obstructions, property destructions, resistances to the actions of state agents, and so on). Principal Forms of Disobedient Action In public space: – Occupations of different types of site: public squares, squats, trees, electricity pylons, railways lines, airport runways, power stations, churches, offices, sit-ins, die-ins, all types of non-authorized entry into public and private premises – Property destruction, sabotage – Unauthorized boycotts, strikes, demonstrations; blockages of construction sites – ‘Hacktivism’, cyber-attacks (such as Distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks), email saturation campaigns – Support marches, demonstrations, manifestos, open letters, public meetings, pamphlets and documentary films, court support actions In the private and professional spheres: – Tax refusal – Protection of vulnerable individuals, and ‘underground railroads’ (accommodation of refugees, asylum seekers, draft dodgers) – Non-application of bureaucratic norms and regulations

This type of categorization is relatively basic, and its boundaries are fuzzy: actions within the private and professional sphere, for instance, are necessarily undertaken also in public space (through manifestos, platforms, conferences and so on that are not themselves actions of disobedience, but without which the disobedient action would struggle to attain its disobedient character, that of a public unlawful challenge to a specific policy or law). The type of classical distinction between the private sphere of conscience and the public sphere of collective political action, discussed above, depends foremost on the meanings attached to a given action by the person undertaking it, as an act is primarily understood to be conscientious because of the motivations that an individual or group ascribes to their action. But from a more grounded perspective, distinctions between private and public actions often depend on the characteristics of staging the action, and the attendant management of the risks and interactions that staging entails. For example, the actions of individuals to provide shelter for nonregularized migrants frequently depend on linkages within initially covert

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networks, before becoming increasingly structured and public, often through their ‘revelation’ by the action of the public authorities. Thus in the Roya Valley in south-east France, farmer Cédric Herrou was prosecuted (and handed a suspended fine of € 3000) in 2017 for giving humanitarian aid to unregularized migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa crossing the border from Italy into France. Herrou’s arrest and trial transformed the hitherto discreet operation of an underground railroad by a small number of the valley’s inhabitants into a ‘public’ and political challenge, with the valley as a whole becoming an ongoing focus for collective discussion and action on France’s illiberal migrant policies, notably through the constitution of the Roya citoyenne network. 48 The conditions of staging are also important to our understanding of civil disobedience, because – rather than an abstract or autonomous set of non-violent direct actions, normatively distinct from other forms of social movement action – it is defined by the intention of the activists to break the law and to be prosecuted for the action committed. Civil disobedience is thus highly dependent on the precise contours of the local legal-political context; what is transgressive in one time and place, and undertaken by one set of actors, may be normative when undertaken by other social subjects, or in another time and place (for example, sitting at a restaurant counter, or boycotting a specific nation). Civil disobedience is thus always a contingent set of interactions, defined through the encounter between legal norms, social subjects, and the available set of actions within any given political culture. Here, we can see that the types of action developed by Thoreau, Gandhi, and the US civil rights movement remain important today: activist groups regularly translate, diffuse, and hold workshops to debate the principles, techniques, and significance of previous struggles, using them as a resource for present and future struggles. Yet, techniques of civil disobedience have also become increasingly complex, particular, and delineated through their adoption and transformation within specific networks of actors, and through the development and adaptation of new technologies of action (such as the ‘Seattle tactics’ now common at G8 summit protests, or the risk-taking techniques of what Doherty (2000, pp. 70-71) calls ‘manufactured vulnerability’, where environmental activists use tripods, tunnels, and ‘lock-ons’ to place their own physical safety in the hands of police and private security). New information and communications technologies, including social media have, equally, broadened the scope of disobedience action (Jordan, 2002). 48 See ‘La vallée citoyenne’, Lien social, 8 June 2017, pp. 30-31; ‘As Refugees Traverse France’s Roya Valley, Locals Ask: Should We Help Them?’, Christian Science Monitor, 23 January 2017.

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Civil Disobedience as Technique In the wake of the US civil rights movement and the resistance to the Vietnam War, the model of civil disobedience imagined by Arendt opposes, as we have seen, the conscientious individual to the organized minority; it also conceives of civil disobedience as the preserve of a mass movement. For Arendt, civil disobedience is action undertaken by ‘a significant number of citizens’ acting in concert; equating it to a new form of voluntary associationalism, she quotes De Tocqueville approvingly: ‘The citizens who form the minority associate in order, first, to show their numerical strength and so to diminish the moral power of the majority’ (Arendt, 1972, pp. 74, 96, emphasis added). Civil disobedience, in other words, is a question of numbers as well as principles. In some senses, the emphasis on numerical strength here is very similar to social movement action understood more widely: Tilly (1993), for example, considers social movements to be public displays of worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment, with numbers denoting a movement’s relative strength, and thus social legitimacy and representativity. Yet this understanding becomes more problematic when civil disobedience is not in fact undertaken by large mass movements, and where it requires not just very high levels of risk and commitment, but specialist technical skills and forms of organization. Here there are two broad models of action. The first is professionalized, structured around a clear division of activist labour: for an organization like Greenpeace, a highly formalized movement organization with a large membership supports a small group of activists with defined skills to undertake specific sets of actions. In Greenpeace’s case, the model is centralized, professionalized, and hierarchical: disobedient actions are undertaken by paid staff or volunteers who participate in regular training (for climbing or sailing, for example), backed by high levels of resources (funding, legal support and counsel, media, communications) capable of financing action and mobilizing support for arrested activists. Greenpeace itself is nonetheless usually careful not to engage in acts of property destruction: typically, Greenpeace action is communicational in intention, and involves symbolically occupying a facility or installation (such as the occupation of Shell’s Brent Spar oil rig off the Norwegian coast in April 1995 (Bennie, 1998), the scaling of the chimney of the coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth in Kent in September 2007 (Hayes, 2013), or the scaling by seven activists of a construction site crane behind the White House in Washington, DC, to attach a large banner bearing the word ‘Resist’ in January 2017).49 49 ‘Greenpeace Protesters Climb 270-foot Crane in Downtown D.C., Disrupt Traff ic’, The Washington Post, 25 January 2017.

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In contrast to this professionalized model, direct action groups typically structure themselves through affinity groups. L. A. Kauffman (2017, pp. 14-18), in her history of radical direct action in the USA since the 1960s, underlines that the affinity group as a form of organization has developed into a recurring feature of non-violent action in particular. Affinity groups are typically small (half a dozen to a dozen members), and – because they are designed for action which involves personal, physical risk – are characterized by high levels of autonomy, flexibility, mutual trust between group members, and decentralized, non-hierarchical, consensus decision-making. Rather than seeing civil disobedience as the result of a deep moral collective engagement, focus on the different forms of organization and action enable us to see it as a generalizable set of techniques that can be mobilized and invested with particular meanings by a series of (different) social movement groups. Nonetheless, because of the high costs of action (the potential physical and symbolic risk), the demands of self-control required by the commitment to non-violence, the complexity of techniques of action, and the potential consequences of arrest, trial, and sanction, it is a form of action which is explicitly taught and learnt. Indeed, the politically productive potential of civil disobedience can be said to lie in this tension between its location within specific historical struggles, its adaptability across contexts, and the demands of commitment and technique it requires. Of course, in historical perspective, disobedience is already an explicitly learnt form of action subject to rational planning. In the late 1950s, the Reverends James Lawson and Kelly Miller Smith, both leaders of the NCLC, ran a ‘non-violent workshop’ to teach local college students the philosophy and tactics of non-violent protest. This type of initiative was central to the capacity of student activists to carry out the sit-ins which spread rapidly across Southern cities in the US between 1957 and 1960, achieving a spectacular breakthrough at Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960 (Morris, 1981). Workshops and weekend training camps are now commonplace moments in the lives of movement activists committed to illegal direct action, generally mixing theory, simulation and role play with wider political and behavioural discussions and creative expression. The importance of camps and workshops for disseminating understandings of action techniques and tactics is emphasized by Hadden (2015, pp. 134-135) in her account of the climate justice movement. She underlines that contentious groups and activists often report learning about actions from their peers; climate camps were crucial for tactical diffusion, especially the learning of practical skills (how to climb fences, assemble tripods, use lock-ons). Learning also lowers the costs of action: knowing that others are doing similar actions makes it safer and more appealing to engage in an action.

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In France, the Désobéir network (www.desobeir.net) runs a regular series of interactive two-day workshops open to activists (and indeed, general members of the public) interested in the techniques of clown activism, non-violent direct action, and civil disobedience. This is practical learning as activist consultancy: instructors can be hired for a weekend at a cost of € 150 per day, plus costs, for groups of at least 8-10 people; sessions offered include non-violent techniques, web activism, the Alinsky method of positive leadership and inter-individual relationship building, citizen journalism, artivism, activist climbing, and so on. A ‘trainings catalogue’ sets out the workshop options; under ‘Strategic accompaniment’, for example: Explain your issue to us. We’ll put out experience of a decade of citizen campaigns and social and environmental struggles, including international campaigns, at the service of your goals by tailoring a bespoke training course for you, enabling us to show you the most advanced mobilization and action techniques. (La Boîte militante, n.d., p. 21)

A series of books are also available for purchase. As participant observers, we took part in one workshop, held in Lannion in Brittany in autumn 2010, run by Xavier Renou, a former communications director at Greenpeace France and founder of the Désobéir network. There were 24 participants in the workshop; twelve women and twelve men, students, retired people, longstanding activists, active in a series of campaigns (pro-Palestine, defending the Breton language, public services, the environment). The weekend was divided into different sessions: how to develop bonds within a group, where different participants feel the boundaries lie between violence and non-violence (‘How far would you go?’), how not to respond to provocation, the importance of maintaining self-discipline, understanding the role of the police (‘public servants and citizens just like us’) and of your adversary, so as better to understand how to react. Legal workshops followed media training, action planning, and how to not to say anything in a police interview, postarrest. For Renou (2009, p. 16), the goal of these workshops is to ‘develop the proper routine of thinking strategically’, to ‘create and promote amongst us a culture of effectiveness’. The diffusion of knowledge and techniques is often characterized as a monological, or uni-directional process, structured as a flow from an emitter to a receiver (or from an originator to an adopter, a teacher to a pupil). In the case of civil disobedience, given the importance of theorization and technique, this can be expected to be especially so: Strang and Meyer (1993) argue that the more successfully theorized a practice is, the more

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its diffusion can be expected to conform to the monological model. But the model in these workshops is dialogical; in part, perhaps, because of the explicitly entrepreneurial ambition of the trainings, it functions as an interactive dialogue between local activists and a facilitator, who is recruited to run the workshop. This is activist learning as mutual exploration, and where activists (and individual citizens) from various groups are able to meet and share experiences and understandings (including of the limits of their own understandings of and willingness to engage in action). The obvious success of these workshops – there are currently around 20 one-day or two-day workshops a year across France, plus a handful in Brussels and Geneva, whilst numerous further workshops were held in the run up to the December 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris (COP 21) and during the Nuit debout protests of May 2016 – also point to the transversal appeal of civil disobedience, to its appropriation, reworking, and regular use within the tactical toolkits of activist groups, rather than being confined to a small number of particular campaigns which are defined by its use as a repeated, integrated strategy. Traïni (2009) observes how participation in social mobilization creates specific emotional resonances, which act as markers of individual identity. Beyond the cognitive goal of technical learning, these workshops function to build collective identities (though process of exchange and the production of mutual recognition, of sentiment in common), but also to anchor the participant as a disobedient subject, to shift the conception of disobedience from an action external to the individual (which the individual uses, deploys) to one which is internal to the individual, whose understanding of their own identity is that of a disobedient citizen. These workshops are therefore also moments of transformation of the self: understanding techniques of public disruption, of action under pressure, of emotional self-control require an incorporation of disobedience within everyday activist practices and understandings of what it is to be an activist. This, indeed, is potentially the most original aspect of disobedient activism: not just the undertaking of action as a physical act, but the importance of embodiment. Through refusal to comply, the activist expresses opposition through their resistant presence, their refusal to be managed (or perhaps more accurately, their demand that their management by the state or corporation be active and physical and present, rather than simply assumed in advance); by doing so, the disobedient inserts the resistant citizen subject into the continuation of politics. This political insertion of the physical and embodied, rather than absent and abstract citizen, is also acutely visible in the prominence of the hunger strike within the repertoire of disobedient

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actions. Indeed, as Siméant (2009) underlines, the hunger strike is an appeal for visibility, a demand to be considered present and to be accorded the rights of citizenship which confirm presence. Here, the hunger strike has become an emblematic political resource for those who have no other resources, particularly unregularized migrants. Self-discipline is especially important given that, by acting physically in public space and refusing to comply with general normative requirements of public conduct, disobedient activists bring themselves into encounters not just with the public and public authorities, but with corporate media organizations who can be expected both to communicate their actions and to be unsupportive of them. What Goffman (1959/1990) refers to as ‘image management’ – the presentation of the self through action within a given encounter or interaction – can thus be expected to be fundamental to civil disobedience actions. The organization of workshops also enables the more hierarchically oriented groups to refine their requirements, to develop their conception of what an activist should do (for Greenpeace, as we have seen, to form an ‘elite’ skilled group), and correspondingly to exclude individuals or behaviours who do not meet these requirements.

Civil Disobedience and Media Representation The embodied and ‘sacrif icial’ nature of civil disobedience, that of the activist submitting their disruptive body to potential physical repression in the public square, and then to further potential sanction following arrest and trial, is one of the central tenets of the form of action. The preparedness of activists to submit themselves to potentially excessive force from opponents and public authorities carries significant symbolic value: it is integral to the construction of the action as an ‘open’, publicly accountable action, and to the demonstration of (in Tilly’s terms) the particular commitment that breaking the law requires. Offering one’s body to repression and violence is central to Gandhian practice as well as to Christian narratives of conscientious action; but it is also central to the construction of action as a media event, and thus to the attempt by activists to use the staging of brutalized bodies in action in order to create political advantage, and delegitimize the unilateral and unequal displays of force by state (or corporate) power. Perhaps most emblematic and influential of such action is the report filed by the American United Press correspondent Webb Miller, brought along by Gandhi to document the 1930 Salt Satyagraha. It is worth quoting his report of the events of

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21 May 1930 at length; Gandhi, arrested, was not present at the events, which were directed by Sarojini Naidu. Webb Miller’s Report of the Confrontation at Dharasana between British Forces and Gandhi’s Followers, 21 May 1930 Mme Naidu called for prayer before the march started and the entire assemblage knelt. She exhorted them: Gandhi’s body is in jail but his soul is with you. India’s prestige is in your hands. You must not use any violence under any circumstances. You will be beaten but you must not resist; you must not even raise a hand to ward off blows. […] In complete silence, the Gandhi men drew up and halted a hundred yards from the stockade. A picked column advanced from the crowd, waded the ditches, and approached the barbed-wire stockade. […] Police officials ordered the marchers to disperse… The column silently ignored the warning and slowly walked forward. I stayed with the main body, about a hundred yards from the stockade. Suddenly at a word of command, scores of native police rushed upon the advancing marchers and rained blows on their heads with their steel-shod lathis. Not one of the marchers even raised an arm to fend off the blows. They went down like ten-pins. From where I stood, I heard the sickening whacks of the clubs on unprotected skulls. The waiting crowd of watchers groaned and sucked in their breaths in sympathetic pain at every blow. Those struck down fell sprawling, unconscious or writhing in pain with fractured skulls or broken shoulders. In two or three minutes the ground was quilted with bodies. Great patches of blood widened on their white clothes. The survivors without breaking ranks silently and doggedly marched on until struck down. […] Then another column formed while the leaders pleaded with them to retain their self-control. They marched slowly towards the police. Although every one knew that within a few minutes he would be beaten down, perhaps killed, I could detect no signs of wavering or fear. They marched steadily with heads up, without the encouragement of music or cheering or any possibility that they might escape serious injury or death. The police rushed out and methodically and mechanically beat down the second column. There was no fight, no struggle; the marchers simply walked forward until struck down. (Miller, 1940, pp. 134-137)

As Weber (1993, p. 275) notes, Miller’s account of the violence administered to Gandhi’s followers outside the Dharasana salt works, ‘besides being one

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of the more famous pieces of political reporting, was the main vehicle for transmitting facts of the raid to the outside world’. Suffering here has not just the double function of Gandhian spiritual practice (self-realization through suffering; the conversion of the opponent through their realization of their own oppressive force), but a third, eminently secular role: the conversion to the cause of bystander publics through the media communication of the event (Martin and Varney, 2003; Stephan and Chenoweth, 2008, p. 11; Schock, 2013, p. 284). Similar tactics were repeatedly used by the US civil rights movement: not only was the development of television key to the success of the Montgomery bus boycott, as protest and the violent responses of state authorities and the white majority were relayed throughout the world (Bermanzohn, 2002, p. 157), but the production of contrasts between disciplined, non-violent civil disobedience and excessive, violent police action became a central concern and recurring pattern of the movement, and of King’s escalatory strategy of non-violent tension in particular (Meyer, 1999, p. 270). Non-violence theorist Gene Sharp refers to this strategy as political jiu-jitsu: By combining nonviolent discipline with solidarity and persistence in struggle, the nonviolent actionists cause the violence of the opponent’s repression to be exposed in the worst possible light. This, in turn, may lead to shifts in opinion and then to shifts in power relationships favorable to the nonviolent group. These shifts result from withdrawal of support for the opponent and the grant of support to the nonviolent actionists. (Sharp, 1973, p. 657)

The goal of political jiu-jitsu is to use the opponent’s strength against them, turning their greatest asset into their key weakness. The result can be backfire: the severity of repression can be transformative, in that it reduces the legitimacy of the repressive authority, and increases both the internal cohesion of and the external public support for the repressed group (Hess and Martin, 2006). It is not enough for repression to happen, however: in order to produce backfire, an event must be perceived as unjust, and thus must be effectively communicated to a receptive audience. The media remains a crucial relay and amplification mechanism for social movements, particularly in asymmetrical conflicts, where effective communication can help overcome the disadvantage of low resources, and potentially give movements standing, or legitimacy, as well as a platform for communicating their ideas or preferred ways of speaking about a given issue.

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However, the media construction of this type of action is far from reliably positive; media organizations have autonomous interests, and pursue their own ideological and financial agendas. The potential pitfalls of attempting to secure media attention are vast, particularly given the emphasis within the commercial media on entertainment values over those of reporting (Gamson, 2004, p. 243). As Rosie and Gorringe (2009) point out, attempts by outsider groups to secure wide media coverage can be counterproductive, as coverage of spectacular, event-driven action can obscure the underlying causes of a campaign. Moreover, there is some evidence that (all things being equal) undertaking spectacular action is less influential in gaining media coverage than having a strong organization: the media are more likely to turn to professionalized groups than to those with few resources when seeking to communicate about a given issue (Andrews and Caren, 2010). In such circumstances, it is unsurprising that activists develop their own media, using since the late 1990s the opportunities created by new internet and communications technologies. Inter alia, Occupy, Indignados, and global and climate justice movements have used social media to document arrests, relay the intimidation and repression that they have been subjected to, coordinate their own actions, and build broader publics (Juris, 2005a; Askanius and Uldam, 2011; Lievrouw, 2011). They can of course also use these affordages in order to manage their image in other ways. To take one example, in Brussels in November 2011, the ‘indignés’ mobilized in front of the Franco-Belgian Dexia bank were able to control the protest, sidelining a number of activists who wanted to smash the bank’s windows.50 Using YouTube, the activists were able to relay images of the action on internet, both documenting police violence, and demonstrating their own capacity for self-discipline and organization, as well as their ability to identify and exclude those who refused to accept the group’s collective definition of its own action. This control of the action’s non-violent grammar required the theatrical inventiveness of a troupe of clowns, whose intervention was able to balance derision with non-violence. For multiple reasons (journalistic norms, format constraints, the allure of violent images), strategies of non-violent maintenance are rarely shown or analysed by media outlets. Activist media is able to fill this gap, able to document both repression and the group’s ability to negotiate self-control and with it, their ‘civility’.

