This is a garter snake,
and because I captured it,
it released its product
Like a bug ?
Yeah, same system. Step back a bit.
You know, tiny as it is, it's watching us.
What do you think this clay is used for?
What did we do with it?
Jars, pottery...
And how could we use it?
To make small aquariums.
I knew Jean-Noel more than 10 years ago.
We met each other on blockades of anger
with the will to change the world.
And from blockading to being angry, from being angry to blockading,
what I discovered in him
was a special feeling
made of curiosity for everything around us.
A tireless hoarder of knowledge,
Jean-Noël, on top of being a man full of anger against this world,
is also and especially in love with our world.
Spending much of his time as a naturalist,
Jean-Noël likes to know things to better share them.
What I liked was that I knew we were going to share.
When I met Jean-Noel for the first time,
I didn't meet only Jean-Noel.
I met Jean-Noël and Nathalie.
There's a CD
Well it's a guy who took pictures
at the antinuclear demo in Chaumont
Nathalie is a specialized educator,
she shares with Jean-Noël a feeling of anger
and disproportionate taste for the richness of our environnement.
When I knew Jean-Noël and Nathalie,
the first times intimacy broke through,
they quickly told me about Chooz, the struggles of Chooz,
where they met and liked each other
in their twenties.
In the feverish tumult of what was
one of the biggest antinuclear protests in france.
In the past few years, an antinuclear discourse has appeared,
but I don't see any antinuclear dynamic,
at least not as I knew it.
We defended the idea that there was a necessary link
between civil and military nuclear power.
So recently, people are told that in Iran,
if they want nuclear power plants,
it's obviously because they want military nuclear power.
Back then, obviously, when we wrote that in the flyers we gave out,
when we yelled it high and loud,
we were made into liars.
Well I wasn't 20 yet, I was a bit younger. we were made into liars.
Well I wasn't 20 yet, I was a bit younger.
I turned 18 at Chooz.
The day of my 18th birthday,
I was demonstrating.
I wasn't fixed in "active life"
because first, I think I was too young for that
and also I didn't want that.
Yeah, you weren't into the ideology of work.
You wanted to live something else.
So meeting people who were taken up by that,
so going to work every day,
having a family to support,
having debts,
those were things that were completely alien to me.
Chooz is a small village,
so you quickly meet all the people in the square
on the day of the demo, it's not hard.
We went to sleep on the straw, in the barn.
That was on the square,
because the barn was at the corner of the square
so we were at the barn window,
we could see the cops waiting for us.
We also slept in the park of Chooz castle,
under the raspberry bushes. That was nice.
On the village square,
there was also the town hall,
where the public inquiries took place,
and it was where, for example, the Thierus lived,
friends who were also from Reims,
who lived a long time in Chooz,
who took in a lot of people
at their place before and after the demos.
We were supposed to make the trip together.
Jean-Noël took us to Alain Thierus,
at Chooz, where the inhabitants are the calcéennes
and the calcéens.
Today, Alain Thierus lives in Reims.
At the time of the struggles in Chooz, he was a young teacher,
today he is a young teacher in retirement,
like his parents Charlotte and Serge
during what would become their years of struggle.
Charlotte et Serge had also opened their house
and shared their rich and precise knowledge.
Their motivation in this struggle had touched the whole family.
Well that's the house of my parents.
This is the main entrance.
Charlotte and Serge already had international level
information about what had happened?
Absolutely. My parents, at the time,
were already part of the antinuclear ecologists
before there was even talk of the second power plant.
So this is one of the houses that would become one of the centres
of the resistance, so to speak.
Well, it's closed.
There's no more bell.
Serge Thierus filled pages and pages
in this famous "public utility inquiry" file,
here in the town hall
Absolutely
He was supported in his work because in fact
he had an absolutely rigorous scientific approach.
My father essentially did very intellectual work
that all the others recognized
including my mother. My mother would never have done that.
My mother was much more, thanks to her childhood ties
because she knew a lot of people in the area,
her work was convincing people:
going to see people, explaining to them
why it would pose a bunch of problems,
why we would have to fight against it,..
And her, she would walk in the village.
You should imagine it's good weather.
Because here, the water vapour,
it's like clouds among the clouds.
But let's try to imagine how it is
with a blue sky.
It makes some damn big clouds.
As soon as we got wind of the second nuclear power plant
because there's a very big difference
between the first and the second.
The first nuclear power plant, end of the 50s, beginning of the 60s,
was accepted practically witout any discussion.
For basically two main reasons :
The first reason was that we were
really into the ideology of progress,
the first power plant was the first civil power plant in france.
It was the first time nuclear power
wasn't associated with the word military,
and for some inhabitants, it was progress
and change compared to
everything that was done before with the bombs and Hiroshima.
The second reason for which it was very easily accepted,
was that this power plant was experimental,
which means really small,
and was entirely under the hill.
So under the mountain in which was the power plant,
vertically, there was a chimney for
evacuating the radioactive gases
- the gaseous part of the waste.
This chimney was under the prevailing winds
that went towards belgium
- so the french had nothing to fear.
Under the prevailing winds, a big rectangle
a few hundred meters long,
a few dozen meters wide.
In this rectangle, at one point,
we noticed there were no more birds.
We heard nothing any more.
