The climate of social anger in which France has been plunged for days spread this Saturday to rural areas. In the Deux Sèvres department, in the center-west of the country, near Poitiers, very violent clashes broke out between law enforcement and radical environmentalists and far-left anti-establishment militants (black blocs), resulting in at least 24 police officers and 7 demonstrators injured, including two very seriously.
The prefecture had banned the protest against a controversial plan to build 16 large water storage ponds for agricultural use. There were precedents for pitched battles there in years past. Despite this, thousands of environmentalists and black blocs showed up in the town of Sainte Soline ready to challenge the 3,200 mobilized police officers.
From the urban guerrilla scenes that many French cities have experienced in recent weeks, in the framework of the protest against the pension reform, they went on to a deployment and maneuvers typical of a military duel. The most extreme protesters carried homemade weapons such as Molotov cocktails, iron balls and high-powered pyrotechnics. Three police vans were completely burned.
The water war in Deux Sèvres has been going on for a few years and is one of the expressions of the tension that exists over the use of a scarce resource in a context of climate emergency and increasingly prolonged periods of drought. In this case, the conflict opposes a sector of farmers and inflexible environmentalists.
The large ponds, with a total capacity of 6 million cubic metres, must be fed with water from the superficial groundwater tables during the winter so that they can then be used to irrigate farms during the summer months when the liquid element is scarce. Opponents claim that this solution will be harmful in the long term and that it means giving in to the interests of intensive and polluting industrial agriculture. Those who defend the rafts, including the Government, maintain that it is a good solution for the survival of the farmers and to ensure the supply with local and not imported products. They have promised to reduce the use of chemical fertilizers to placate environmentalists.
Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin described the level of violence suffered by police officers and gendarmes as “unspeakable” and “unbearable”. Darmanin emphasized the responsibility of ultra-left militants.
What happened in Deux Sèvres shows that the discontent in France has multiple causes, due to various feelings of grievance, that it is widespread throughout the territory and it will be difficult for the government to calm things down. This insurrectional atmosphere threatens to overwhelm the police. There are not enough riot forces to cover all the sources of violent and continuous protest.
Several media outlets, including the newspaper Le Monde, published this Saturday some audio recordings made incognito, on March 20, during a demonstration in Paris, in which members of the controversial motorized riot control brigades (BRAV- M) insulting, harassing and making racist and sexist comments at young people held on the street, who were in some cases slapped. This leak erodes the image of the police, already warned, even by the Council of Europe, for the excesses in their repression of protesters.