50 See the site of the Belgian ‘indignés’, http://www.indignez-vous.be, last accessed 12 January 2012.

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Greenpeace, Reporters of Their Own Action Greenpeace is an emblematic example of the importance of a highly sophisticated media strategy for impression management, organizational growth, and public influence. Greenpeace evolved out of local countercultural networks in Vancouver, bringing together Quaker activists, environmentalists, and Americans avoiding the Vietnam War draft; its founding action, in 1971, was to sail to Amchitka atoll in the Aleutian Islands, in an abortive (and unsuccessful) attempt to stop a US weapons test. The group’s decision to include on the voyage a young journalism student who was dodging the Vietnam draft was consequential: images of the group’s mission and attempts to stop the test were relayed to and taken up by the local press, making highly visible what was little more than an unsuccessful attempt to enter a prohibited military area (Ollitrault, 2008). During the 1970s, activists like Robert Garner filmed whaling campaigns and the slaughter of seal cubs, presenting the images to the media, who did little at the time to cover these actions and issues. Greenpeace decided early that action by itself was not enough: feelings of injustice have to be transmitted and nurtured, and to do that, people have to feel that they are also at the ‘crime scene’. At the time, there was a common theory that the Holocaust would never have happened had there been reports and images of the concentration camps (Ollitrault, 1999). Greenpeace’s actions stopped short of direct intervention and deliberate law breaking, privileging instead an ethic of bearing witness, not just as a small group, but via effective media relay, as representatives of general public opinion. The group’s origins show the strategic importance of exploiting media images, especially where activists are not campaigning to stop a harm that is happening to them or to other human subjects, but in order to give voice to a third party (the environment, animals). Potential sympathizers were able in this way to see the proliferation of injustices with their own eyes, whilst the conscious development of action as a ‘David against Goliath’ narrative also proved to be highly effective at leveraging public opinion and financial donations, as the group mobilized supporters far beyond its initial small circle of activists. Following decades of internal conflict, factionalism, organizational growth, bureaucratization, and global restructuring this mode of action remains intact at the heart of the group’s modus operandi: the auto-production of images is designed to demonstrate and diffuse injustice, the treatment inflicted on activists, and the ‘heroic’ nature of Greenpeace action itself.

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Civil Disobedience, Criminal Prosecution As we have seen, undertaking civil disobedience implies participating in illegal action, whilst adopting the role of the citizen who interiorizes and respects the norms of behaviour in public spaces; who maintains the boundaries of civility, and thus differentiates themself from the delinquent, the deviant, the irrational. It also typically requires substantial physical risk, integrating the values of self-sacrifice and heroism; non-violence is a tool designed to enable persuasion and cooperation, but also to create leverage over the opponent, both during and as a direct result of the action. However, acting in a disciplined and non-violent way is not always enough: activists engaged in civil disobedience are also frequently arrested, and by obligation or by choice called to defend their conduct in court. In political theorizations of civil disobedience, preparedness to be prosecuted is a guarantee of and action’s civil, rather than criminal, character. For Bedau (1961, p. 659), Normally, committing civil disobedience does not involve acting with disloyal, seditious, traitorous, or rebellious intent, nor with the intent to resist, even nonviolently, the legal consequences of the act.

Rawls, similarly, underlines that ‘the willingness to accept the legal consequences of one’s conduct’ is central to the act’s public and non-violent nature, to its fidelity to law, the proof of its fundamental ‘civility’; disobedients accordingly must ‘pay a certain price to convince others that [their] actions have […] a sufficient moral basis in the political convictions of the community’ (1971/1999, p. 322). Of course, what the ‘legal consequences of one’s conduct’ constitute, what the price that must be paid is – whether it means submission to prosecution, or acceptance of sanction – is open to question here. Cohen takes this reasoning a step further: disobedients should not just willingly offer themselves for arrest and prosecution, but should also automatically accept whatever punishment the court hands down, entering either a guilty plea or one of no contest. For Cohen, not to do so is to undermine the moral power and commitment of the act: A willingness to accept public punishment for a deliberate public violation strongly reinforces the general belief in that commitment. But the effort to have the illegal conduct excused because it is a protest sharply reduces its effectiveness as a protest. If, after having disobeyed the law to make a dramatic self-sacrifice, one then seeks to avoid the penalty which

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makes it a sacrifice, the depth and completeness of one’s commitment is likely to be questioned. (Cohen, 1969, p. 177, emphasis in original; see also Cohen, 1966)

The acceptance of legal sanction is indeed central to ‘historic’ civil disobedience struggles. Thoreau, Gandhi, and King each underlined the importance of accepting imprisonment. Gandhi, having already served jail time in South Africa, was sentenced to six years in prison in Ahmedabad in March 1922 on sedition charges; speaking in court, he demanded the judge impose the highest penalty available, precisely because colonial rule was unjust; and because anything else would be to treat him as something other than a citizen.51 King, arrested in Birmingham, Alabama, in April 1963, writes in his ‘Letter from Birmingham City Jail’ that: One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law. (King, 1963)

Accepting sanction is thus, variously, testimony to the courage, sacrifice, and sense of citizen responsibility of the disobedient, a resource which confers moral worth to the transgressive act of public lawbreaking, and of integrity to the lawbreaker. Accepting legal punishment draws attention to the injustice of the exercise of power, and reinforces the legitimacy of the protest action. Yet civil disobedients rarely, if ever, act like this: typically, in court, they accept the facts of their lawbreaking action, admitting them openly, but seek to mount a public interest defence, claiming them as an act of necessity, or by claiming (where legal systems offer it) lawful excuse. To understand why activists do so requires shifting the terms of the discussion, away from questions of conscientious action and moral character, and towards the language of costs, resources, threats, and opportunities, to the material aspects of struggle, and to the productive possibilities that trials offer as dramatic (and potentially transformative) events within a larger campaign.

51 For Gandhi’s speech, see ‘Statement in the Great Trial of 1922’, http://www.gandhimanibhavan.org/gandhicomesalive/speech3.htm, last accessed 31 January 2018.

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Trials as Political Arenas As Barkan points out, the prosecutions and trials of political activists are ‘normal events in the life cycle of many protest movements’ (2006, p. 183). Criminal trials are arenas for political interaction, movement building, and tactical decision-making; they offer regulated, highly codified spaces of engagement in which activists can attempt to secure favourable outcomes, challenge the basis of the laws they have broken, and put the policy or law against which they are protesting ‘on trial’. In France, groups like the Déboulonneurs and the Faucheurs volontaires explicitly integrate securing criminal trials into their campaign strategies. Since 2005, the Déboulonneurs have committed regular, open and public direct action against advertising billboards across a number of French cities (principally Paris, Rouen, Lille), seeking to impose a maximum size of 40cm x 30cm on commercial advertising posters. For the group, being prosecuted is a strategic aim to enable them to make arguments in court, though the police frequently choose not to arrest (and the state not to prosecute). The Faucheurs volontaires have been much more successful in securing trials: between February 1998 and January 2012, courts in 23 different French towns heard 28 prosecutions, with 13 verdicts taken to appeal, with activists consistently pleading a ‘necessity’ defence, arguing that crop destruction was designed to stop a greater harm. Yet these prosecutions rarely resulted in victory. On three occasions magistrates did not convict the Faucheurs being prosecuted (at Orléans in December 2005, Versailles in January 2006, and Chartres in June 2008; on a further occasion, at Poitiers in June 2011, defendants were discharged after the trial was nullified for procedural reasons). However, even on each of these four occasions, the decision was subsequently overturned on appeal. In a fifth case, 60 Faucheurs were found guilty in September 2011 of destroying a vine root crop trial at the Institut national de la recherche agronomique, or National Institute of Agricultural Research (INRA) in Colmar the previous year; the verdict was overturned in 2014, with the appeal court acquitting the defendants; but a subsequent appeal court decision in 2015 overturned this acquittal. Notwithstanding this (at the time of writing, still ongoing) case, on each occasion, criminal trials of Faucheurs have resulted in conviction, either at the initial hearing or on appeal. Despite the difficulty of securing favourable judicial outcomes, groups like the Déboulonneurs and the Faucheurs volontaires hope to secure trials in order to create a series of opportunities for mobilization and political pressure. As we will discuss below, in the French civil law criminal justice

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system, it is particularly difficult for activists to secure acquittals, given both the difficulty of the legal mechanisms typically available to the defence in such cases and the structure of the court process. However, we can expect activists to have a much greater ability to secure favourable judicial outcomes in other criminal justice systems. Thus in England, four women Ploughshares activists were acquitted of causing criminal damage by a jury at Liverpool Crown Court in 1996, even though they freely admitted causing this damage to a Hawk military aeroplane at the BAe factory at Warton in Lancashire (see Chapter 12 for a fuller discussion of this action); equally, English juries acquitted peace campaigners at Bristol Crown Court in 2007 (for damaging US B-52 bombers at Fairford airbase in 2003, prior to the Iraq War), and at Brighton Crown Court in 2010 (for breaking into and damaging the premises of a defence equipment supplier to the Israeli army). Prosecutions for the destruction of GM crops in the England and Wales seemingly confirm this tendency, with only one jury trial for crop destruction producing a conviction; almost always, defendants were acquitted, including at Norwich Crown Court in 2000, where 28 Greenpeace activists were twice acquitted of destroying a field of GM crops in Norfolk the preceding year, despite agreeing that they had deliberately done so. And as previously discussed, in September 2008, six Greenpeace activists who had broken into a coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth, in Kent, England, were cleared of causing £ 30,000 of criminal damage by the majority verdict of a jury at Maidstone Crown Court (Hayes, 2013). The presence of a jury thus may be highly significant in the ability of activists to gain a favourable trial outcome. Common law systems (England and Wales, the United States, former colonies of the British Empire), where activists have the right (for some offences) to be tried by jury, ostensibly offer activists greater chances of acquittal, as juries are often reluctant to convict where defendants act with sincerity and integrity. In contrast, in Napoleonic civil (or ‘continental’) law systems, juries are much less significant, and (for the types of offence for which civil disobedients are typically prosecuted, such as obstruction, trespass, and property damage), effectively unavailable. Where trials are heard by magistrates, without juries, acquittals are much harder to secure. The notion of ‘judicial opportunity structures’ (Doherty and Hayes, 2014), which are more or less open or closed, is useful here: the contours of the criminal justice system in which defendants act and are prosecuted have a significant influence on the likelihood that they will be able to gain an acquittal. Even so, even in common law systems, the capacity of juries to acquit is strongly affected by the actions of the other actors within the trial arena.

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The case of United States v. DeChristopher is instructive: DeChristopher was prosecuted in spring 2011 for disrupting a federal auction of oil and gas drilling rights in southern Utah in Salt Lake City in December 2008. DeChristopher’s motivations were that the auction illegally privatized protected land, and threatened to exacerbate climate change. Refusing a plea bargain, DeChristopher demanded his right to trial by jury. The trial judge, however, refused to let DeChristopher put forward a political necessity defence, arguing that in cases of so-called indirect civil disobedience – where action breaks not the contested law itself, but a circumstantially related one – prior jurisprudence prohibits the presentation of such a defence (Cavallaro, 1993). Consequently unable to explain why he broke the law, DeChristopher was ultimately found guilty by the unanimous verdict of a jury able to hear the details of his offences, but not his motivations for committing them. He served two years in prison; since his release, he has become a key figure in the US climate disobedience movement. Civil Disobedience and Prosecution: The Case of GANVA As noted above, it is hard in the French civil law system for activists to secure favourable judicial outcomes. The court experiences of GANVA (Groupe d’actions non violentes anti-nucléaires), a small group of non-violent anti-nuclear activists from northern France, illustrate why. In November 2010, GANVA activists physically blocked a train carrying vitrified nuclear waste travelling from Valognes in Normandy to Gorleben in Germany, using the now routine practice of ‘locking-on’, chaining themselves to the railway track (in this case) and to each other. By placing themselves on the track, unable to move, the activists used a routine staging of ‘manufactured vulnerability’ (Doherty, 2000, discussed above), forcing the train to stop and the police to spend valuable time freeing them. Indeed, it took the French police three and half hours to remove the activists from the track, and enable the shipment to continue its (constantly disrupted) 750-mile journey, eventually taking 91 hours, mobilizing 20,000 police, and costing a reported € 50 million. The activists were prosecuted for obstructing the railways in Caen the following month, found guilty by a panel of three magistrates, and ordered to pay substantial damages to SNCF (Société nationale des chemins de fer français, or the French National Railway Company). The next month, January 2011, saw the group on trial again: this time seven activists were prosecuted for an action dating back to spring 2007, when they occupied two high tension electricity pylons in protest against the government’s decision to authorize the start of construction on the

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Flamanville EPR nuclear reactor. The activists were pursued by the Réseau de transport d’électricité (Electricity Transmission Network, RTE) under a 1906 statute protecting the distribution of electricity, on the grounds that the action was potentially dangerous, might encourage others (including children) to climb pylons, and should be sanctioned as such. RTE claimed compensation of € 830,000. The presiding magistrate found the defendants guilty, but for an infraction considered to be minimal, awarding RTE damages of € 6000 and imposing no further penalty on the activists. For the defendants, these prosecutions carried material and psychological costs. In the first trial, the activists were obliged to put up € 16,500 as a condition of freedom on bail before the trial, despite the non-violence of the action and their acceptance that they had committed it. The six were then each sentenced to one month in prison, suspended, fined € 1000 each, ordered to pay (collectively) € 20,500 compensation to SNCF, and € 1000 in legal fees to each of the civil plaintiffs (SNCF and the state nuclear power company, Areva). One defendant refused to give a DNA sample, and was fined a further € 500. All of the activists were young, and unemployed, studying, or in low-paid jobs. But these costs are only material. Appearing in court can be an emotionally draining, stressful experience. It was, for example, noticeable during the second trial that one of the seven activists was under severe stress during the short time of the trial. The previous evening, at a public meeting in support of the seven activists, his behaviour had been unsettling, and – in comparison to the mood of the meeting and his fellow accused – verbally aggressive. During the trial, he was admonished by the presiding magistrate for his inability to sit still, and his use of aggressive language. In his defence, he argued – in contrast to the other defendants, who had all openly admitted their action as a collective act of civil disobedience – that he was simply passing by when the action took place, heard about it on his car radio, and came along to see if he could help mediate between protesters and gendarmes.52 In subsequent interviews after the trial, other members of the group explained his actions as a product of the stress of having to revisit an episode of his life from which he now wished to dissociate himself, of being forced together with former fellow activists with whom he now did not get on, and of the emotional pressure of the court experience itself.53 Another of the 52 Fieldnotes, Rennes Criminal Court, 13 January 2011, and public meeting at the IEP de Rennes on 12 January 2011. 53 Interview with Au., J., and T., Rennes, 18 January 2011.

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activists on trial – who, from our vantage point on the public benches, had appeared controlled and coherent on the stand – later told us he had been fighting back tears.54 The long wait between action and trial, the initial difficulty in finding a lawyer, the threat of massive punitive damages – € 830,000 – had created tensions in his personal relationships. Emotional stress here was a result of the peculiarly long time period between action and trial. But the December 2010 trial in Caen, for the nuclear waste train action, demonstrated similar strains with very different actionprosecution time frames. The six activists appeared in court less than five weeks after their action. During the trial, the state prosecutor justified the strength of the penalties demanded by repeatedly making play of the defendants’ apparent lack of ability to convincingly express the reasons why they had undertaken their action. For the prosecutor, the vagueness, generalizations, simplistic reasoning, and absence of clarity on the part of the defendants contrasted strongly with the meticulous planning of the action, and this therefore justified any demands for financial reparation; repeatedly, she argued that the activists were simple pawns: We accept that activists are from modest backgrounds. But they have organizations behind them who have the means to repay the financial damage caused. The people who manipulated them must answer for their actions.55

The state prosecutor’s position echoed that of the presiding magistrate, who at the start of the trial had admonished one activist for being unable to respond to a question about relative radiation levels: You’re not very clued up scientifically… you’re the soldiers of an organization which gives you your orders.56

The activists themselves had a very different reading of their difficulty of giving calm and coherent responses to the presiding magistrate’s questions. 54 Interview with A., Rouen, 2 February 2011. The impressions of the trial and the public meeting are from field notes. 55 Trial of GANVA activists, Caen Tribunal de Grande Instance (Criminal Court), 8 December 2010; field notes. 56 Trial of GANVA activists, Caen TGI, 8 December 2010; f ield notes, complemented by trial notes supplied by C. (GANVA activist) and ‘Procès du GANVA le 8 décembre 2010’, http:// www.resistances-caen.org/photos,326,proces-du-ganva-le-8-decembre-2010.html, consulted 25 January 2011.

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According to A., another member of the group who did not participate in the Valognes action, the activists were still ‘under the shock’ of their action, arrest, hospitalization, police questioning, bail conditions, defence preparation, and logistical organization.57 Three activists received severe injuries to their hands (second and third degree burns, sliced tendons) as the police cut them free from the track, whether by intent (as argued by activists, with the police deliberately being reckless and vindictive in their use of an angle-grinder to cut through the metal tubing in which the activists’ hands were encased) or through the fault of the activists (as argued by the state prosecutor, as she formally dismissed the action brought by the group for police violence). In these cases, not only do key aspects of the trial lie outside the control of the activists – from timing and charging, to the conduct of the trial itself – but they have few potential allies in the courtroom. Yet if being prosecuted is to make sense as political action, then the prospect of being maimed by police machinery, taken to court, being fined, potentially losing one’s job, and undergoing considerable emotional stress, also has to offer collective benefits which go beyond those located in the direct effects of the action itself (stopping a train, shutting down a power station). So why undertake this sort of action? Prosecution for this sort of offence provides three sorts of opportunity for activists. The first is to build solidarities; the second, to create a political platform; the third, to gain victories, symbolic or concrete. Outside the courthouse, movement organizations attempt to consolidate or extend their position within the social movement space; these moments are opportunities to solidify affective relationships, to reinforce existing and create new ties. The first GANVA trial, in Caen, is typical: outside the court building, about three hundred activists occupied the road, with stalls, musicians, banners, speeches, and television crews. Numerous organizations – environmental, rights, anti-nuclear, far left, libertarian, syndicalist – came to demonstrate their support. But it is not just outside the courthouse that solidarities were created: the group told us of their emotion at receiving small donations from strangers all over France, including from pensioners sending small amounts of money.58 The second opportunity provided by prosecution is to create arenas for democratic challenge. ‘Have mass mobilization, and public information, advanced the debate on nuclear power? Of course not’, asked the defence rhetorically during the Caen trial. Throughout the trial, prosecution 57 Interview, Rouen, 2 February 2011. 58 Interview with GANVA activists, Rennes, March 2011.

