The beginnings of the occupation

Saturday, October 11, 2025 – Day 1 – The Banquet

The Gare is illegal, it seems. Here we are finally. We celebrate this strange passage by giving a big banquet in the main building. About fifty guests take place around the tables where dozens of candles shine. A speech is read, solemn and powerful, which ends with applause and fireworks. Here it is as we heard it:

“Dear friends,

La Gare is happy to see you gathered today for this inaugural banquet of its illegal occupation. Since 2007, this pretty limestone meadow and its charming buildings – at the time much less hospitable, it must be said – have been bought by opponents who preferred the saturated sound of punk guitars to the screeching of nuclear waste carriages. Oh yes! It has already been 18 years since this place and its events have grown under the benevolent gaze of the Law and the sacrosanct regime of private property. It was at this pivotal age that the State chose to encourage our lively Gare to leave the cozy nest of legality to fly on its own over the bleak land grabbing procedures of Andra.

If during its youth the Gare was able to act strongly against the administration, by bringing up its front yard or by daring to erect such detestable sheds to the mayor of Gondrecourt, it has always been able to welcome the thousands of people who have taken care of it and live more or less joyful adventures. VMC camp, kitchen construction, Rayonnantes, meetings against prison or speciesism, insulation of its walls, cabins, concerts at the Bricostation and other caravan barricades, these eighteen years have been put to good use to reach the maturity mixed with fiery insolence that we know it today.

It is on these tables eager to welcome guests, falafels and future conspiracies that we will be able to share this first illegal banquet, heralding weeks and months of radiant sunshine and morning awakenings.

Let’s reminisce about all our happy memories, nourish our braziers with the vestiges of the old world, and take care of ourselves and the hawthorns that will one day separate us from the gendarmerie, jealous of the dazzling power of this place. When adversity comes to dawn, crossing the colorful portals, let’s not forget that the fight against Cigéo and its 150 years of work will be only in its infancy. That, like the Gare, we will have to metamorphose ourselves by leaving behind a rigid state, a moribund nuclear industry, incapable of understanding the beauty of what we have experienced here. That we will return to these grassed rails and others continue the fight against forgetting these joyful moments, and against forgetting the shame of nuclear waste.

Long life to the illegal and proud Gare and to all of you, to those who loved it, a big thank you.”

The evening stretches out, to the rhythm of dishes, bottles of apple juice or red wine, then to the sound of a furious accordion. Then a very simple idea is born, in the shape of a foot of nose to the threat that grows on the horizon : what if banquets like this one, we were doing every month? What if, the «illegal Gare» crossed the winter of festive evenings into worldly dinners, moments of joy and respite in the midst of barricades? Will we still be there for the 5th monthly banquet of l’Ornois? What will be served for the tenth edition of Festoons of La Gare? Come and you will know!

 

Sunday, October 12, 2025 – day 2 – The expulsion

-What if they really came to deport us tomorrow?

-Noooooo… Not tomorrow … In a year or two …

-Well nooo, in two or three weeks!

-But no! Tomorrow I tell you! I’m sure. And even that I won’t sleep all night, so I wake you up as soon as they arrive.

-It seems that we saw mobile police trucks 1 hour from here… Like 8 or 9 …

-But no, it’s CRS trucks at 2 or 3 o’clock, coming from Paris.

-Ok! For sure, they’re coming! I’m going to barricade the car entrance.

-But no, stop, it’s 5:30 PM there…

-Chill, they never evict a 12th, it’s well known.

-Ok well I will still close the car entrance tonight, you never know.

-Ha yeah, at what time? When are you going to bed? Like midnight…

-You’re kidding! We are at the candle here… At 8 PM, everyone is sleeping… It’s the «early night of the Gare» here…

-Ok, well we close from 8 to 8 then.

-Yeah… A good occupation starts with quality sleep.

-Yeah.

-Well said!

-Ok.

 

Monday, October 13, 2025 – day 3 – The handover of the keys

Patrice is sitting at his desk. He observes the Meusian countryside in the distance: around his laboratory everything is his. Everything? No, an improbable plot of land is still resisting its expropriatory tendencies.

But today maybe, everything will change, tip over. He does not have great illusions but all the same, he waits – and when, like him, one is overflowing with ambition, waiting means hoping. So he hopes something comes to break the monotony of this sunny Monday. What if the occupants of the Luméville station indeed came to “hand over the keys” to their land, as they were required to do a few days ago by way of a bailiff? Patrice is skeptical. He knows that those maggots there will not come with keys – by the way it does not exist «the keys of the station», there are no keys for a wasteland of several hectares, riddled with traps and barricades, huts and hawthorn bushes. But are they only going to come? He gave them an appointment at the tech space – at his place, so, because here everything is up to him – and then it was wide, he set from 10am to 6pm. These are not very punctual people, he told himself at the time of writing his letter and he was quite proud of himself for despising them in this way, with his big watch on his wrist. But now he’s the one waiting. And he waits all day because he wouldn’t want to miss that. He can no longer delve into his files full of acronyms, he stands at his window, looks at his roundabout, watches for the slightest car: this Monday, Patrice is on the lookout.

The afternoon is fleeing, the sun is declining on the monocultures in precarious lease and Patrice despairs. They will not come. Of course they will not come. Neither with padlock keys, nor with house keys, nor with a carnival-like keychain that would explode into fireworks once placed in the Andra parking lot. They will not come because they have nothing to do here, in the wolf’s mouth and they have many other things to think about. A few kilometers away, as if hidden in a strange geological fold of the South Meuse, we are getting active. And at nightfall, under the bright sky of stars, someone remembers the crumpled mail, thrown under the kitchen table or in a mud puddle and that we had read while laughing: well, but it’s today that Patrice wanted his keys. Everyone had forgotten about that one.

 

Tuesday, October 14, 2025 – day 4 – 10:24 AM – The passage of the bailiff

« Is there someone ? Hohé !!! Is there someone ???? Sorry, excuse me… Is there someone ? No, but if there is no one, that’s all for the best, that’s what I’m here to see. It’s Andra who would like to know if you have left … I am the bailiff, I just came to check. So? Is there someone or is there no one? Ha! Uh … Mr Torrès, it seems that there is someone… Uh … How do we do that?

 

16/10/2025

La Gare