And it was very impressive to arrive
before the rectangle where there was normal life in the forest,
cross into the rectangle where you heard nothing,
and on the other side of the rectangle, normal life took up again.
It was very difficult to convince the people
that there was no link between the chimney and this lack of life.
What surprised us when we
saw Monique Moffroy,
wasn't the liveliness in her eyes
or the determination in her tone of voice
which seemed to be both intact.
What surprised us, was the fact
that she lived a few dozen meters
from the entrance of the nuclear power plant
like in an outpost that had
knowingly ignored the end of the fight.
Monique Moffroy is a grandmother today
but it seemed to me that it was with the determination
of her 30s that she met Jean-Noël again.
It started in 79 when we learned
there would be a power plant.
We mobilized with 3/4 people.
We started with flyers,
then we sent letters
and then formed a comity to not have a power plant.
After, when we saw that it was increasing in scale,
that the construction work was going to start, then,
we did a lot of things.
For example, I have a photo,
it's a small meeting,
There were practically only women.
Yes it's true there's almost only women.
Because us, the women, we didn't work,
we were more available.
The men would come meet up with us in the evening.
But because Chooz is a small lost village
at the end of the world, no one listened to us,
so one day, we decided to sequester the mayor.
After that, it hardened even more
with the public enquiries.
Then it got really intense.
It was intense at Chooz.
I had gone and stolen the keys,
and like that, every evening,
when they closed the church,
I would open it and go ring the bells.
And when the bells rang,
people knew we were meeting on the square.
Every evening at 6 for 2 or 3 years.
So do you recognize the people ?
Well yeah, still a few.
There is Mr Couturier.
But here, the CRS (cops), you see them like this.
But in the street going up,
there were schools, all along the road.
And the children were traumatised when they got out..
The children in first grade, in kindergarten,..
Here, it's nothing.
They had shields,
They had tear gas, grenade launchers.
They had everything.
Us, what did we have ? Nothing.
So we tried by every means :
be it eggs, flour, bleach.
During the public utility enquiry,
you were wounded.
Yeah
What happened to you ?
I was on the square.
The cop cars were leaving.
So, we were throwing stuff at them.
And I didn't see there was one of them behind.
They got down and surprised us, there.
So I got hit, 11 stitches.
And hit by a truncheon on the thigh
with a hematoma like this which lasted I don't know how long.
Yeah, I didn't see those arrive.
The village today, it's a great village.
We maybe have the most beautiful village of the Pointe.
Why ? Because of the power plant.
Because of the power plant, we have free internet,
very nice roads
as you've seen, a beautiful town square.
But it's not our village anymore.
I'll tell you honestly :
I prefered the village 25 years ago to now.
Now, it's a village for rich people, it's not a village anymore.
In a village, you do what you want.
Before there were chickens, ducks, dogs...
Now: a dog in the street, you've got a trial.
An oil stain on a sidewalk,
you have to pay to get it cleaned.
Chooz, this farmer's and worker's village
in the Ardennes is no more.
The sweat of the earth and the bodies
was replaced by the power plant's steam.
And here, at Chooz, an intriguing luxury creeps in and builds itself up,
in a region ravaged by unemployment.
And like in every transformed village, there are remnants :
those of the resistance against nuclear power are here, alive.
You can see them in the streets or in the buildings
built up by the power of the power plant. You can see them in the streets or in the buildings
built up by the power of the power plant.
You see, it's not only at Roudoudou's we can get a drink ?
So, want some "little milk" ?
Little milk ?
Yes.
No, no he desn't know what it is.
Yes he does, he had some the other day ! He liked it.
Ah, little milk ! Yes !
It's to cool down the coffee !
Yes, of course little milk, yes, yes !
The lots for the wood will be drawn on tuesday.
It's a random draw ?
Yes.
Everyone draws their lot.
In front of the camera, Josette Courtois didn't want to
speak about past events.
"We still have the same ideas, but we've gotta turn the page."
With Michel, her husband, and Pascal, one of their children,
a few days from the draw for the lots of the woods,
Jean-Noël went into the forest.
In principle, all the people of Chooz who contested the 2nd power plant,
practically everyone got their own wood.
I was on the city council at the time,
and the old director of the SENA came,
he was called in, he had pretty much sworn
that nothing was ready,
but then the general Morlaix,
who was also on the council, was in the loop
and had said Monsieur Romestin was a liar,
because he knew very well they were going to make a 2nd power plant.
People in the country were consulted,
people came to vote
and we had gathered 65% of the votes against the plant.
And that's also what pushed us a bit.
So you decided something
relative to the enquiry at Chooz, to resist?
Yes, at the beginning, there were the documents,
everything at the town hall, we had taken all of it,
we threw it all in the Meuse.
And then, there was a chain of events
and quite some people came from outside
and then, it was a big fight,
and the Communist Party got involved,
the Socialist Party.
And the first to betray us
were the Communist Party, well they understood after,
because they paid dearly for it. And then at the last moment,
when Mitterrand arrived in 81,
everyone still believed in them, and all of a sudden,
they found a system,
they went and ask the neighbouring villages if they wanted it
or if they didn't want it, and then
there were promises of money and voilà,
that's how it happened.
I think the women had taken more of a stand
from the beginning on there being a power plant or not.