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and defence were constantly engaged in a contest to define the process underway: for the prosecution, to restrict debate to the established facts of the action (themselves uncontested by the defendants), and to consider motivation in strict legal terms only; for the defence, to generalize, to draw the debate into political terms, establishing motivation as democratic dysfunction, as the opposition between a nuclearized society and participative citizenship: C.: Our goal is to create a real debate about nuclear power, the public has never been consulted. State prosecutor: It’s not in court that that type of debate can take place, but within the democratic organs of society. You are here to be judged for your actions, not to make the world anew. C.: That’s exactly why I am here.

Beyond the detail of the judgement, what is interesting – particularly in the context of Markovits’s definition (2005) of ‘democratic disobedience’, discussed earlier – is the attempt of activists to think of ways to open up a viable democratic space, to create the conditions for citizens, through public action, to become subjective actors in the determination of social choices. In part, this is through the mediatization that both civil disobedience and the subsequent trial hearings can bring. But it also happens directly within the courthouse; in the face of the apparent closure of debate over energy policy, activists attempt to create an arena to ‘speak truth to power’, or at the very least to confront it, within existing institutional arrangements, with a different vision of process and politics. A key avenue for this is the opportunity provided by trials for the defence to call expert witnesses. As the misnomer only vaguely suggests, these tend – informally, rather than in legal terms – to be of three types: scientific experts, able to provide scientific evidence to support the legal justification generally claimed by the defence for their avowed lawbreaking and required to be proven by the court; ‘witnesses’, who, as the term suggests, give firsthand experience of the effects of (for example, climate change) on their lives and culture; and supporters, who are neither experts nor witnesses, but have community standing (for example, as elected representatives) and are able to provide political context and argument for the action. Third, prosecutions may enable activists to win victories. Victories may of course, be symbolic only: in the second GANVA trial, activists claimed a symbolic victory: ‘We consider that the judge heard our argument about the aberration of nuclear power and its relaunch, and about the impacts of

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very high tension power lines’.59 This view, that of ‘a symbolic judgement’ was echoed by Green MEP Nicole Kiil-Nielsen, who appeared as an ‘expert witness’ for the defence: Clearly, the arguments we developed were listened to. The judge recognized the political character of the action, and the seriousness of the defendants. The penalty was symbolic only: the punitive damages demanded by RTE were rejected. RTE tried to pose as a victim, but the judge saw through this.60

Yet, for all that, it is also the case that against an obviously weak case – one which the state prosecutor had declined to pursue in December 2007 – tried by an open and relaxed magistrate, the defendants were nonetheless still found guilty, and were not discharged. As Ogien (2010, p. 189) argues, [civil disobedience] displaces social conflict from the political to the judicial arena. […] Disobedients pressure judges to make a formal decision (even if this pressure rarely pays off) over the legitimacy of a legal or regulatory prescription.

But arrest, prosecution, and sanction thus potentially carry heavy costs. These are physical, financial, emotional, and psychological, and are born individually and unevenly. Loss of liberty, material resources, future employment possibilities, and so on, can place severe strain on the livelihoods, relationships, and mental well-being of activists. For public authorities, the use of suspended prison sentences is also an effective mechanism for forestalling further actions, particularly where those actions are undertaken by small groups, as they clearly signal the penalties of acting again. Prosecution can also place severe strain on collective activist identity and decision-making, splitting groups, and diminishing trust. Yet whilst prosecution carries threats and costs, it also enables solidarity and collective identity reinforcement processes. The courthouse can also, where democratic processes are otherwise closed, offer activists the opportunity to create a public arena for political challenge. But these opportunities are also influenced by the relative 59 ‘A Rennes, verdict du procès de l’occupation de pylônes THT de 2007’, http://ganva.blogspot. com, last accessed 21 February 2011. 60 Nicole Kiil-Nielsen, communiqué de presse, Brussels, 22 February 2011.

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strength of social actors. For GANVA, it was precisely their lack of influence and resources – despite the suspicions and allegations of the state prosecutor and magistrate – that made a court hearing so attractive, and which in both cases, meant that they were unable to exploit these opportunities effectively, as the group subsequently split and mobilization declined. In contrast, for a campaign like the Faucheurs volontaires, criminal trials have been key arenas for the presentation of analysis, the gaining of victories, and the productive creation of political pressure. Moreover, for a campaign tied geographically to rural areas, particularly in south-west France, and to the summer months, arrest and trial enabled the construction of a permanent, urban, and national campaign, from Lille and Colmar to Dax and Marmande, as trials were held in cities and towns across the country throughout the year. In this way also, trials enabled the campaign to create and sustain the support and solidarity networks required both for its financial survival, and for its political significance.

Networks of Commitment At the start of this chapter, we emphasized the contrast between the mass disobedience movement familiar from the USA in the 1960s, the subsequent development of affinity groups as an action-oriented organizational form, and the Greenpeace model of professionalized, centralized, and highly resourced structure. Yet, for groups such as GANVA, Faucheurs volontaires, RESF, and even Greenpeace itself, the sustenance of action also depends on the availability of activists within wider interconnecting networks. The contours of action can be fluid. In France, Faucheurs volontaires crop-trashing actions are supported by environmental organizations and peasant agricultural unions; actions regularly feature small farmers as well as environmental activists; RESF actions are supported by national labour unions and human rights organizations (the Ligue des droits de l’homme, for example), as well as civic non-profit associations well known for migrant activism (such as CIMADE and GISTI). For individual activists, participation in campaigns such as RESF and Faucheurs volontaires does not carry specific formalized costs or entail bureaucratic membership processes, administrative procedures, or leadership roles. Thus RESF, for example, does not have formal membership, whilst the Faucheurs volontaires are organized locally on an ad hoc basis, with an annual national general assembly of workshops and discussions, at which ideas and tactics are shared, and campaign decisions taken by consensus democratic procedures.

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Equally, activists from even highly formalized groups, such as Greenpeace or the Confederation paysanne peasant farming union, can participate individually in actions, without entailing formal recognition processes, or potential legal consequences for their organization (indeed, Greenpeace France discourages its volunteers from participating in confrontational actions, and in practice – such as for a support action for an illegal occupation – group leaders remind activists what constitutes legal and illegal action, and to remain within the law). The looseness of these networks also enables activists to maintain a relatively broad range of ideological commitments, with participation focused on taking interventionist action rather than developing an integrated, ideational platform; it also encourages what Jasper (1997) calls different ‘taste in tactics’, as activists can choose to be involved in different types of action, from fund raising and supporter actions to workshop organization and training or to material participation in conflictual action. As Mathieu (2010) has shown in his analysis of RESF, Bernard de Raymond (2010) in his discussion of the Faucheurs volontaires, and Ollitrault (2008) in her observations of Greenpeace, participation in these networks is far from random. Though some activists are clearly particularly invested in given campaigns, in France there are a number of common patterns of recruitment within overlapping disobedient networks, such as prior activism in or in support of the pacifist MAN network, subscription to reviews like Silence, and membership of leftist teaching (FEN-FSU), public sector (CFDT-CGT), peasant farming (Confédération paysanne), and student (UNEF) unions; participation in associations focused on international solidarity, or in social and educational support activities (such as literacy classes and other forms of voluntary tuition provision) is also common. Among disobedients, ‘activist careers’ (Fillieule, 2010) which do not include this kind of prior engagement are rare; where this does happen, there is often strong family socialization to political commitment, through parents, grandparents, siblings (see, for example, Ollitrault’s (2008) discussion of a young Greenpeace activist whose commitment is highly influenced by a sister active in the defence of Breton language and culture). Asked to explain their biographies in court, Faucheurs volontaires often cite the values handed down to them by parents and grandparents, the experiences of close relations, the importance of their own children and grandchildren, or the importance of the wartime Resistance (especially in their immediate family histories), in order to explain their participation in lawbreaking action.61 61 Field notes from trials in Lille (September 2005), Poitiers (June 2011), Colmar (September 2011).

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Disobedience and Biographical Availability Activists who take physical risks, and who participate in forms of action involving bodily obstruction, are characteristically (though not exclusively) male and (relatively speaking) young. The GANVA group, discussed at length above, is in many respects typical: four of the seven activists prosecuted at Caen in 2010, and six of the seven prosecuted at Rennes, were men. To take another example, three quarters (45 out of 60) of the Faucheurs volontaires prosecuted at Colmar in September 2011 were men. Overwhelmingly, activists are on low incomes, whether students or receiving state income support benefits. It is reasonable to assume that their participation in action is also related to their relatively low financial risk if found guilty (French magistrates formally ask defendants how much they earn in open court, both as situating biographical detail and to aid calculation of potential penalties). Beyond these individual cost-benefit calculations, the participation in disobedience actions of numerous activists in a state of precarity can be seen as form of anti-capitalist resistance, or for others, a period of professional instability. In the latter case, this can be temporary; but in a context of high youth unemployment, this latter group can either use this period to invest themselves in actions which give motivation and structure, or find meaningful ways of thinking about their low socio-economic status through the development of critical responses to ‘market society’ (particularly where activists have high levels of education and low levels of social mobility). This level of commitment is, for older disobedients, often reinforced by a pattern of conscientious engagement derived from religious socialization. Social Catholicism, developed in youth organizations and schools, places strong emphasis on solidarity and community action. Often, when activists discuss their motivations, they distance themselves from religious institutions, even constructing their own do-it-yourself spiritual journeys (such as references to Hinduism); in general, spirituality is a resource explaining and contextualizing their internalized duty to take action as and when specific situations of injustice demand it. Analysis of these multiple networks identifies two broad categories of activists. On the one hand, there are highly experienced individuals with long biographies of involvement in different struggles, going back to the social movements which developed in the period after May 1968, whether in ecologist and pacifist or in Marxist networks. In this category, the reference to a ‘resistance’ matrix is particularly strong, with activist know-how firmly internalized and available to be (re)produced almost automatically. Such activists typically know how to stage media-oriented actions, participate

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effectively in meetings, understand the political and policy processes, understand what can be achieved, have a strong conception of who their opponent is and which allies can be mobilized (whether associations, or friendship networks). On the other hand, there are first-time, or relatively inexperienced activists, who participate in occasional actions or in wider activist socialization activities, and who may be developing commitment for future actions, within this or other networks. A strong affective bond is frequently central to mobilization: the parent of a child whose classmate is to be deported; a farmer who has seen their colleague die of cancer, following a (supposed) regular use of pesticides; a Greenpeace activist understanding in Guyana about the devastating effects of globalization on local populations. Direct emotional shocks can reactivate latent, already existing predispositions to disobedient action. These shocks can ‘universalize’ a specific event, to the extent that there are even conservative Catholics who are active in RESF, a left-wing group. This engagement, understood in terms of the individual’s moral duty, also enables these movements to position themselves as apolitical, whose objective is to open a democratic debate whilst reacting to a de facto state of urgency. First-time, inexperienced activists typically take charge of policy dossiers, organize support and solidarity actions, rather than take the front line in physical interventions; their role is characteristically logistical support. Thus the first Greenpeace action, to Amchitka, also relied upon the presence of partners and supporters in Vancouver to print t-shirts, sell button badges, launch a petition drive, and organize a countercultural welcome back event for the activists’ return to harbour (with journalists present). Equally, however, the involvement of supporters broadens the movement beyond those taking action, and can demonstrate the strength of ‘citizen opinion’, of the depth of feeling of ‘ordinary individuals’. When the parents of schoolchildren become involved in an action, their identity as parents and citizens (rather than activists) is central, contributing to the wider social legitimacy of the action; when Greenpeace volunteers (nurses, teachers, engineers, etc.) act publicly, these professional identities and their associated roles as ‘ordinary members of the public’ are foregrounded in their responses to GMOs. In these cases, activists act as ordinary, regular citizens who have the courage to confront power and injustice on behalf of society. Amongst the Faucheurs volontaires on trial in Colmar in September 2011 were a technician in a water treatment station, a GP, a retired solicitor, a graduate student in anthropology, several students, nurses, a ‘citizen journalist’, a community arts worker, an architect, a climber working for the ONF (Office nationale des forêts, or National Forests Office); of the 60

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defendants, one-third were also small farmers or agricultural workers. Amongst those not in agriculture, defendants made frequent references to their rural and farming backgrounds. Thus one defendant, a GP from the Avignon area in her mid-60s, explained in the following terms why she had taken action, by placing it within her own family biography: My origins are peasant origins. My parents were small market gardeners from near Cavaillon in the Vaucluse. They passed on their fundamental values to me: the respect for nature on which we depend, and for Mother Earth which gave us the quality of nutritious food so necessary for our health. With my grandfather, I learnt how to select seed. It was he who chose the seed of the best melons.62

As Mathieu (2010) underlines, there are therefore often also (and unsurprisingly) strong links between specific campaigns and related professions: in RESF, many activists are employed in, or are close to, the national education system. These outlines suggest that the division of activist roles is more grounded in the gradual process of socialization into illegality than in the individual disobedient’s specific character, though of course it is also the case that an activist with specific tactical tastes, resources, or talents is likely to accomplish this socialization more rapidly than others, or (in the case of a professionalized organization) be promoted more quickly. Nonetheless, a distinction between support and solidarity roles, on the one hand, and physical interventionist roles, on the other, is typical; equally, participation in such actions can also be transformative for activists, and can promote and intensify group identity. Observations we carried out amongst Greenpeace activists in France (Ollitrault, 2008) reveal how participation in transgressive collective action can create emotional bonds between participants. Thus activists blocking the arrival and discharging of a transatlantic shipment of GM soya in Lorient, a port in Brittany, in January 2005 used a variety of tactics: silent demonstration, spatial occupation of the port area, and physical obstruction, and passive resistance as police worked to remove them from the area. At the subsequent post-action debriefing, the activists – who were nearly all under 30 years old – discussed their ‘encounter’ with police, and expressed their pride at having disrupted, if only for a short time, the unloading of the soya. The more experienced took the opportunity to recount their activist experiences: arrests, police interviews, their criminal records; visibly, the exchange of looks and expressions of 62 Field notes, Colmar, September 2011.

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approval reinforced their reputation and group position, reinforcing in turn the cohesion of the group through shared emotional responses to and valuations of the personal costs this type of activism. As in any collective action, a shared sense of action and accomplishment developed, sustained by a strong sense of solidarity. This shared feeling enabled the swapping of stories, themselves integrated into a wider symbolic history, that of the heroic narrative of Greenpeace, creating linkages to activists in different times and places. In the wider context of the celebration of individual autonomy within action, this set of connections offers activists an identity which reconciles a moral individualism with membership of a much larger symbolic community, whilst making available allies and partners for material action. Thus the sociability provided by group and symbolic community do not dilute individual identity, but rather enhance it, enabling the individual activist to integrate the larger narrative within their own personal identity. To put it another way, this is a process of learning named by Le Bart (2008) as the métier d’individu, the craft of the individual: in societies which privilege the autonomous, self-reliant individual, civil disobedience engages self-reliance as a historically legitimated active citizenship to denounce injustice. There is some evidence from opinion polling data that undertaking open and conscientious illegal action enjoys public support. However, civil disobedience also requires professional support, particularly from ‘cause lawyers’, or solicitors and barristers who specialize in defending activists, often in particular legal practices (Epp, 1998; Israël, 2009; Vanhala, 2011); and, further, groups undertaking civil disobedience are (even if loosely) also situated within a wider network of rights-based and other advocacy organizations and associations on which they can draw for expert witnesses to appear in court. Characteristically, defendants seek to legitimize their action through the mobilization of expert testimony, in either their own statements or those of the witnesses they persuade to appear (though their ability to do the latter depends on the willingness of the presiding magistrate or judge to allow it in court). In the public sector, professional disobedience (against budget cuts, new forms of management, monitoring and evaluation) also relies on the professionalized capacities of unions to support and defend the actions of their members.

Conclusion In this chapter, we have looked at two specific aspects of the practice of civil disobedience, discussing it as repeated, culturally freighted performances, which are learnt and then recast in action. In political theory, willingness

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to accept arrest and trial is normatively constituent of the civility of civil disobedience; it is also normative in that it is central to the historic, rightsbased struggles that civil disobedients characteristically draw on in order to legitimize their actions and beliefs, constructing their campaign in terms of its appeal to citizenship. But activists deploy multiple types of action (passive resistance, lock-ons, occupations), imbued with specific meanings (sacrifice, heroism, reclamation of public space and beyond it, democratic space), such that action reflects particular identities (who we are as a group) and expresses particular meanings (why we should be considered as legitimate, what we specifically seek) as well as seeking to create particular effects (backfire, discrediting the adversary, increasing public support). Equally, rather than simply accept judicial sanction, civil disobedients characteristically exploit the opportunities afforded by the courthouse in order to prolong and pursue political challenge, accepting the facts of the action itself but contesting the charges and the attribution of penalties, seeking to justify their action. As with the action itself, the courthouse becomes a site for media communication and the development of discourses (of sacrifice, heroism, integrity), with – in liberal democracies governed by universal suffrage – disobedients opposing their active roles as citizens to the decisions of the majority. To do so, disobedients draw on wider networks of professional knowledge, expertise, and support. However, the opportunities are not the same in all times and places: the organization of judicial systems, and the roles of other actors within them, can be expected to play a significant role in determining how activists are able to make their case, and to whom they can make it (whether to a jury, or to magistrates, for example). In Chapter 12, we develop these ideas by looking at one aspect of civil disobedience: the fuzziness between boundaries of violence and non-violence, and the opportunities this creates for activists to create specific meanings for their actions.

12 Negotiating the Boundaries of Violence and Non-Violence Civil disobedience is, as we have seen, strongly associated with non-violence in both its conceptual framework and its activist practice. This is axiomatic where civil disobedience is enacted as a refusal to cooperate, where resistant agency lies in non-compliance: most obviously where the disobedient withholds a payment, or their acquiescence in a specified, compulsory action or order. Yet where non-compliance takes place in a public space (such as, for instance, as a sit-in, or other type of occupation), it becomes embodied, and draws the enactment of civil disobedience into a relational interdependence with a public authority, who must solve two interrelated problems. These are the logistical problem of the management of the action, so that the public space is cleared for the resumption of activities designated as legitimate, and the problem presented by the threat to the legitimacy of public authority by the open refusal of the activists to uphold the social contract, and maintain norms of acceptable public conduct. These problems are interrelated for the state agent, because an ill-judged response to the first problem may exacerbate the second, through the production of backfire, as we have already discussed. In this sense, the construction of the opposition between the ‘non-violent’ activists and the ‘violent’ agents of law enforcement can be said to be constitutive of the problem of civil disobedience. However, if disobedient actions of physical intervention (claiming of space) and actions of non-cooperation (refusal to withdraw from space) are intimately linked through temporal sequencing, actions of intervention characteristically raise different problems from those of non-cooperation. This is especially the case where the former are proactive actions designed to stop an opponent from accomplishing something which is formally authorized in law but considered politically or morally illegitimate by the activist or group. Here, disobedient actions may typically involve the use of physical constraint on an adversary, and/or the destruction of property. Indeed, it is common that groups claiming to commit acts of civil disobedience undertake actions where the destruction of a specific item is the central goal of the action, such as when 3500 members of the Catholic anti-war movement burnt their draft cards, or covered conscription offices in blood, in opposition to the US invasion of Vietnam.63 63 Between 1967 and 1971, around 250 such actions were carried out in the USA; see McNeal (1992, p. 197) and Nepstad (2008, pp. 44-53).

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This chapter accordingly discusses the ambiguous nature of the relationship between violence and non-violence in disobedience actions, focusing on three movements which undertake direct actions of obstruction and property destruction: the Ploughshares movement (drawing on examples from the USA and the UK); anti-abortion, or ‘pro-life’ activists in France (with comparisons to the UK, and the USA); and anti-GM activists in France and the UK. The goal is not to draw a systematic comparative analysis between discrete cases, but rather to use these examples to tease out the conceptual problems inherent in the definition of civil disobedience as necessarily a non-violent form of action, and to highlight how civil disobedience operates as a discursive regime. Foremost, we discuss how activists may aim to negotiate, in words and action, the moral boundary that claims of violence seek to bring into play.

Property Destruction: A Form of Non-civil Disobedience? The sociology of social movements generally considers the use of violence by collective actors to be a rational response to prevailing asymmetries of power. Tilly’s work on the development of protest tactics is central to understanding collective acts of violence not as a form of pathology or, as Arendt contended, as discontinuous from orderly political life, but rather as intimately concerned with the political; violence, routinely, is a tool of collective social mobilization, undertaken by ‘ordinary’ (rather than ‘lunatic’) people which evolves in tandem with peaceful political action and which can be effective in establishing the entitlement of a group to make political claims (Tilly, 1973). This instrumental view of collective violence is echoed by Della Porta (2010, p. 274), who defines violence to be ‘the use of physical force with the goal of causing harm to a political opponent’; by the same token, Melucci (1996, p. 367) defines it as ‘the aberrant use of force resorted to in order to threaten or damage an adversary, usually so as to force that adversary to act against his/her own will’. For Gamson, the central question of violence is its relationship to outcomes, rather than morality; it should accordingly be viewed as ‘an instrumental act, aimed at furthering the purposes of the group that uses it when they have some reason to think it will help their cause’ (1990, p. 81). Yet discussion of the instrumental function of violence in collective actions also raises questions of its categorization, of the relationship between different forms of violence, and of the conceptual and moral boundaries between different targets of action. For many observers, violence includes both

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harm to persons and to inanimate objects: for Tilly (2002, p. 17), collective violence can be defined as episodic social interaction which ‘immediately inflicts physical damage on persons and/or objects’, and ‘results at least in part from coordination among persons who perform the damaging acts’; Gamson defines it to be the enactment of ‘deliberate physical injury to property or persons’ (1990, p. 81). Violence is thus conceived as physical, and which includes harms caused to both persons and property, undertaken at the service of politically defined goals, with the objective if imposing costs on an opponent in order to advance a collective struggle or campaign. From this perspective, it follows that collective acts of property destruction, and the groups that carry them out, can be routinely – if, self-evidently, non-judgementally – classified as violent. Yet we can also consider this position to be analytically problematic from a constructivist viewpoint, as exemplified by the French Faucheurs volontaires. For sociologist Bruno Villalba, the act of breaking, pulling up, and trampling GM crops, wherever they are sited, is an inherently violent act of property destruction; as he underlines, ‘the central practice [of the Faucheurs volontaires] – the pulling up of transgenic crops with their bare hands – is an action which is clearly both illegal and violent (because it targets private property)’. In so doing, the actions of the Faucheurs volontaires ‘perpetuate the use of violence as the ultimate recourse against injustice (even if associated with euphemised images and the vocabulary of non-violence), and as such, confident of its own power’ (Villalba, 2008, pp. 130-131). For Ogien, similarly, the method of political action adopted and employed by the Faucheurs volontaires – the violation of private property, the deliberate destruction of material goods – constitutes a recourse to violence (2010, p. 187). In these terms, the systematic destruction of GM crops can hardly be said to constitute an attempt to ‘pacify conflict’ or ‘break the chain’ of violence as advocated by the highly influential French spiritual leader Lanza del Vasto of the Communauté de l’Arche, of whom Jean-Baptiste Libouban, founder of the Faucheurs volontaires, is a disciple. This situation therefore raises the question of the location of the boundary between violence and non-violence. Bedau explicitly def ines property destruction as ‘uncivil’ behaviour, classifying it alongside acts of bodily harm: Not every illegal act of public resistance to government, however, is an act of civil disobedience. Anytime the dissenter resists government by deliberately destroying property, endangering life and limb, inciting to riot (e.g., sabotage, assassination, street fighting), he has not committed civil disobedience. The pun on ‘civil’ is essential; only nonviolent acts thus can qualify. (1961, p. 656)

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In this reading, deliberate sabotage, or the destruction of material goods, can by definition not be acts of civil disobedience. Yet not only are such acts common in campaigns which make claims to be civil disobedience, but activists themselves often contest the characterization of such acts as ‘violent’. Thus, for example, Angie Zelter argues that Ploughshares actions are ‘always peaceful and accountable actions and are part of the non-violent and civil disobedience traditions’ (2004, p. 132). Zelter was one of four women activists prosecuted (and acquitted by a jury) for her role in an action at British Aerospace’s factory at Warton (near Preston in north-west England) in 1996 (see Chapter 11). In order to raise public awareness of (and, if possible, physically prevent) the sale of 24 Hawk military airplanes by BAe to the Suharto regime in Indonesia, where the same planes were already being used against the civilian population of East Timor, the activists broke into the factory. As Zelter describes it: In the early hours of 29th January, Lotta Kronlid, Andrea Needham and Joanna Wilson snipped a hole in the fence around BAe’s weapons factory in Warton, Lancashire, opened the hangar door with a crowbar and proceeded to use their hammers to disarm the control panels in the cockpit, the radar system and the wings, nose and fuselage of the Hawk warplane. They did around one and a half million pounds worth of damage. Photos of women and children shot at the Santa Cruz massacre at Dili (the capital of East Timor) in 1991 when Indonesian troops fired on a peaceful demonstration killing 528 people, were hung on the plane along with a banner we had carefully and lovingly sewn over the previous months. The video and report were left on the pilot seat and seeds of hope (vegetable and flower seeds) were poured all over and around the plane. They were able to make several phone calls from the hangar and it was not until the press informed BAe security that they had disarmed a plane that the security finally arrived to arrest them and take them into custody. (Zelter, 2004)

Needham who discovered both civil disobedience and the Catholic Worker Movement whilst spending nearly two years at the Community for Creative Non-Violence in Washington, DC, in the late 1980s, describes breaking through the security fencing with bolt-cutters before using a heavy iron bar to jemmy open the doors of the hangar, where they found one Hawk waiting to be exported to Indonesia. She continues:

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One of the beautiful things about Ploughshares actions is that anyone can do them. You don’t need to be a technical genius or an engineer, you don’t need to be physically strong, you don’t need any expensive equipment or special skills. All you need is a hammer and a functioning arm. We each had both of those things. We started hammering. […] Our first tentative blows dented the fuselage; a little more force with subsequent strikes and our hammers burst right through the metal outer skin, leaving large puncture holes in the sides of the plane. (Needham, 2017, pp. 91, 93)

Interventionist ‘rescue’ actions by ‘pro-life’ groups in abortion clinics provide an interesting counterpoint. In the USA in the late 1980s, Operation Rescue developed a repertoire of actions explicitly modelled on the US civil rights movement, organizing mass demonstrations, targeting specific cities for their symbolic value (Atlanta, Georgia – where the Democratic Party convention was held in 1988 – Wichita, Kansas, in 1991, and Buffalo, New York, in 1992), multiplying sit-ins in front of abortion clinics, and inviting tens of thousands of arrests of activists. In parallel, a wave of arson attacks, bombings, and assassinations of doctors were carried out, often by activists from the Army of God, a clandestine organization. The passing by the Clinton administration of the FACE (Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances) Act in 1994 forced Operation Rescue to reassess its tactics, and concentrate instead on actions outside clinics, economic boycotts, and the harassment of medical staff (Doan, 2004; Joffe, 2011). In France, the first direct action of this kind was carried out by ‘pro-life’ activists at the Tenon hospital in Paris in January 1987; in the following decade, anti-abortion groups undertook a series of actions in hospitals and medical centres. Two groups were chiefly responsible for these actions: the fundamentalist Catholic group SOS Tout-Petits (Save the Little Ones), supported by the French extreme right, and La Trêve de Dieu (Truce of God), an evangelical Protestant group with strong links to Operation Rescue in the USA. One of the most significant actions took place in June 1995, when seven Trêve de Dieu activists entered the operating theatre of a hospital in Annecy and chained themselves to the theatre equipment with motorcycle locks, in an action described by French Family Planning as of an ‘absolute violence’.64 Trêve de Dieu was remarkable for aggressive practices; as Mathieu notes, activists desterilized or destroyed medical equipment, chained themselves up, urinated or defecated on the floor, insulted women attending to have 64 In ‘Absolution d’un commando anti-IVG. Ils avaient sévi à l’hôpital d’Annecy en juin 1995, ils ont été relaxés hier en appel’, Libération, 21 November 1996.

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abortions and medical staff, and even physically attacked the latter. (2006, p. 565)65

In contrast, SOS Tout-Petits adopted less aggressive and physical, but nonetheless highly effective, forms of occupation and obstruction: entering clinics en masse, and then genuflecting, praying, and singing hymns in the corridors in order to make it impossible for medical staff to carry out procedures (Erdenet, 1992). SOS Tout-Petits Our goals: – The restoration of God in hearts and in public life, the respect of all and especially of the very smallest, an open armed welcome for the mother and especially for the child – A family policy worthy of the name – An easier route to adoption – A maternal wage – The pure and simple abolition of the abominable laws [the Veil-PelletierRoudy Acts] which have allowed the greatest genocide in our history […] Our methods: – Constant prayer, whether silent or manifest – Action in its own right (70 occupations of abortion clinics in six and a half years […] – Participation in processions and different types of demonstrations (human chain of life…) Our results: – Demonstrations in abortion clinics have produced two questions in Parliament – The Maussins clinic in the 19th district of Paris stopped nearly all abortion procedures following the group’s visit in December 1989 – The certain case of a woman who changed her mind about having an abortion66

65 See also ‘Les commandos de Dieu’, L’Express, 13 December 1990. 66 ‘SOS Tout-Petits’, TransVIE-mag, no. 56, 23 November 1993, p. 3.

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For Venner (1995), these are the ‘commando’ actions, a term widely repeated in media reports of the group’s activities. In response to these actions, CADAC (Coordination des associations pour le droit à l’avortement et à la contraception, or Coordination of Associations for the Right to Abortion and Contraception) was formed in 1990, and three years later, the Neiertz Act introduced the specific crime of obstructing an abortion procedure. The act expressly prohibited numerous actions, including blocking or disrupting access to abortion clinics and medical centres, and the issuing of threats or intimidating behaviour to medical staff or abortion service users. The act both made it easier for anti-abortion activists to be prosecuted, and for family planning associations to pursue civil cases against them. As a result, anti-abortion activists developed new tactics, focusing on the staging of actions outside clinics, or ‘street rosaries’. Xavier Dor, the leader of SOS Tout-Petits, rejected any accusation that the group’s clinic actions were violent, whether inside or outside clinics: ‘People say that we are violent? Our only violence is our presence. Intolerant? We condemn no one. Illegal? We are against ONE law, a homicidal law.’67 Whilst rejecting accusations of violence, the group also refused, however, to place its action in the tradition of non-violence, declaring itself to be ‘more attached to the beatitudes of the Gospels than to the principle of non-violence, a negative term which can be confused with pacifism’.68 Whilst Ploughshares and Faucheurs volontaires activists expressly place their action within the twin traditions of non-violence and civil disobedience, this is not the case for anti-abortion activists in France, whose cultural understanding of their own action has developed in opposition to the ideas and action networks of these groups, whether faith-based and Catholic (like Ploughshares) or secular and republican (like the Faucheurs). At the general level, therefore, ‘pro-life’ activists also undertake actions which correspond to the repertoire of civil disobedience: they commit public acts of deliberate lawbreaking, openly and unmasked, without physical harming people, accepting the legal consequences of their action, and this with the self-limiting goal of producing a reform of the law or revision of a public policy decision. Yet the meanings that the activists give to their actions are often very different. Equally, the meanings that opponents give to these actions, and the terms that they use to qualify them, are also often very different. To return to crop destruction actions: here, political opponents, bio-sciences corporations, 67 Quoted in ‘Manifestation’, La Croix, 10 October 1995. 68 ‘SOS Tout-Petits’, TransVIE-mag, no. 56, 23 November 1993, p. 3.

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and public authorities regularly contest the claims made by the Faucheurs volontaires that their actions are ‘non-violent’. Thus for the agriculture minister, Dominique Bussereau, crop destructions were ‘irresponsible acts of vandalism which are contrary to the rule of law, and respect for both private property and labour’.69 Following the destruction of a field trial of GM crops in the Puy-de-Dôme region of France in August 2006, the seed company Limagrain declared that the Faucheurs volontaires were ‘engaged in an escalation of mindless and ignorant violence’,70 whilst after a further action in the Lot-et-Garonne region the following weekend, the pro-GM FNSEA (Fédération nationale des syndicats d’exploitants agricoles, or National Federation of Agricultural Holders’ Unions) demanded that the government ‘take its responsibilities and arrest the commandos who commit acts of aggression and destruction’.71 After further destructions of ‘mutagenic’ sunflower crops in 2010 and 2011, numerous farmers authored an open letter to the Faucheurs volontaires and set up a webpage to express their frustration and resentment: Using the so-called ‘civil disobedience’ agit-prop methods that you describe so well in your manuals, you claim for yourselves the right to decide what is acceptable and what is not, and cast aspersions on producers who follow the regulations to the letter. Ransacking, destruction of fields, acts of vandalism: your actions are violent. No disrespect to your calls for ‘debate’, ‘dialogue’, and your ‘non-violent’ culture (what a joke!).72

Justifying and Legitimizing Property Destruction Depending on both the position of the actor and the definition of violence adopted, similar acts are contrastingly qualified as violent and non-violent, civil and uncivil. This is frequently materially significant, in that though criminal justice systems vary across context, they generally distinguish between harms caused to persons and harms caused to property; and it is also the case that legal systems codif ied and developed within 69 ‘Dominique Bussereau condamne avec vigueur les destructions d’OGM de Miradoux’, Communiqué de presse, Ministry of Agriculture and Fishing, 20 August 2006. 70 ‘Faisant fi de la décision de justice, prise à leur demande, les opposants aux OGM s’acharnent sur les essais Biogemma à Antoingt!’, Communiqué de presse, Limagrain, 28 August 2006. 71 ‘Ça suffit!’, Communiqué de presse, FNSEA, 4 September 2006. 72 ‘Lettre ouverte aux Faucheurs’, http://marre-des-faucheurs.fr/fr/?page_id=26, last accessed 28 November 2011.

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post-Enlightenment democratic states are unsurprisingly biased towards the protection of property rights, reflecting the power dynamics of states governed in the interests of the both land-owning and industrial bourgeois classes (Thompson, 1975, pp. 258-269). As Tilly notes, if violence is a fundamentally contested concept, it is precisely because it almost always carries negative connotations, and activates a moral boundary as much as an analytical or legal one. For Tilly, to qualify an act as violent is consequently to condemn it in public discourse (2002, p. 17). Girard, meanwhile, places the resurgence in interest in civil disobedience within the wider framework of redefinitions of morality in Western societies: We are currently witnessing a morality of anti-violence fuelled by the discrediting of all actions which, in individual behaviours as in political practices, relate to violence […]. Civil disobedience practices must be seen in this context, where they are obliged to construct their legitimacy through their distinction from other, less controlled, secretive, unarticulated practices. (2010, pp. 215-216)

The question of violence is thus inseparable from that of political legitimacy within campaigns whose goal is characteristically the production of a policy or law reform. This can to some extent be explained in terms of the classical definition of the limits of the political set out by Max Weber in his 1919 essay ‘Politics as a Vocation’, such that a state is a: human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory […] the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it. The state is considered the sole source of the ‘right’ to use violence. (Weber, 1948/1998)

For collective social actors, we can suppose that to make a claim to nonviolence is not simply to place a particular lawbreaking action or campaign within a ‘heroic’, sacrificial tradition of struggle, but also to articulate its conformity with the respect for the rule of law, and the power of the state to maintain its monopoly over the use of physical force. It is therefore salient to enquire how the use of ‘violent’ methods by actors making claims to civil disobedience might be explained or justified, and to do so in the terms of conflicts over legitimacy. Bourdieu reminds us that conflict over the definition of the means of struggle is integral to the struggle itself: ‘the very words that we use to speak about what we are speaking

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about are themselves elements of struggle, and as such are used differently by political actors’ (Bourdieu, 1988); ‘the political field [can] be described as a game whose stakes are the legitimate imposition of the principles for viewing and dividing the social world’ (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 67). Thus the meaning of a given conflict is itself a site of conflict; and this conflict over its definition is both a pre-condition and an outcome of the conflict’s political construction. To put it another way: the categorization of an action is not a neutral act, and is an integral part of the interpretive contests in which social movement actors participate, alongside opposing movements, the political authorities that they appeal to, the media organizations that structure public communication about them, and the observers (including sociologists and political scientists) who suggest informed analyses of these relationships. If the question of violence must therefore be considered as part of the legitimation process of a given conflict, it follows that we must also consider the moral and political discourses articulated by collective actors to justify their actions. As we noted in Chapter 10 when discussing the role of direct action in environmental campaigns, the question of urgency is often given a central role in the discourses that activists put forward to justify their actions. If identity and ideological positioning are central to the explanation of tactical choices, and thus to the specific forms that movement actors adopt for their actions, the decision to destroy material property or to inflict other kinds of violence, be they emotional or psychological, is also governed by the urgent need to intervene. An intervention is generally intended to prevent another actor completing an action held to be illegitimate on political, moral, or ethical grounds, although it is not (or not yet) prohibited in law. For the actor who is the direct (or in many cases, indirect) target of the intervention, this intervention can be perceived as a violence done to their physical or moral integrity. Thus for the farmer (or biological scientist) whose work is destroyed, the act of crop destruction does not simply represent material loss, but can also be perceived as an attack on the dignity and value of their labour, and in some cases a threat to their careers. For example, the 62 Faucheurs who broke into the Colmar INRA research centre and pulled up the transgenic vine stock in August 2010 were arrested and brought to criminal trial in September 2011, also in Colmar. On the second day of the three-day trial, defence and prosecution each called a series of witnesses to explain the context and detail of both the vine crop trial and the destruction action. Two witnesses appearing for the prosecution particularly stressed the damage done to their labour, and to the idea of

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public research, by the destruction of the eight-year research project. Jean Masson, director of the INRA’s Colmar research centre, told the court: The day it happened was hard, very very hard. When I became director, no-one could have imagined that the job would take so much of my energy, so much of my time. Over the course of the eight years, I took part in more than 250 debates, and I replied systematically to every letter, every email, and met everyone who asked to meet me, unless they were aggressive. I must have spent a quarter of my time doing this, so two years, just doing this, two years, two years which for me, for my career, have now gone up in smoke, completely gone up in smoke. And afterwards, talking personally, of course, I had some very, very difficult times.

Jeanne Grosclaude, a retired animal biology research director and representative of the centre-left CFDT trade union at INRA, condemned the action as an attack on academic freedom: For trade unionists, destroying work is either a cry of despair from employees at the end of their tether, and a form of violence that the CFDT has never agreed with, or it is an act of corporate hooliganism. […] This act of destroying someone else’s work is unspeakable. I cannot imagine how citizens can, in a commando action in the middle of the night, destroy the labour of other workers. For me, this is the last word in social violence. […] What will be the legacy of this ransacked vineyard? It’s an attack on public law, an attack on democracy, an attack on research ethics, an attack on the scientific community whose responsibility is to further knowledge. I don’t want to say any more, but I’d like you to take away these two things. I’m from a union background so respect for the labour of other workers is sacred, and let’s try to remember that researchers act responsibly, and stick to the facts. This is a criminal act of vandalism which cannot be explained away with a neat phrase [‘civil disobedience’].73

From the perspective of the target of the action, property destruction is here experienced not simply as material damage (a violence done to things), but as a symbolic violation. This violation is experienced personally and collectively, and results from the forced intrusion of the political into actions held to be separate from it, ‘sacred’ and inviolable (in this case, the production of scientific knowledge, and more widely, individual labour). 73 Field notes, Colmar, September 2011.

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Albeit in a different (and acutely gendered) context, we can observe a similar dynamic at play in anti-abortion actions: the presence of ‘pro-life’ activists inside or immediately outside clinics represents the intrusion of the public, social, and collective sphere of politics into the private, confidential, and intimate sphere of personal healthcare. In the UK, where ‘pro-life’ activists do not (in general) engage in deliberate acts of lawbreaking, we analysed over 200 comment forms filled in by clients at abortion clinics. Our analysis underlines that anti-abortion actions staged (legally) outside clinics are experienced by many women as inherently distressing, as they subject an intimate and difficult decision to public critical scrutiny (see Hayes and Lowe, 2015; Lowe and Hayes, 2018 for fuller discussion). Comments on the forms included: It’s unfair. It’s supposed to be confidential. (Comment #9, Brighton, 2011) The protestors are clearly intimidating people coming into the clinic and although they never spoke to us (older people) younger people ahead who were coming into the clinic were spoken to. (#49, Brighton, 2012) Also it makes everyone from public knows why you are here. Not good. (#79, Brighton, 2013) Not happy with the way lady harassed me at the gate. Spoke loudly for all to hear and was intrusive and very embarrassing. (#132, Streatham, 2012) Though they did not approach me I felt harassed as I walked through the gate knowing that they watch me and they know the reason I am here. (#149, Doncaster, 2014) Making the choice to have an abortion is a very personal decision […]. Why is bullying in schools, work or general society not accepted and in some cases reason for jail time but in the case of my personal medical treatment allowed? Causing undue stress on ANY human being for any reason especially one who is about to undergo surgery surly must be seen as a crime. (#173, Richmond, 2014)

Many clinic users thus reported that they felt the presence of activists outside clinics to be a significant invasion of their right to medical confidentiality, and experienced being approached or observed as a form of harassment. Indeed, in the USA, Doan characterizes anti-abortion clinic actions, including those held outside clinics, as ‘political harassment’ whose goal is to bring about an immediate change in the decision-making of the target, by creating a climate of anxiety and intimidation (2004, pp. 130-131). The occasional visible distress of women entering abortion clinics (and highlighted in the comment forms, above) is correspondingly considered by ‘pro-life’ activists

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not to be a result of their own presence and actions, but as a reflection of the ‘true nature’ of abortion. This insight allows us to rethink the question of violence. Rather than asking whether a given action is objectively violent or non-violent, we emphasize the situational nature of action: particularly where the effect is emotional or concerned with property, the ‘violence’ of a given action is open to multiple interpretations, and these competing interpretations are central to claims over the public legitimacy of the action. This may also help explain why activists who claim that their action is non-violent (or, at the very least, who reject the claim that their actions are violent) may stage or participate in actions which are nonetheless perceived as emotionally or physically harmful. Indeed, Jacobsson and Lindblom (2012), in their discussion of Plowshares actions in Sweden, argue that civil disobedients are confronted with a dilemma when undertaking action, and must resolve the conflict between their transgression of dominant social norms and the pursuit of their own ideals. This in turn requires a high degree of moral reflexivity: where activists depend on effective public communication and positive media representation in order to gain public approval and thus advance their goals, they find themselves in the paradoxical position of needing to downplay the transgressive and emphasize the most socially conformist elements of their action. What, therefore, do activists ‘do’ with their ‘violence’? How do they justify it, through what means do they make it morally, publicly acceptable? Focusing on the three movements already discussed in this chapter, we identify three tactics regularly deployed by activist groups to relativize and legitimize the property damage they cause: (i) the staging of their own action as ‘pacified’; (ii) the relational emphasis on the violence of their target or adversary; (iii) the discursive reframing of civility.

Staging Action The theorization and wide diffusion of civil disobedience gives the appearance that it is a stable set of practices, based around a recurrent number of central features. Indeed, it is this understanding that allows civil disobedience actions to be defined and categorized and counted together. Protest event analysis, for example, conceives of civil disobedience as a single and unified category of action, enabling the frequency and scale of such actions to be compared over time, and between politico-cultural contexts. Yet the precise contours of staging action – how groups of collective actors choose to undertake actions, how they invest these actions with meanings,

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and how they develop them in interaction with other actors – matter, and vary hugely. For Jasper (1997, p. 237), Tactics are rarely, if ever, neutral means about which protestors do not care. Tactics represent important routines, emotionally and morally salient in these people’s lives. Just as their ideologies do, their activities express protestors’ political identities and moral visions.

Each particular action or set of actions can therefore be expected to creatively express the identities and worldviews of the collective actors that set them in motion; indeed, because tactics are always interactions (between activists and the material and political circumstances of action, the nature of their targets, and their opponents, allies, and bystanders), we cannot grasp how activists give meaning to their actions without paying detailed attention to the precise contours of their staging (Doherty and Hayes, 2018). The staging of actions will therefore depend on ideological differences and disagreements within and between groups; there are frequently significant differences between groups which might ostensibly be considered to be similar, but which emerge from different networks and action traditions, and which act in different politico-cultural and ideational contexts. Thus the wave of crop destructions that took place in the UK in the late 1990s was predominantly carried out covertly, by activists whose sceptical view of legality developed from the anarchist direct action traditions of their activist networks (though here there were also considerable divergences, with one group, genetiX snowball, launching a series of open ‘accountable actions’ whose basis was rooted in anarchist individualism) (Doherty and Hayes, 2012). Nonetheless, despite their evident differences, we can also trace a similar general legitimation strategy across actions undertaken by Plowshares, Faucheurs, and ‘pro-life’ activists. Such a strategy appears particularly important for activists who must reconcile questions of conscience, and particularly a religious faith, with potential acts of destruction and coercion. Thus when activists from the Ploughshares ‘Seeds of Hope’ group broke into British Aerospace’s hangars at its Warton factory in January 1996, they placed particular emphasis on integrating both their own beliefs and the reasons for their action into the way they carried it out. As Zelter notes, the decision to form an all-woman group – the first such Ploughshares action – was a conscious decision, taken to ‘challenge the unbalanced, patriarchal basis of our society’, itself reflected in the control of the arms industry by men, and the targeting of women and children in human rights abuses and

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armed conflict. It also enabled the group to ‘explore certain ways of working that many men would not have been happy with’. Principally, this involved an emphasis on mutual care, and the adoption of ways of undertaking direct action that undercut its inherent machismo (Zelter, 2004, p. 131). The accounts of the action given by both Zelter and Needham also stress the care with which it was carried out. Zelter explains: Photographs of women and children shot at the Santa Cruz massacre at Dili in 1991, when Indonesian troops fired on a peaceful demonstration and killed 528 people, were hung on the warplane along with a banner we had carefully and lovingly sewn over the previous months. The video and the report [made by the group to explain their action] were left on the pilot’s seat and ‘seeds of hope’ (vegetable and flower seeds) were poured all over and around the plane. (2004, p. 132)

Needham describes what they did: We had each brought a packet of seeds and ashes from our New Year’s Eve ritual, and we scattered them over the wings of the plane. I added a photograph of my baby niece, Skye. I wanted to say that ordinary children, just like her, were going to be killed with this weapon, and we couldn’t ignore that reality just because we didn’t know them personally. (2017, p. 94)

In this way, the action of causing property destruction was designed to express resistance to violence, and an ethics of mutual care, and love, whilst denying the status of weapons machinery as property. Rowan Tilly (1998), one of the members of the Warton action support group (and subsequent founder of genetiX snowball), put forward a similar argument: Any weapons system or machinery which terminally damages the Earth or robs the future is inherently violent and should not exist as ‘property’.74

The use of hammers, again, expressed deeply held beliefs, not just about the beating of swords into ploughshares, but about the use of hand tools and their availability to ordinary people, requiring few skills; Rowan Tilly stresses that a hammer ‘is a tool that most unskilled people could use and it has a symbolic association with justice’ (Tilly, 1998). Equally, for Needham, 74 Nepstad (2008, pp. 63-64) quotes a Swedish Ploughshares activist, who develops this line of reasoning in greater depth.

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using a hammer emphasized the gulf between the strength of our everyday lives and convictions, and the fragility of highly sophisticated weaponry when faced with these convictions (Needham, 2017, pp. 38-39). In US Plowshares actions typically strongly marked by Christian symbolism, the spilling of blood has been regularly used to represent the death and suffering caused by the weaponry that is the target of the action. In July 2012, for example, three Transform Plowshares Now activists – one an 82-year-old nun – used bolt cutters to break into the Y-12 weapons grade uranium storage facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, carrying Bibles, written statements, peace banners, spray paint, flowers, candles, bread, hammers with biblical verses on them, and baby bottles filled with human blood (Quigley, 2013). Having gained access to the plant’s high-security Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility, the three spray-painted the messages ‘Woe to the empire of blood’ and ‘The fruit of justice is peace’ and splashed blood on the facility, before covering it in crime-scene tape. In court the following year, one of the three activists, Greg Boertje-Obed, explained that they used the baby bottles to ‘represent the blood of children that is spilled in the use of and making of weapons’.75 More generally, the spilling of blood also denotes the sacrificial character of Christ, as well as the sacrifice made through action of the activists themselves, who accept sometimes severe prison terms. In the US and elsewhere, Plowshares actions are, moreover, marked by an often ostentatious civility towards others: in Sweden, for example, once an action is accomplished, the activists offer coffee and biscuits to security guards, talk to the police as if they were their friends, and try to negotiate with arms industry representatives (Jacobsson and Lindblom, 2012). To some extent, similar themes and concerns are visible within the staging of Faucheurs actions. The act of crop destruction is characterized by selfrestraint, and in the initial series of actions, by attempts to create a festive, family-oriented atmosphere. As in Ploughshares actions, the Faucheurs use only basic tools to pull up crops, here representing peasant farming identity (and again, the dignity of the everyday, and of the ordinary citizen). As Bonneuil notes, the Gandhian traditions of the campaign’s leading figures are central to the adoption by the Faucheurs of a strategy focused around ‘exposing one’s body to repression for actions which are considered to be just, such as hunger strikes, or the acceptance of physical blows or prison 75 Munger, Frank, ‘Reporter’s Notebook: Was the Judge Wearing Blue under His Robe?’, Knox News, 11 May 2013, http://archive.knoxnews.com/news/local/reporters-notebook-was-the-judgewearing-blue-under-his-robe-ep-358284696-355860401.html/, last accessed 22 November 2018.

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sentences’ (2010, p. 241). Particularly in the early actions in late 2004, such as at Solomiac, images of activists being tear gassed in fields were widely shown in the media; in this way, the negative public image that might be created by the destruction of property was overwritten by media images of sacrifice and suffering. In the Faucheurs campaign, the symbolic value of staging action as physical bodily exposure to the violence of the state authorities was reinforced by the terms of codification of permissible conducts in the charter of the Faucheurs volontaires (see below). The charter functioned as a written declaration signed by campaign members before their participation in action; it demonstrated a strong normative bias towards undertaking ‘responsible’ action, emphasizing that activists must maintain self-control during action and follow the rules of non-violent action as defined by the campaign. For José Bové, even if we do not personally know everyone involved in our civil disobedience actions, those who participate give a written engagement to take full responsibility for their actions. I place great faith in this written charter: it is a sort of citizens’ oath, a citizen’s charter signed by every participant which demands great respect for the collective. It brings about a very strong sense of responsibility.76 Charter of the Faucheurs volontaires The Faucheur volontaire is committed to acting for the protection of the environment for the protection of consumers and peasant farmers, in the Global North and the Global South: – Recognizing the uncontrolled danger to the environment of genetically modified plants – Finding it unacceptable that biotechnology corporations seek to profit from living organisms through gene patenting and the control of seed markets, to the detriment of peasants farmers in the North and the South – Finding it unacceptable that the government chooses not to apply the precautionary principle to the sale of genetically modified foodstuffs In the absence of any democratic recourse, I volunteer to neutralize genetically modified crops sown in open fields. I agree to observe the rules of non-violent action. 76 Quoted in Libération, 8 November 2004.

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I have been informed of the risks I run through my participation in this form of action. I also agree to participate in various forms of communication and solidarity-building actions at the criminal trials which follow from these actions.

The Relational Logic of Harms A second widely used strategy for minimizing the transgressive nature of disobedient action is to place the disobedient action within a relationship of violence, in which the violence of the target or adversary is much more harmful and consequential. To some extent, this relationship is already present in ideas of political jiu-jitsu, which were at the heart of the strategies used by Gandhi and by the US civil rights movements, and have been theorized by Sharp (and others) as central to the repertoire of non-violent direct action (see Chapter 11). However, jiu-jitsu (and indeed backfire) depends on the creation of a mechanism, the production or provocation of a counteraction by an adversary, in which the deployment of excessive force in response to a non-violent action effectively delegitimizes the more physically powerful side. Here, in contrast, activists are concerned with the construction of their own action as legitimate, both in terms of its capacity to be seen as such publicly, and to express their own ideas and identities. Moreover, in both common and civil law systems, constructing action as proportionate is also fundamental to presenting an explanatory defence in judicial arenas, where activists are prosecuted for criminal damage. The relational logic of action is relevant at two levels: (i) where violent acts are of a similar category, or type, but where they are of different orders of magnitude, such as where minor acts of property damage forestall greater acts of property damage; (ii) where actions belong to different categories of violence, such as where an act of deliberate property damage forestalls actions which cause physical bodily harm to human beings. This raises two issues. First, as we have seen, the social movement literature typically elides distinctions between different orders of physical violence when constructing general definitions, categorizing damage to property alongside harm to human bodies (notwithstanding Tilly’s observation (1978, p. 177) that state authorities and their agents historically commit the largest part of violence directed at people, whilst the groups they are trying to control do the largest part of damage to property). Second, at least in debates concerning violence,

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the social movement literature rarely explicitly focuses on forms which go beyond physical acts, but are nonetheless central to the structure of social relations, such as the symbolic violence of the production and maintenance of arbitrary hierarchies of power and domination (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 190). Yet the invisible and embedded symbolic violence of social relations, whether engendered by the state (redundancies, public sector reforms, iniquitous laws, etc.), or by multinational corporations, is frequently articulated by activists as a justification for the physical acts of destruction they undertake. Thus for one Faucheur volontaire, the act of crop destruction is a way of refusing the violence of the system, the despair of terrorism, the impotence of social struggle. […] [It is] a way out of the cycle of powerlessness that citizens are trapped in today. (Filippozzi, 2004)

This type of argument is particularly present in the discourses of the campaign’s leading figures. For Bové, for example, crop destruction is a non-violent act: the goal is to convert both public opinion and our opponents, not to provoke repression or an armed response. Any attack on property can only have a symbolic meaning. (2007, p. 154)

In contrast, ‘real violence’ is produced by the ‘particularly violent economic system’ (p. 48), in which ‘the violence of social relationships is integral to the expansion of the market and to capital accumulation’ (p. 84). From this perspective, pulling up crops is an embodied act of resistance to the neoliberal order, whose symbolic violence is expressed through the materiality of everyday life. Thus whilst denying that crop destruction is an act of violence, Bové justifies the act by contrasting it with the ‘real source of violence’, that of the globalized market economy. In Ploughshares actions, the weapons are characteristically rejected not just for their potential for physical, material destruction (including murder and genocide), but for the way they violently structure social relationships. Thus the three Transform Plowshares Now activists who broke in to uranium storage facility in Tennessee in 2012 carried a letter with them, outlining their motivations: We come to the Y-12 facility because our very humanity rejects the designs of nuclearism, empire and war. Our faith in love and nonviolence encourages us to believe that our activity here is necessary; that we come to invite transformation, undo the past and present work of Y-12; disarm

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and end any further efforts to increase the Y-12 capacity for an economy and social structure based on war-making and empire-building.77

On some occasions, actions go further, underlining the gender-based nature of this systemic violence. As already discussed, the Warton Ploughshares action in January 1996 was consciously designed as a women-only action, making the link between patriarchal power and warfare and human rights abuse. Equally, undertaking actions as openly as possible (in the terms used by Ploughshares, and by genetiX snowball subsequently, being accountable) is central to exposing the systemic violence inherent in the uncritical, non-reflexive assumption of positions of obedience. Rowan Tilly explains: Ploughshares actions challenge the sheep-like habit of doing as others do, not stepping out of line, otherwise known as obedience. As long as individuals unthinkingly do as others do, our society will never grow out of making war and destroying the Earth. To carry out an act of disarmament and then to take responsibility for it contravenes all society’s norms. To openly state one’s intention to carry out an act of disarmament is also profoundly challenging to the status quo. Both are against all the rules, especially the unwritten rules. People are supposed to wrap their acts of resistance in a veil of secrecy, to run away, remain in hiding – all a form of obedience in as much as it is what our society expects. The activists dare to push against the closed minds of a society which is helpless only because it believes itself to be powerless to act. (Tilly, 1998)

Whilst ‘pro-life’ actions at abortion clinics are clearly different on many levels from these actions, they also demonstrate some broad similarities. Thus there is a similar relational logic governing the contrast between the intervention and the act of abortion, held to be a far greater, and nonreversible, threat or harm. For anti-GM activists, pulling up crops is commonly justified by the threat of cross-pollination and contamination, and future unknown harms that might be caused by the entry and combination of genetically modified organisms into the animal and human food chains. For Ploughshares activists, disarming a warplane is justified by the outcome of saving human life. For ‘pro-life’ activists, the justification is structurally similar: clinic actions are justified by their understanding of a foetus as an 77 Quoted in Quigley, Fran, ‘How the US Turned Three Pacifists into Violent Terrorists’, Common Dreams, 15 May 2013, https://www.commondreams.org/views/2013/05/15/how-us-turned-threepacifists-violent-terrorists, last accessed 22 November 2018.

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unborn child. This logic is succinctly resumed by Ruth Rawlins, a prominent activist from Abort67, a US-influenced British group which regularly displays large images of dismembered foetuses outside abortion clinics in London and Brighton: ‘It is wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being. Abortion is the intentional killing of an innocent human being. Therefore abortion is wrong.’78 Similarly, for Thierry Lefèvre of Trêve de Dieu, abortion is ‘institutionalized murder’.79 The comparison of abortion to genocide is a commonplace of anti-abortion activism, shared widely by Catholic and Protestant evangelist groups, with annual abortion statistics regularly cited to underline the cumulatively massive nature of the act. In the UK, for example, the 40 Days for Life campaign, which organizes ‘vigils’ outside abortion clinics, claims abortion has taken 8.7 million lives over the 50 years since it was legalized in the UK in 1967; in France, SOS Tout Petits make similar claims (such that ‘25 children are killed every hour’, for example).80 These figures also act to encourage supporters to take part in campaigns, as groups typically make (unverifiable) claims about the effect of clinic actions: in the USA, for example, 40 Days for Life claims that, ‘Since 2007, 40 Days for Life participants report 13,305 lives saved from abortion during a campaign’.81 The supposed violence of abortion is held to be not only physical, but emotional and systemic, and reproduced through secular law and social conditioning. For Xavier Dor, against all conception of justice, we grant the right to murder, an act which is condemned by the fundamental basis of law which protects the weak and the innocent. […] This aberration can only be maintained through conditioning and terrorism. The result is that women themselves present themselves at an abortion centre.82

For ‘pro-life’ activists, it is this systemic violence which not only does not offer women the resources they need to make a valid choice – understood as the choice of not having an abortion, and of bringing the pregnancy to term – but which produces the symbolic structure in which a termination appears as a legitimate choice. 78 Field notes, public debate at London Legal Salon, 3 March 2015. 79 ‘Procès anti-avortement’, Midi 2, 18 November 1993, www.ina.fr. 80 For example, ‘Interview du Dr Dor’, Présent, 19 April 2016. 81 See http://www.marchforlife.co.uk/ and https://40daysforlife.com/history/, last accessed 15 July 2017. 82 Xavier Dor, ‘Politiquement et religieusement correct…’, SOS Tout Petits Actualités, no. 1, 1 February 2004.

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The Semantic Construction of the Civic In any legitimation struggle, the precise terms used to describe an action correspondingly take on specific importance. As we have already seen, the acts of property damage carried out by Ploughshares activists are typically qualified by them as ‘disarmaments’, or ‘transformations’; by the same token, crop destructions are termed ‘fauchages’ by the Faucheurs volontaires campaign, from the word to mow – denoting peasant identity, tradition, and agricultural husbandry. In the vocabulary of the Confédération paysanne (Farmers’ Union), the acts are frequently referred to as ‘neutralizations’, stressing crop destruction as the beneficial removal of a contaminant.83 By the same token, the actions of ‘pro-life’ groups depend on the definition of the foetus as a baby, as human life from the moment of conception; as we have seen, actions designed to disrupt abortion clinics are correspondingly widely termed ‘rescues’.84 In each case, the lexical building blocks function to define the action so that it becomes a legitimate act; they also serve to evacuate the act of potential violence. The effect of these semantic strategies can be significant, permeating media and academic accounts. The Faucheurs volontaires are particularly interesting from this perspective. Campaign leaders notably promote a semantic shift, referring to civic, rather than civil, disobedience. Bové explains the significance of this shift: whereas civil disobedience is the action of the ‘individual who resists in the name of their own individual conscience’, civic disobedience is undertaken by ‘the citizen who resists in the name of a collective conscience, in the name of principles that are shared by several people’. Civic disobedience is thus defined by the citizen character of the action that it sets in motion: disobedients call on their fellow citizens to follow their example or, at the very least, to engage in a debate on the problem that the action has identified. (Bové and Luneau, 2004, pp. 160-161)

83 See ‘Procès en appel des trois faucheurs de Saint-Georges: pour une action illégale mais légitime’, Communiqué de presse, Confédération paysanne, 3 October 2005; Michel Dupont, ‘Des mois décisifs pour la lutte anti-OGM’, 18 November 2004, http://www.lesdixdavelin.free. fr/actu_all.php?actu_id=actu_000117, last accessed 31 January 2018; ‘La Confédération paysanne appelle ses militants à participer aux actions anti-OGM’, Communiqué de presse, Confédération paysanne, 3 August 2007. 84 For France, see for example the recurring rubric in TransVIE mag, starting from issue no. 1, 16 July 1991. As noted above, Operation Rescue was set up in the USA in 1986.

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The term ‘civic’ disobedience first appeared in France in February 1997, when artists and mobilized against the Debré Act, which required French citizens to formally notify their municipal authorities when inviting non-French nationals to stay overnight in their house (see discussion in Chapter 10). Opponents of the act compared it to the anti-Semitic laws of the wartime Vichy regime,85 thus articulating their disobedience not as a refusal of the rule of law, but as resistance to the growing electoral success of the Front national (particularly in the south of France). But it also expressed a continuing commitment to the ideal of the republic, as particularly expressed through the defence of human rights and the reaffirmation of citizenship as an active and continuous engagement (Hayes and O’Shaughnessy, 2005). For Étienne Balibar, the term ‘civic’ specifically speaks to two elements of the mobilization: first, the collective aspect of the initiative; second, the articulation of disobedience as an expression of citizenship and common values in the face of a re-emergent fascism. For Balibar (1997): This is not a matter of individuals who, as an act of conscience, object to authority. This is a matter of citizens who, who in serious circumstances, recreate their citizenship through a public act of ‘disobedience’ to the state.

In this sense, therefore, the action is civic in that it creates the civic sphere of action. Sémelin (1997) follows a similar line of reasoning, underlining the importance of the distinction between civism and civility: Civic disobedience refers solely to citizenship. It is an appeal made by citizens to other citizens to join them in the refusal of a given law that they consider to be unjust. Civil disobedience adds civility to civism: it is a matter of collective disobedience, undertaken in the respect of the other. The peaceable, non-violent aspect of this action therefore excludes those forms of disobedience which harm the other.

Given that the mobilization against the Debré Act was a public appeal for non-compliance with an administrative procedure, the distinction between civism and civility had relatively little importance in that specific case. However, where collective disobedience becomes a question of a preventive intervention in the action of another, and potentially at least, the destruction of property, the distinction becomes meaningful, and raises the question 85 Herzberg, Nathaniel, ‘Les lois sur l’immigration suscitent un foisonnement de protestations’, Le Monde, 12 February 1997; ‘Polémique sur une ‘rébellion caviar’’, Le Figaro, 13 February 1997.

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of the centrality of non-violence in disobedient action. Jean-Marie Muller, a non-violence theorist close to the Faucheurs volontaires, argues that the term ‘civic disobedience’ is a semantic confusion; for Muller, ‘the primary sense of civil disobedience is that it as an act of citizenship’. Further, however, the shift from civil to civic: pushes into the background the ‘civil’, non-violent character of action, which is nonetheless fundamental to the ‘civic’ character of action. It is better and more valuable to emphasize that it is civility which gives citizenship its meaning. Citizenship is a status, civility is a virtue: it is, precisely, the virtue of the citizen. (2005, pp. 104-105)

For Muller, it is better therefore to speak of ‘civil’ rather than ‘civic’ disobedience, particularly as doing so places the action within the Gandhian tradition. The discursive shift from ‘civil’ to ‘civic’ can create confusion; yet the issue is not purely semantic. In the case of the Faucheurs volontaires, the shift to ‘civic’ is not a politically neutral act. Privileging the ‘civic’ over the ‘civil’ carries has the advantage of obscuring the potentially violent nature of the intervention, of minimizing the political importance of doing no harm, and thus of promoting a specific reading of disobedience. Moreover, we can also argue that this semantic shift has a further, allied effect. As previously noted, ‘civil disobedience’ has only shallow roots in French political culture, with few examples prior to the mid-1990s of movements claiming to be acting in the disobedient tradition. Yet for the artists and intellectuals who mobilized against the Debré Act, the publication of a ‘manifesto’ placed the action within a framework of previous appeals by intellectuals, such as the ‘Manifesto of the 121’ of September 1960, and the ‘Manifesto of the 343 Sluts’ of April 1971. In other words, the chosen form of the action consciously placed the appeal to civic disobedience within a specifically republican national cultural tradition of non-compliance. In the case of the Faucheurs volontaires, the use of the term ‘civic’ achieves a comparable effect. First, in the reasoning put forward by Bové, to speak of ‘civic’ tethers action to the life of the collective, placing it outside of the realm of individual conscience, and making it constitutive of the public sphere, as disobedience creates the civic. This argument is strikingly consonant with Habermas’s understanding of civil disobedience as a ‘necessary’ component of the political culture of Western societies, emerging in the mid-1970s as a symptom of the weakening of the public sphere as states experienced a legitimation crisis (Habermas, 1981). Equally, as a definition of action, it

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maintains the importance of conscience whilst placing this at the service of the public sphere; it thus both offers a conception of disobedient action beyond that of liberal individualism, and axiomatically inscribes it as a collective act. Second, the reference to ‘civic’ reinforces the relationship between the anti-GM campaign and prior struggles, especially the Larzac campaign against the extension of a military base in south-west France in the 1970s. Lanza del Vasto referred to the Larzac campaign as ‘non-violent civic action’ (Del Vasto, 1973, p. 58); Libouban and Bové were both highly influenced by this campaign. Third, and more widely, the call to undertake ‘civic’ action serves, as for the film-makers, to legitimize a form of action with relatively little purchase in France, making possible its inscription within the republican tradition, thus normalizing it (Doherty and Hayes, 2012). For Balibar (1997), indeed, the relationship between disobedient action and the civic sphere is that of the ‘foundational transgression’ out of which the French Republic was made. The multiple references within the texts and speeches of the Faucheurs campaign to the foundations of the Republic is mirrored within activist discourses by references to the wartime Resistance, De Gaulle’s appeal of 18 June 1940, the taking of the Bastille; by uses of the image of Delacroix’s Liberty leading the people, which commemorates the 1830 Revolution; and by the wearing of tricolour sashes by local elected representatives when participating in crop destructions.86 Conclusion Civil disobedience is typically cast as a principled form of non-violence, in which non-violence is a guarantee of the commitment of social mobilization to democratic forms of problem resolution. Yet, for activists and campaigns where mobilization is structured around an intervention in the acts of others (rather than an act of non-compliance with an obligation for action), this requirement poses a number of problems, and blurs the boundaries between what is considered violent and what is considered non-violent. Property damage challenges the definition of democratic action as necessarily non-violent; for the activist, however, the choice of tactic is justified by the necessity of acting in the urgent present, in order to save a habitat, a species, a village threatened by aerial bombardments, or in some cases, the 86 For references to foundational Republican texts, see the right to resistance to oppression established by Article 2 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789, and the right to insurrection established by the preamble of the radical Constitution of 24 June 1793.

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‘life of an unborn child’. As we have noted, similarity of action is difficult to establish across movements with diverse ideological dynamics, and even between ostensibly similar movements across political cultures. We can nonetheless trace similar regimes of justification for property damage carried out by non-violent groups, involving semantic shifts, normalizing staging, and relational discourses. Yet here again specific traditions, whether activist or national, are called into play: ‘pro-life’ activists rarely place their actions within the ideas, cultures, networks, and precedents of civil disobedience.

13 Conclusion to Part 2 Acts of civil disobedience seemingly destabilize the social order through their avowed and deliberate transgression of the law. Yet civil disobedience has, in Western liberal democracies, also become an increasingly widespread and normalized form of political protest, drawing on celebrated (and seemingly consensual) figures of struggle, such as Gandhi, or King. At the trial of the GANVA anti-nuclear activists in Rennes in January 2011 for their occupation of a high-tension electricity pylon four years earlier, for example, a Green MEP appearing as expert witness told the court that: These activists are worthy of Gandhi. Yet you are prosecuting them! They should be receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. They are defending the common good. They have of put themselves in danger, personally and physically, in order to protect their fellow citizens.87

Civil disobedience draws on a heroic tradition of action, valorizing and legitimizing it as an ideal of democratic engagement, particularly where prosecution is used by activists to create a space for political challenge and democratic deliberation. Indeed, because civil disobedience characteristically is followed by prosecution and appearance in court, the individual activist subjects themself to two forms of vulnerability: the physical vulnerability of action, as they place responsibility for the physical governance of their body directly in the hands of their adversary; and the symbolic vulnerability of subsequent prosecution, as they subject their motives and actions to public examination and potential sanction. In the repertoire approach to understanding social movement tactics (Tilly, 2003), major transformations in the types of action used by social movements develop as a result of major social transformations. Thus the development of the types of democratic participation familiar to Western democratic states – voting, demonstrations, political campaigns, industrial action, petitions, rallies – are the product of large-scale shifts in the organization of society: industrialization, urbanization, the development of national suffrage, markets, and communication systems. These forms of participation are inherently indirect, as they aim to secure a favourable outcome by persuading publics, political parties, and public authorities of the validity of their particular cause. Equally, these forms of action constitute a pacification 87 Nicole Kiil-Nielsen; field notes, Rennes Criminal Court, January 2011.

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of social conflict: strikes, demonstrations, elections promote negotiation rather than force as the mechanism of social arbitration (Deloye, 2007). Boycotts are a case in point. Taking its name from community resistance in late-nineteenth-century Ireland to an absentee landlord’s agent named Charles Boycott, this form of action enables community members to ostracize a named individual (be they a person, a corporation, or even a state) whose actions or values are adjudged to be harmful to the moral life of the community. In premodern times, this recourse was available to communities through forms of direct action known as the charivari, or ‘rough music’: the ritualized, physical humiliation and exclusion of the harmful individual (Thompson, 1992). The boycott, whilst remaining a form of direct community action requiring strong social solidarity, is also a pacified form of direct action; for Taatgen (1992, p. 167), it is thus an important part the wider civilizing process, displacing violent methods of resistance as the dominant form of expression of agrarian discontent. The post-war development of civil disobedience in Western democratic states is correspondingly consistent with the longer development of nonviolent forms of action. Taatgen’s discussion of the boycott draws on the work of Norbert Elias. In The Civilizing Process, Elias analyses the process through which Western societies have increasingly integrated norms of self-discipline and emotional control since the Middle Ages: individuals in these societies have internalized emotional expressions and frustrations in order to conform to ‘civilized’ conducts. In this perspective, the civil of civil disobedience is telling; we can see it as not just a guarantee of a commitment to democratic deliberation, or even to non-violence, but to the reproduction of conducts which do not disturb the wider social sense of the democratic self. Indeed, where activists committing civil disobedience allow their bodies to be removed and processed by police forces, they demonstrate a remarkable degree of bodily self-discipline (notwithstanding the deployment of sophisticated techniques of passive resistance designed to draw out such processes for as long as possible). There is a continued tension here between the collective defence of the common good and the individualism of action. Although Thoreau remains a reference point for many contemporary movements (particularly through his commitment to voluntary simplicity), the individualism of civil disobedience as a general form of action is typically not that of Thoreau’s fundamental resistance to the state, or his elevation of the sovereignty of the autonomous moral individual. Rather, many activists ground their disobedience in a moral reflexivity privileging the right of the individual citizen to take illegal action, in conditions of absent democratic engagement. This position

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presupposes collective action; but, given both the primacy of moral reflexivity and the level of personal risks and vulnerabilities that it also presupposes, disobedient action is frequently undertaken in small rather than mass groups. Indeed, where Arendt imagined civil disobedience as necessarily a mass movement, on the lines of the rights campaigns of the 1960s in the USA, for many contemporary movements it is a relatively high-risk action carried out by small groups of activists organized within affinity groups, enjoying relatively low financial resources (though it frequently requires specific skills, such as climbing, assembling tripods, and so on). Here, the organizational resource of action (the small, consensus-oriented, high trust group) demands the maximal commitment of the individual ‘self’ in action. Disobedient action therefore requires a strong ‘mobilization of the self’, going beyond the level of personal engagement and implication that is central to any form of public political participation. Equally, as a form of action, civil disobedience reproduces some of the dominant norms of Western liberal societies: social responsibility, moral reflexivity, conscientious action, individual autonomy, respect for the physical integrity of the self and of the other. The spread of civil disobedience is thus also consistent with the emergence of new demands, discourses, and social forces. Where socialist and communist forces articulated industrial, class-based demands through demonstrations, strikes, and the formation of parties and trade unions, the post-60s emergence of new social forces correspondingly privileged new forms of action. As we argue elsewhere (Ollitrault, 2008, pp. 77-79), for the environmental movement the emphasis on non-violence was both cultural and instrumental: for new movements lacking strong organizational resources, non-violence enabled the recruitment of new middle-class supporters and participants, whilst differentiating the movement from the antagonistic class conflict of the far left. In France, the active non-violence of the 1970s Larzac campaign became integrated into the collective memory of the movement, such that subsequent enactments of non-violent disobedient action have become sites of the reiteration of this cultural identity. In this sense, civil disobedience is not just a form of action designed to secure a particular outcome, but a site of the repeated performance of a specific activist identity, as different political cultures produce different genealogies of action, and disobedient action carries different meanings, techniques, and purposes that are specific to particular groups and networks. Its generalization across numerous movements also testifies to two other developments. First, an extension of the importance of rights campaigning as a feature of the social movement culture of Western societies, as the free

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movement of capital within the global economy systemically produces democratic inequalities (Fraser, 2005), but is mirrored by the hardening of borders to the free movement of people both inside Western states and between Western states and their less affluent neighbours and former colonies. Civil disobedience in defence of the rights of migrants has become a key element of the social movement repertoires of these states, consonant with both these states’ own liberal premises and the normalization by these states of the promotion and defence of human rights as a discursive indicator of democratic, ‘civilized’ status. As Siméant (2009) underlines, embodiment is particularly important to this type of disobedient action; embodiment focuses attention on the public management of the politically and economically disruptive (non-documented, and therefore ungoverned) body of the migrant, and functions as a physical expression of citizen solidarity and resistance to the forced removal of the migrant body. Second, it is emblematic of the frustration of activists with the routinization and institutionalization of the ‘classic’ repertoire of these states, of their perception of the failure of the indirect repertoire to produce change. As, again, one of the GANVA activists said in court in Rennes in January 2011, There were hundreds of us, and more, in the street, saying No [to nuclear power]. And nothing changed. What do you want us to do? Direct action was our only available option.88

There are two broad underlying reasons for this type of argument. The first concerns democratic time, and is explained by the nature of the policy or action being protested or opposed: though, as we have discussed, urgency was central to the rationale for taking disobedient action articulated by the US civil rights movement, this urgency was primarily rhetorical, signalling the intolerability of waiting longer, of continuing to be denied equal citizenship rights. In more contemporary civil disobedience direct actions, urgency is typically more narrowly instrumental: there is, for activists, no time for the indirect repertoire, for appeals to media power or for the intervention of the public authorities. Urgency is instead dictated by the apparent necessity of physical intervention to stop an irreversible action being committed, whether it is to stop the deportation of a migrant or the extraction of fossil

88 F., explaining the reasons for participating in the action (the protests referred to concerned opposition to the granting of a construction permit for a new nuclear reactor at Flamanville in Normandy); field notes, Rennes Criminal Court, 13 January 2011.

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fuels or the bombing of a civilian population (or here, the construction of new nuclear power infrastructures). The second broad underlying reason for this is disenchantment with established methods is related to the wider critique of the functioning of Western democratic states, and is perhaps the key explanation for the contemporary significance of civil disobedience in these states. Disobedient action translates the exclusion of citizens from established channels of democratic participation, an expression that the formal granting of citizenship rights, far from being the enabling condition of distributive justice (as Rawls would have it), does not, or does no longer, create democratic inclusion. Disobedient action in this sense indicates a wider crisis in the functioning of representative democracies, as corporate power is privileged over public participation in decision-making, divisions between elites and mass publics become more entrenched, and citizens become increasingly disengaged from formal electoral processes. Mair refers to this process as ‘democracy without a demos’, as the separation between popular and constitutional democracy erases the sovereignty of the citizenry (2006, p. 25). In this sense, civil disobedience is inherently performative, in that the action calls for greater citizen involvement in decision-making whilst itself creating the sovereign citizen, able to intervene directly within the decision-making process. As these processes appear (at the time of writing) to be ever more present in representative democracies, the political and cultural potential of disobedient action equally appears ever more significant.



Biographical Notes

France Joëlle Aubron. Born in 1959. Having broken with her bourgeois Catholic family, she lived in Parisian squats from the late 1970s to 1980, when she joined Action directe. First arrested in 1982, she married Régis Schleicher the following year. Released in 1984, she went completely underground in 1985 and was arrested again on 21 February 1987 with her companions. She was given a life sentence for the assassinations of General René Audran on 25 January 1985 and of Georges Besse on 17 November 1986. Seriously ill with cancer, she was released in June 2004 and died two years later. Nathalie Ménigon. Born in 1957 into a working-class family, she founded Action directe along with Jean-Marc Rouillan, whom she married in prison in June 1999. She was arrested on 21 February 1987 and given a life sentence for the same crimes as those with which Joëlle Aubron was charged. Also seriously ill after two strokes, she was placed on a day-release programme, still spending nights in prison from May 2007 to November 2011, when she was fully released. André Olivier. Born in 1943. He was professor of literature for two years after 1968 before he was suspended. A member of the NRP (the underground branch of the GP), he was arrested in 1976 for possession of weapons and forged documents. He met Jean-Marc Rouillan in prison and founded Action directe with him. He took part in the first AD action against the employers’ union, the CNPF, on 1 May 1979. He was in charge of the AD Lyon branch up until his arrest in 1986. He was given a life sentence in 1989 and remains in prison. Frédéric Oriach. Born in 1953. He joined the UJCml at age 14, then the GP and the Comités Palestine, then the Brigades internationales and NAPAP. He founded the journal Subversion in 1982 with the leader of the Belgian CCC, Pierre Carette. His last arrest dates back to November 1987, which brought him a six-month sentence for complicity in justifying murder; he has been free since having served it. Jean-Marc Rouillan. Born in 1952. His father was a socialist and worked for the Ministry of Youth and Sports. He was a member of the lycée action

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committees, then of the libertarian autonomous groups before joining the MIL in 1970, then the GARI. He was jailed from December 1974 to May 1977. He was one of the founding members of AD and was arrested in 1987, and sentenced to life imprisonment two years later. In December 2007, he was granted partial release (working outside and spending nights in jail), incarcerated again the following year for having made public statements about Action directe, and granted partial release again in May 2011. He works in publishing and has written many books, both biographical and about prison conditions; in May 2017, Rouillan was sentenced to a further eighteen months in prison (of which ten months were suspended) for incitement to terrorism, following comments he made in the wake of the 13 November 2015 attacks in Paris claimed by Islamic State (Daesh). Régis Schleicher. Born in 1957 into a Catholic family. His father was national secretary of the CFDT trade union, and his mother ran an institution for disabled children. A member of NAPAP and then of AD, he was arrested in March 1984 and sentenced three years later to life in prison for the Avenue Trudaine attack of 31 May 1983. He left prison on conditional release in July 2009.

Germany Andreas Baader. Born in 1943. No known activity, probably a social dropout until he took part in the firebombing of two department stores in the spring of 1968 with his girlfriend, Gudrun Ensslin. He was one of the founding members of the RAF in May 1970, alongside Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin. Arrested in 1972, he died in prison on 18 October 1977, officially by suicide, though this version is still currently disputed. Gudrun Ensslin. Born in 1940. Her father was a pastor. In 1965, she began working on a thesis in humanities at the Freie Universität Berlin and became very involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement. She took part along with Andreas Baader in the firebombing of two department stores in 1968, and went underground with him to form the RAF, of which she was a member until she was arrested on 8 June 1972. Like Baader, she was found dead in her prison cell on 18 October 1977. Hans-Joachim Klein. Born in 1947. His father was a police officer. A member of the RZ, he took part alongside Carlos in the hostage-taking of the OPEC

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ministers in Vienna in 1975. He left the organization in 1977 and lived underground until his arrest in France in 1998. He was given a nine-year prison sentence, and was paroled in 2003. Horst Mahler. Born in 1936. Member of Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund, a law student at the Freie Universität Berlin, then Baader and Ensslin’s defence lawyer, he was an active member of the RAF until his arrest in 1972. Sentenced to fourteen years imprisonment, he was paroled in 1980. He officially joined the far-right party NPD in 2000. He was sentenced to concurrent prison terms of five and six years in 2009 for Holocaust denial, but in 2015 fled Germany during a period of temporary release from prison on health grounds. After a failed attempt to claim political asylum in Hungary in 2017, he was extradited back to Germany, where he is now serving the remainder of his sentence. Ulrike Meinhof. Born in 1934. An active member of the APO, she was a journalist for the magazine Konkret, published by her then-husband Klaus Reiner Röhl, from 1959 to 1968. She helped Baader break out of prison in 1970 and co-founded the RAF with him and Ensslin. She was arrested in the summer of 1972 and placed in solitary confinement. She was found dead by hanging in her cell on 9 May 1976, in circumstances considered suspicious by some. Brigitte Mohnhaupt. Born in 1949. Militant member of the SPK until its dissolution in 1971, when she joined the RAF. Jailed from 1972 to 1977, she then became the leader of the RAF alongside Christian Klar. She was arrested in November 1982 and given five life sentences for her participation in the major actions of the second-generation RAF, including the assassinations of Attorney General Siegfried Buback and the ‘boss of bosses’, Hanns Martin Schleyer, as well as in the anti-NATO operation of September 1981. She was released from prison on probation in March 2007 after completing the 24 mandatory years of her life sentence.

Italy Renato Curcio. Born in 1941 to a protestant single mother. Educated at the University of Trento, where in 1963 he met his future wife, Margherita Cagol, with whom he founded successively the Metropolitan Political Collective, Sinistra proletaria, and the BR in September 1970. He went underground in

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the summer of 1972 and was first arrested in September 1974 before breaking out the following year with the help of a BR commando led by his wife. He was returned to prison in January 1976, where he stayed until April 1993, when he was granted partial release and, in 1998, full release. He is currently the director of a publishing cooperative, Sensibili alle foglie, and publishes in particular his research on prison work and conditions. Mario Moretti. Born in 1946 into a petit bourgeois Catholic family, he worked as a technician at Sit-Siemens during the ‘hot autumn’ strike wave of 1969. He joined the BR in the spring of 1971 and became their leader in 1974 after founders Renato Curcio and Alberto Franceschini were arrested. In charge of the commando that kidnapped Aldo Moro in 1978, he was arrested in 1981 and was given six life sentences. On partial release since 1997, he now works with former convicts. Toni Negri. Born in 1933, he was professor of philosophy in Padua in 1967. He founded Potere operaio in 1969 then Autonomia operaia in 1975. He was arrested on 7 April 1979 and falsely charged with being the mastermind of the BR. Whilst in prison awaiting trial, Negri was elected in 1983 to the Chamber of Deputies for the Radical Party; he then fled to France, where he stayed until 1997, when he returned to Italy as part of a plea bargain. Sentenced to seventeen years in prison, he was released in the spring of 2003. Adriano Sofri. Born in 1942. A renowned intellectual, he founded Lotta continua in 1969 and was its leader until it self-dissolved in 1976. He was sentenced to 22 years in prison in 1997 after the revelations of a ‘repentant’ who accused the LC of having ordered the assassination of Police Chief Calabresi in May 1972. The sentence triggered a large opinion movement in his favour. He was released in January 2012.

Japan Hiroko Nagata (aka Yoko Nagata). Founder of Keihin Anpo Kyoto (TokyoYokohama Anti-Security Treaty Joint Struggle Committee) and then leader of Rengo Sekigun (United Red Army), she was arrested in February 1972 with Tsuneo Mori, who committed suicide. She was sentenced to death in 1982 for the Nagano massacres of the winter of 1972. She died in prison in February 2011 of a brain tumour.

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Kozo Okamoto. Born in 1947, he is the only survivor of the suicide attack against Lod Airport on 30 May 1972 conducted by the JRA. Sentenced to life imprisonment in Israel, he was part of an Israeli-Palestinian prisoner exchange in 1985 and found refuge in Lebanon, where he was granted political asylum in 2000. He is assumed to be still living there today. Fusako Shigenobu. Born in 1945 into a poor family. After the war, her father joined a far-right group, The Blood Brotherhood League, which was planning thirteen assassinations. She was a leader of the JRA and settled in Lebanon in 1971. Arrested in November 2000 in Osaka, she was sentenced to 20 years in prison in February 2006. She remains in prison, where she is gravely ill with cancer.

The United States Bill Ayers. Born in 1944, member of the Students for a Democratic Society and co-founder with his partner, Bernardine Dohrn, of the WUO in 1969. He went underground with her after the Greenwich Village explosion of 6 March 1970, until he turned himself in to the authorities in 1981. He is currently retired as professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and has written numerous books on the WUO and an autobiography. Bernardine Dohrn. Born in 1942. Her father was a Hungarian Jew and her mother of Swedish descent. She studied law in Chicago, where she defended tenants, then draft dodgers. She joined the Students for a Democratic Society in early 1968 and founded the WUO the following year with Bill Ayers, living underground from 1970 to 1981. She was a professor of law at Northwestern University until 2013 and currently runs a legal-aid centre for adolescents and their families. Mark Rudd. Born in 1947 into a Jewish family emigrated from Poland. His father was a former army officer. He was the leader of the Columbia University conflict in 1968, the last secretary of the Students for a Democratic Society, then a member of the WUO, which he quit in 1976. He is currently retired as professor of mathematics at a New Mexico community college.

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Index 350.org 173 40 Days for Life 235 Abernathy, Ralph, D. 124 Abort67 235 ACNV (Association pour la communication non violente), France 160-162 act of necessity 165 action repertoires 137 AD (Action Directe) 13, 21, 25-26, 78, 87-88, 96-99, 102, 106, 113-114, 247-248 affinity group tactic 178, 185, 189, 207 Aganaktismenoi, Greece 182 Ahmedabad, Gandhi in prison 150, 198 Algerian War 160-161 desertion 157 fastings 161 Front de libération nationale (National Liberation Front) 158 petitions 161 political opposition 158 torture by French troops 160 Alinsky, Saul 152, 189 Amazon rainforest 173 Amchitka, Aleutian Islands, Greenpeace first voyage 143, 196, 210 American United Press 192; see also Miller, Webb ANC (African National Congress), South Africa 149 Andō, Norisuke 47 Andreotti, Giulio 63, 90-91, 93 annexation of Texas 146 ANPE (Agence nationale pour l’emploi, or National Employment Agency) 181 Anpo (Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan) 13, 16, 46, 54, 73, 250 anti-abortion 216, 226, 234; see also ‘pro-life’ anti-austerity movement 128 Spain 181 anti-war movement 128 APO (Außerparlamentarische Opposition, or Extra-Parliamentary Opposition) 13, 55, 79, 249 arenas of action 141, 206 Arendt, Hannah 131, 133, 135, 140, 147, 150, 188, 216, 243 unpolitical individual act 147 Army of God 219; see also ‘pro-life’ action ASALA (Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia) 98 Asanuma, Inejiro 65 Association pour la communication non violente (ACNV), France 160-162

Aubron, Joëlle 26, 97, 100, 106, 247 AutOp (Autonomia Operaia, or Workers’ Autonomy) 13, 107, 250 Ayers, Bill 69, 117, 251 B2J (Bewegung 2. Juni, or the June 2nd Movement) 13, 79-81, 93, 96 Baader, Andreas 55, 62, 79, 81, 95, 107, 248-249 backfire 148, 194, 213, 215 Balibar, Étienne 237, 239 Battisti, Cesare 26 bearing witness 143, 170, 196 Beauvoir, Simone de 157, 159 Bedau, Hugo 131, 197, 216 Berlinguer, Enrico 91 Berrigan, Daniel 170-171 Berrigan, Philip 170 Besse, Georges 99-100, 247 BI (Brigades internationales) 13, 77, 247 Biagi, Marco 105 Biao, Lin 42, 89 Birmingham, Alabama, US 124, 198 BLA (Black Liberation Army) 13, 117 Black Bloc tactic 178 blockades 162 Bollardière, General Jacques de 168 Bologna, Sergio 57 Borghese, Prince 90 Bové, José 163, 165, 231, 233, 238-239 Boycott, Charles 242 boycott 149-150, 151, 185, 242 BPP (Black Panther Party) 13, 66, 68-69, 72 BR (Brigate Rosse, or Red Brigades) 13, 17, 25, 63, 71, 73, 80-81, 84-85, 90, 92-93, 96, 107-112, 249-250 Brana, Guy 99 Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement 178 Breton language, campaign to defend, Brittany, France 190 British Aerospace, action against factory 200, 218, 228 Brown v. Board of Education 125, 142 BR-PCC (Brigate Rosse per la Costruzione del Partito Comunista Combattente, or Red Brigades for the Construction of the Combatant Communist Party) 13, 18, 102, 105, 110-112 BR-PG (Brigate Rosse – Partito Guerriglia del proletariato metropolitano, or Red Brigades – Party Guerrilla) 13, 17, 108-112 BR-UdCC (Brigate Rosse – Unione dei Comunisti Combattenti, or Red Brigades – Union of the Combatant Communists) 13, 18, 110-112 Buback, Siegfried 95, 249

266  Buddhism 145 Bush, George W., president 178 CADAC (Coordination des associations pour le droit à l’avortment et à la contraception, or Coordination of Associations for the Right to Abortion and Contraception) 221 Caen, trial for nuclear waste action 203, 209 Cagol, Margherita 63, 249 CAL (Comités d’action lycéens) 74 Calabresi, Luigi 26, 250 Camp Mercury nuclear test site Nevada 168 Cannes film festival 160 Carlos 27, 77, 96, 101-102, 248 Carmichael, Stokely 68 Casalegno, Carlo 92 Catholic Worker Movement, US 171, 218 cause lawyers 212 CCC (Cellules communistes combattantes, or Communist Combatant Cells) 14, 98, 247 CCNV (Community for Creative Non-Violence), Washington, DC 218 CDU (Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands, or Christian Democratic Union of Germany) 14, 55, 93 Chahine, Gabriel 97 Chavez, César, Mexican agricultural workers movement 151-152 Christianity 143, 192, 228, 230, 235 Catholic faith based civil disobedience 151, 158, 161-162, 170, 215, 221 Social Catholicism 209 Christian pacifism 147 Protestant faith based civil disobedience 158, 219 Cipriani, George 97, 100 CIRCA (Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army) 178 citizen journalism 190 civil disobedience civility 137, 197, 236 conditions of liberal constitutional democracy 136 democratic disobedience 134, 173, 205 direct and indirect debate 135, 137, 139-142, 153, 177 irreversibility 172, 176, 244 justification of 132-133 liberal theorisations 143 non-violent 136-137, 144, 148, 150, 155, 164, 171, 185 passive resistance 213 pedagogic disobedience 179 private and public actions debate 185 public punishment for 197 sacrifice 149-150, 192, 213 Thoreau’s ‘Civil Disobedience’ 145 urgency of 168-169, 174-176, 224, 244 Civil Rights Act 1964 125

Breaking L aws

Clark, Mark 66, 69 Clark, Septima 151 climate camps 171, 189 climate justice movement 155, 171-173, 195 Climate Games 171 Ende Gelände, Germany 172 intergenerational justice 174 Red Lines action 171 Clinton, Hillary 152, 173 CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) 168 CNPF (Conseil national du patronat français, or National Council of French Employers) 14, 78, 88, 99, 247 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel 27 Colbert, Claudette 124 Cold War 126 collective self-determination 133 Colonna 2 Agosto, or 2nd of August Column 14, 109-110 Colonna Walter Alasia, or Walter Alasia Column 14, 109-112 COLP (Comunisti Organizzati per la Liberazione Proletaria, or Communists Organized for Proletarian Liberation) 14 Comité Viêt-Nam national (CVN) 41, 74 Comités d’action lycéens (CAL, secondaryschool action committees) 74 Comités Viêt-Nam de base (CVB, Vietnam grassroots committees) 74 Committee of 100 168 Communauté de l’Arche 160-163, 217 Confédération paysanne (peasant farmers’ union), France 163, 208, 236 COP21 (United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties), Paris 172, 191 CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) 125, 150 Cossiga, Francesco 107 crime of solidarity 169 Croce, Fulvio 92 Croissant, Klaus 80-81, 87, 89, 107, 260 CSO (Community Service Organisation) 152 CUN, France 162 Curcio, Renato 63, 92, 111-112, 249-250 cyber attacks, hacktivism 185 D’Antona, Massimo 105 DAPL (Dakota Access oil pipeline) 171 Darcos, Xavier 179 DC (Democrazia Cristiana, or Christian Democracy) 14, 90 de Gaulle, General Charles 49-50, 90, 101, 239 de Grailly, Michel 39, 75 De Tocqueville, Alexis 188 Déboulonneurs, anti-advertising group 177, 199 Debré Act 156, 237-238 DeChristopher, Tim, oil and gas permit auction hoax, Salt Lake City, Utah 171-173, 201 deliberative democracy 127 democratic deficit 176

Index

democratic individualism 146 Democratic Party 152 demonstrations 139, 185, 242 Den plirono (I Do Not Pay) movement, Greece 182 deportation flights 175 Desertion 158 Direct Action Network, US 178 direct democracy 182 DKP (Deutsche Kommunistische Partei, or German Communist Party) 15, 62 Dohrn, Bernardine 53, 69, 117, 251 Dor, Xavier, leader of SOS Tout-Petits 221, 235 Dozier, General James Lee 108, 110 Druon, Maurice 159 Dutschke, Rudi 55, 62, 66 Dylan, Bob 69 East Timor 126 Elias, Norbert 242 embodied practice 128 Ende Gelände, Germany 172 Energy Robin Hoods 179 English Civil War 141 Ensslin, Gudrun 55, 62, 79, 81, 84, 95, 107, 248-249 environmental movement 128, 196, 204 environmental emergency 155 see also 350.org; climate justice movement; Faucheurs volontaires, Genetically modified crops (GM), campaigns against; Greenpeace; Gulf of Mexico, US, TransCanada Keystone XL Pipeline, campaign against; Keystone XL, TransCanada oil pipeline, campaign against; Ploughshares, UK, Plowshares, US European Union safeguard clause 165 FACE (Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act 1994) 219 Faucheurs volontaires 164-165, 169, 176-177, 199, 207, 209-210, 217, 221-222, 224, 228, 230-233, 236, 238 Colmar INRA research centre action 209-210, 224 prosecutions 199, 209-10 Federal Bureau of Land Management, US 172 Federal Onshore Oil and Gas Leasing Reform Act 172 Fédération nationale des syndicats d’exploitants agricoles (French Agricultural Union) 222 Feltrinelli, Giangiacomo 63, 256 Fillon, François, French Prime minister 179 financial crisis 2008-2009 181 Fischer, Joschka 27 Flamanville EPR nuclear reactor, action against 202

267 food sovereignty 177 Fouchet, Christian 49 Franceschini, Alberto 63, 92, 109, 250 Fraser, Nancy 244 Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act 1994 (FACE) 219 Freedom Rides 125 French Communist Party 56, 76 French Family Planning 219 French Polynesia nuclear tests, action against, Moruroa 168 French Resistance in World War II 208 Front national 237 FSM (Free Speech Movement) 15, 42 Gandhi, Mohandas K. 126, 131, 142, 147-152, 161, 173, 178, 187, 192-194, 198, 230, 232, 238, 241 abstinence 149 activist career 149-150 boycott of British Goods 150 marches 148-149 sacrifice 149 salt tax, campaign against 149-150 simplicity 149, 242 South Africa 148-149 GANVA (Group d’actions non violentes anti-nucléaires) 201-209, 241, 244 GAP (Gruppi d’Azione Partigiana, or Partisan Action Groups) 15, 36, 63, 81, 90 GARI (Groupes d’action révolutionnaires internationalistes, or Groups of Internationalist Revolutionary Action) 15, 77-78, 248 Gavi, Philippe 42 Geismar, Alain 39 Genetically modified crops (GM), campaigns against 164, 169, 177, 200, 210-211, 216, 222, 234, 239 genetiX snowball 228-229, 234 Genoa G8 Summit protests 178 global justice movement 128, 155, 177, 195 Goffman, Erving 137, 192 Golden Rule boat protest against US nuclear test, Nevada 168 Goutierre, Christian 102 GP (Gauche Prolétarienne, or Proletarian Left) 15-16, 39, 56, 58-59, 75-78, 88, 97, 100, 210-211, 247 Graeber, David 178 Gramsci, Antonio 58 GRAPO 25 Greenpeace 143, 168, 173, 188, 190, 192, 196, 200, 207-208, 210-212 acquittal of defendants for destroying a field of GM crops Norfolk, UK 200 Greensboro, Northern Carolina, sit-ins 189 Gregg, Richard Bartlett 152 Grenelle de l’environnement 165 Guevara, Che 41, 72 Gui, Luigi 49

268  Habermas, Jürgen 126-127, 238 Hampton, Fred 66, 69 Hansen, James 173-174 Herrou, Cédric, arrest of for migrant solidarity 187 Hezbollah 103 Hindj Swaraj (Indian Home Rule) 149 Hinduism 149, 209 spirituality as a resource 209 Histoirs d’A 159 Ho Chi Minh 67 Hollande, President François 162 Holocaust 196 Holy Loch nuclear submarine protest 168 hunger strikes 151, 161-163, 191 Huxley, Aldous 152 image management 192 India 148-149 caste structure 149 Indignados, Spain 182, 195 INRA (Institut national de la recherche agronomique, or National Institute of Agricultural Research) 199 International Monetary Fund 182 Iraq War, action against B-52 bombers and acquittal 200 Ireland, boycott against absentee landlords 242 Israeli army, action against equipment, acquittal at Bristol Crown Court 200 JCR (Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire, or Revolutionary Communist Youth) 15, 39, 44, 56, 69, 74-75 Jeanson, Henri 158 Jeunesse agricole catholique 161 Jeunesse étudiante chrétienne 161 Jeunesse ouvrière chrétienne 161 Jim Crow laws, US 139 JRA (Nihon Sekigun, or Japanese Red Army) 15, 25, 73-74, 81, 84, 101-104, 106, 119, 251 judicial opportunity structures 200 Kakumeito (Revolutionary People’s Party) 16, 104 Karman ‘super coil’ abortion technique 160 Keihin Anpo Kyoto (Tokyo-Yokohama committee against the U.S.-Japan security treaty) 16, 46, 73, 250 Kennedy, Robert 66 Keystone XL, TransCanada oil pipeline, campaign against 171-174 Khrushchev, Nikita 54 Kiil-Nielsen, Nicole, Green MEP 206 Kinder Scout, mass trespass 138-139 King Jr., Martin Luther 123-124, 142, 147, 151-152, 161-169, 173, 183, 194, 198, 241

Breaking L aws

Kingsnorth coal-fired power station, Greenpeace action 188, 200 acquittal at Maidstone Crown Court 200 Klein, Hans-Joachim 27, 96, 248 Klonsky, Mike 68 Kodama, Yoshio 65 Krivine, Alain 44, 74 Ku Klux Klan 66 La Boétie, Étienne de 125 Lanzardo, Dario 57 LARF (Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Factions) 16, 98 Larzac campaign 160, 163-164, 176, 239, 243 LC (Lotta Continua, or Continuous Struggle) 16, 57-58, 69-70, 82, 250 Lévy, Benny 42 Lhomme, Jean-Denis 77 Libouban, Jean-Batiste 164, 216, 239 Ligue des droits de l’homme 207 Limagrain seed company 222 lock-on 213 logic of action 138, 140 Luther King, Martin 46, 66, 123 Macchiarini, Idalgo 90 Madagascar 126 Mahler, Horst 62, 80, 93-94, 249 Mair, Peter 245 MAN (Mouvement pour une alternative non-violente) 179 Manifesto of the 121 157, 238 Manifesto of the 343 Sluts 157, 159, 238 manufactured vulnerability 187, 201, 241 Marcellin, Raymond 75 Marea Blanca (White Tide) 139, 181 Marighella, Carlos 72, 80, 86, 89 Mascolo, Dionys 157 Massu, General 49 May 1968 209 May 19th Committee (United States, 1977-1980) 16 McDonald’s, action against, Millau 177 Mégret, Catherine 156 Meinhof, Ulrike 62, 79-81, 84, 89, 95, 107, 248-249 Meins, Holger 80, 89, 93, 107 Mellon, Jim 68-69 Ménigon, Nathalie 26, 97, 100, 106, 113-114, 247 Mexican-American War 145 Migrant solidarity, France 187 MIL (Movimiento Ibérico de Liberación, or Iberian Liberation Movement) 16, 77-78, 248 Miller, Webb 192-193 Mitterrand, President François 162 MLAC (Mouvement pour la liberté de l’avortement et de la contraception) 160

269

Index

Mohnhaupt, Brigitte 26, 249 Möller, Irmgard 95 Monsanto 165 Montgomery Bus Boycott 123-125, 150, 194 Moretti, Mario 92, 107, 111, 250 Mori, Tsuneo 73, 87, 250 Moro, Aldo 71, 92-93, 109, 112, 250 Morrison, Norman 42 Movement of 22 March 41, 74 movements of the squares 138, 155, 182 Movimiento 15-M 138 MSI (Movimento Sociale Italiano, or Italian Social Movement) 16, 66, 70, 90 Muller, Jean-Marie 238 Myanmar 126 Nagata, Hiroko (aka Yoko Nagata) 46, 73, 87, 250 NAP (Nuclei armati proletari, or Proletarian Armed Nuclei) 16, 70-71, 81, 112 Napap (Noyaux armés pour l’autonomie populaire, or Armed Units for People’s Autonomy) 16, 77-78, 88, 247-248 Napoleonic law systems 200 Nashville Christian Leadership Council 166 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) 124, 135, 142, 150 NATO 64, 91, 99-100, 107, 110, 249 Needham, Andrea 218-219, 229-230 Negri, Toni 57-58, 107-108, 250 new social movements 141 Nihon Sekigun (Japanese Red Army) 15, 73; see also JRA Nixon, E.D. 124 Nobel Peace Prize 241 Nogrette, Robert 75-76 Notre Dame des Landes, campaign against a new airport 162-163 NPD (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or National Democratic Party of Germany) (neo-Nazi) 16, 62, 249 NRP (Nouvelle résistance populaire, or New People’s Resistance) 16, 75, 247 Nuclear power, campaigns against 162, 171, 185, 203 Plogoff, Brittany 162 nuclear testing, France 143 Nuit debout 182 Obama, President Barack 172 obstruction 137-138 occupations 162-163, 183, 185, 213 Occupy Wall Street 138, 155, 183, 195 OECD 99 Ohnesorg, Benno 55, 62 Okamoto, Kozo 96, 103, 251 Olivier, André 97, 100, 247 Operation Rescue, USA 219 Orange revolution, Ukraine 126

Ordre Nouveau 16, 39, 74 Oriach, Frédéric 77, 247 Otpor, Serbia 126 Overney, Pierre 76-77, 100 pacifism 128, 160 PAH (Platforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca, or Platform for People Affected by Mortgages) 139 Palestine 126 Parks, Rosa 123, 125, 135, 141 Parliament, France 181, 220 PCC see BR-PCC PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano, or Italian Communist Party), Italy, 1921-1991 17, 57, 70, 91, 93 Peci, Patrizio 108 Pennsylvania Abolition Society 144 Persichetti, Paolo 26 petitions 139, 161 Petrella, Marina 26 PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) 17, 73-74, 96, 101-103, 119 PG (Partito Guerriglia del proletariato metropolitano, or Guerrilla Party of the Metropolitan) see BR-PG Pienkny, Jeannette 75 PL (Prima Linea, or Front Line), Italy, 1976-1981 17, 70-71, 109, 112 Plato 126 PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) 17, 74, 119 Ploughshares, UK, Plowshares, US 170, 216, 218-219, 221, 230, 233, 236 Seeds for Hope 228 women acquitted at Liverpool Crown Court 1996 200 Plowshare actions, Sweden 227 PLP (Progressive Labor Party), United States, 1962 17, 53, 68-69 political harassment 226 political liberalism 147 porteurs de valise (suitcase carriers) 158 post-citizenship movements 128 PotOp (Potere Operaio, or Workers’ Power), Italy, 1969-1973 17, 36, 57-58, 69-70, 82, 92, 250 Prairie Fire Organizing Committee 117 precautionary principle 165 private property 138 pro-life actions 216, 219, 226, 228, 234-236 pro-Palestine campaign, Brittany, France 190 property destruction 137, 217, 225, 232, 239 PSU (Parti socialiste unifié, or Unified Socialist Party), France, 1960-1989 17, 56, 160 Quakerism 125, 131, 142-144, 147, 168, 196 Quit India campaign, Ghandi 150

270  racial segregation in the US 123, 138 RAF (Rote Armee Fraktion, or Red Army Faction) 17, 25-26, 58, 62, 73, 79-82, 84, 89, 93, 95-96, 98-99, 102, 107, 113, 248-249 Rainforest Action Network 173 Raspe, Jan-Carl 95 Rawls, John 126-127, 131-133, 135-137, 141, 164, 197, 245 social contract 164 Recanati, Michel 75 Religious Society of Friends 141, 144; see also Quakers Rengo Sekigun (United Red Army) 18, 73, 87, 250; see also URA Republic of New Africa 17, 117 RESF (Réseau éducation sans frontières, or Education without Borders) 169, 179, 207, 211 Revolutionary Armed Task Force 17, 117 Robinson, Jo Ann 123 Rose revolution, Georgia 126 Rote Zora (Zora the Redhead) 17, 79 Rouillan, Jean-Marc 77, 97, 100, 106, 247-248 Rousset, Pierre 74 Roya citoyenne network 187 Rudd, Mark 46, 53, 68-69, 251 Russell, Bertrand 168 RYM (Revolutionary Youth Movement) 53, 68-69 RZ (Revolutionäre Zellen, or Revolutionary Cells) 17, 27, 79, 81, 96-97, 248 Salt March 150, 192-193; see also Gandhi Sarkozy, Nicolas 26, 34, 165 Sartre, Jean-Paul 42, 107, 157 Satō, Eisaku 47, 65, 73, 101 satyagraha 148, 192 Scalzone, Oreste 107 Schleicher, Régis 77, 99-100, 106, 113-115, 247-248 SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) 124, 150-151 SDS (Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund, or Socialist German Student League) 17, 44, 48, 55 SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) 9, 18, 42, 45-46, 53, 55, 62, 67-69, 72, 78, 105 Seattle, WTO meeting 177, 187 Sekigun (Red Army) 15, 72-73 separate but equal 125 sexual equality 145 SFIO (Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière, or French Section of the Workers’ International) 18, 56 Shah of Iran 55 Sharp, Gene 194, 232 Shigenobu, Fusako 73, 81, 101, 103, 106, 251 Signoret, Simone 157 sit-ins 125, 138, 141, 178, 189, 215, 219 Greensboro 189

Breaking L aws

Marea Blanca 139 Oklahoma 135 Wichita, Kansas 135 SLA (Symbionese Liberation Army) 18, 86 slavery abolitionism 144, 167 Fugitive Slave Act 146 underground railroad 144 SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) 18, 68, 135, 150 social contract 126, 146 Socrates 126 Sofri, Adriano 26, 36, 250 Solidarity movement, Poland 126 Sophocles’ Antigone 126 SOS Tout-Petits (Save the Little Ones) 219-220 sovereignty 126 SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or Social Democratic Party of Germany) 18, 55, 78 SPK (Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv, or Socialist Patients’ Collective) 18, 79, 81, 249 Spock, Benjamin 42-43 Stopub subvertisement, Paris metro 177 strikes 151, 242 Strobele, Hans Christian 107 Tamiya, Takamaro 73 tar sands, Alberta, Canada 172 Tavernier, Bertrand 156 tax refusal 145, 150, 162, 185 taxation 138 Thompson, E.P. 223, 242 Thoreau, Henry David 131, 142-143, 145-149, 166, 187, 198, 242 Tilly, Charles 31, 33, 37, 61, 137, 185, 188, 192, 216-217, 223, 232, 241 Tilly, Rowan 229, 234 Togliatti, Palmiro 91 Tolstoy, Leo 149 Tramoni, Jean-Antoine 76-77 Transcendental Club 145-146 Transform Plowshares Now 230, 233 trespass 137-138 Trêve de Dieu, La (Truce of God) 219, 235 trials for civil disobedience 128, 199 Tronti, Mario 57 Truffaut, François 158 Tupac Amaru 103 tute bianche (White Overalls), Italy 178 UdCC (Unione dei Comunisti Combattenti, or Union of Combatant Communists) see BR-UdCC UEC (Union des étudiants communistes, or Communist Students Union) 18, 56 UJCml (Union des jeunesses communistes marxistes léninistes, or Union of MarxistLeninist Communist Youth) 18, 56, 247

271

Index

UNEF (Union nationale des étudiants de France, or National Students’ Union of France) 18, 55-56, 208 United Farm Workers of America 151 United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties, Paris (COP21) 172, 191 URA (Rengo Sekigun or United Red Army) 18, 73, 87, 250 US Civil Rights Movement, US 123-125, 131, 141, 166, 183, 187-188, 194, 232, 244 electoral registration campaigns 125 non-violent resistance 125 police brutality 125 US Senate 173 US State Department 173 US Supreme Court 124, 150

blood on draft records, Baltimore 170 burning of draft records, Maryland 170 violence and non-violence debate 128, 170, 215-240 VLR (Vive La Révolution !, or Long Live the Revolution!) 18, 56, 58 voluntary servitude 126 Voting Rights Act, 1965 125

Vaincre et vivre (Conquer and Live) 18, 77-78 Vasto, Lanza del 161, 216, 239 Veil Act, France 160 Velvet revolution, Czechoslovakia 126 Vietnam War, protest against 170, 188, 196, 215

Zapatistas 178 Zedong, Mao 42 Zelter, Angie 218, 228-229 Zengakuren (Japanese League of Student Self-government) 19, 54, 71

Warton Ploughshares action 229, 234 White Citizen’s Councils 124 Women’s Political Council, US 123 WUO (Weather Underground Organization) 19, 25, 69, 73, 81, 86, 89, 117, 251 Yodo group 73, 101



Protest and Social Movements

James M. Jasper and Jan Willem Duyvendak (eds): Players and Arenas. The Interactive Dynamics of Protest 2015, ISBN 978 90 8964 708 5 Isabel David and Kumru F. Toktamış (eds): ‘Everywhere Taksim’. Sowing the Seeds for a New Turkey at Gezi 2015, ISBN 978 90 8964 807 5 Johanna Siméant, Marie-Emmanuelle Pommerolle and Isabelle Sommier (eds): Observing Protest from a Place. The World Social Forum in Dakar (2011) 2015, ISBN 978 90 8964 780 1 Robert M. Press: Ripples of Hope. How Ordinary People Resist Repression without Violence 2015, ISBN 978 90 8964 748 1 Jan Willem Duyvendak and James M. Jasper (eds): Breaking Down the State. Protestors Engaged 2015, ISBN 978 90 8964 759 7 Christophe Traïni: The Animal Rights Struggle. An Essay in Historical Sociology 2016, ISBN 978 90 8964 849 5 Mustafa Gurbuz: Rival Kurdish Movements in Turkey. Transforming Ethnic Conflict 2016, ISBN 978 90 8964 878 5 Marcos Anclovici, Pascale Dufour and Héloïse Nez (eds): Street Politics in the Age of Austerity. From the Indignados to Occupy 2016, ISBN 978 90 8964 763 4 Johanna Siméant and Christophe Traini: Bodies in Protest. Hunger Strikes and Angry Music 2016, ISBN 978 90 8964 933 1

Kerstin Jacobsson and Jonas Lindblom: Animal Rights Activism. A MoralSociological Perspective on Social Movements 2016, ISBN 978 90 8964 764 1 Lorenzo Bosi and Gianluca De Fazio (eds): The Troubles in Northern Ireland and Theories of Social Movements 2017, ISBN 978 90 8964 959 1 Donatella della Porta (ed.): Global Diffusion of Protest. Riding the Protest Wave in the Neoliberal Crisis 2017, ISBN 978 94 6298 169 0 Frédéric Volpi and James M. Jasper (eds): Microfoundations of the Arab Uprisings. Mapping Interactions between Regimes and Protesters 2018, ISBN 978 94 6298 513 1 Konstantinos Eleftheriadis: Queer Festivals. Challenging Collective Identities in a Transnational Europe 2018, ISBN 978 94 6298 274 1 Julie Pagis: May ’68. Shaping Political Generations 2018, ISBN 978 94 6298 375 5 Matteo Cernison: Social Media Activism. Water as a Common Good 2019, ISBN 978 94 6298 006 8