At 6 PM, when the church bell rang,
my mother would put down her gloves
and go to the square.
Directly. That's ideas,
that's people with convictions
who don't want the power plant.
The socialists came to Charleville.
Michel Rocard came to Charleville,
he said "there'll be no problems, there'll be no power plant",
and there was also
Mauroy ?
No, Mauroy, he came after. Mauroy ?
No, Mauroy, he came after.
Mauroy was to announce they would do it anyway.
That was when they betrayed us.
"Minorities, however active they may be,
cannot claim to dictate the law"
That's what we can't forget,
because if they agreed,
they shouldn't have promised anything before the elections.
And it's alway the same with politics.
All the people I knew well from Chooz,
they weren't bad people,
but people become bad.
We become bad.
And there's even moments, we don't know who we are anymore,
we don't have the same behaviour anymore
in these moments.
After, of course, when everything has passed by,
you have to continue your life normally.
Well yeah, we didn't change.
It's still the same,
we still have the same ideas, whatever happens,
Huh Dad ?
This is my little paradise, my small corner.
I see that, I see that, but there's still the forest !
Ah, there's the forest, nothing to do about that,
we needed the forest, that's for sure !
In the explosion the Chooz region went through,
there was also the explosion at the start,
that of escape and rupture.
Jean-Noël met Jean-Marie Monbillard again
in the southwest of france.
Jean-Marie Monbillard was the media icon of the struggles in Chooz.
At the time, as a worker and especially
as the young president of the hunting association,
there was little that destined him
to join an ecological struggle,
if not, here also, for an instinctive curiosity
and a stubborn desire to bite into life,
and thus to not let his choices be dictated
by the laws of the strongest.
I didn't show you the mill yet ?
No !
Well come on, let's go see it,
because it's worth seeing.
.. and with the inertia, it turns with the weight
My idea when I made this mill,
was mostly to make current
because I wanted to fuck over EDF a bit,
I want to sell them my current,
they sold me enough shit as it is.
It'll be a small comeback.
I'm a bit warm.
I mean, warm c-h-a-u-d, not c-h-o-o-z (dumb french joke)
At which point did you decide to leave the Ardennes ?
When I got to retirement age,
I saw my village completely rotten,
rotten by the money, rotten by the people..
It's not easy to leave like that,
impulsively, because you're disappointed by something.
For me personally, but also for my friends, the gendarme (cop) is supposed to represent the law.
He's not supposed to go against the law,
he's there to protect you,
he's not there to destroy you.
We had never seen anything like it :
we saw vans of cops arrive,
we saw the famous public utility enquiry files arrive
chained to the desks' feet.
It was really folkloric.
And we said : one cuts the file,
he cuts the chains, he opens the window,
he gives the file to the people outside,
and the others keep the cops busy.
They pushed the cops back
but without any nastiness.
They held them in place like that, laughing about it.
But the others weren't kidding.
They charged in and started to hit people.
And there, we really saw the violence of the cops.
For us it was almost a joke.
It wasn't mean what we were doing.
Imagine they come, suddenly
and it blows up and comes at you with such violence,
really uncontrollable
because really they were uncontrollable.
They were hitting everywhere.
You see, with hindsight, now, I tell myself,
they were puppets. They're marionettes.
There are people on top pulling the strings
and them, underneath, they have to follow.
It got worse very very fast, and there was more and more because
from the first enquiry to the end of the second enquiry,
I'm incapable of telling the number of wounded.
We had to radicalize.
Because if we hadn't radicalized,
they would have destroyed us.
We weren't able to explain to people
why we became violent like that.
That's really the big mistake.
Because the people who didn't go on demonstrations
couldn't realize what was happening.
Because we knew there'd be a second enquiry,
some people went to the sidelines
of the Common Front committee and created an Action Front.
And the Action Front had for objective to do everything
to prevent the cops from entering the village.
We weren't sleeping any more, we slept 2/3 hours per night,
we were throwing stones at the cops
when their cars passed by,
we were preparing the flyers,
we were preparing the actions
and we were fighting. It became unbearable.
But if the struggle lasted so long,
it's because without a doubt there were very rich moments.
There were parties
and that's what allowed us to hold out,
because we also needed money,
because it was expensive.
But we also needed friendship
around us because if we wanted to go on,
we had to manage to gather a lot of people around us.
There was up to 5 000 people at some parties.
And they were incredible parties with people coming from everywhere.
Of course there was the GAM with Roudoudou.
The valley was beautiful
and the Meuse swollen
by all the winter waters
was overflowing into the fields
The GAM (Musical Action Group)
was a rather atypical group in the struggles of Chooz.
First of all because the main activity of the GAM was music.
You could spot them at the demos with an instrument in hand.
As soon as we got to their place,
they showed us the first reactor in the distance :
a power plant that was already expired after 15 years
that had taught them to be wary of the wind.
They came from belgium.
and even if the belgian border was only a few kilometers to the north, They came from belgium.
and even if the belgian border was only a few kilometers to the north,
to the west and east of Chooz
and that many other participants in the struggle
were of belgian nationality,
the fact they were crossing over the border,
it was like abolishing the border.
Chooz, in Wallonie, meant something.
Charleroi is 40 km from Chooz, to the north.
It's a town that lived off industry
and then was ravaged by industry.
This is where we met up with Roudoudou,
the singer of the GAM.
The one you always recognize on the pictures,
guitar in hand.
You understand now we don't want it anywhere
A crane burned the other evening
We have to stop it all before it's too late
If necessary, it'll get serious
We made discs, 45s
to spread the word about the struggle
and at the same time to bring in money.
That being said, it was impressive to see that day by day,
there were more and more people coming.
And it's true the cops are intimidating :
it allowed the people on the square
to hold on to something
you're disconcerted also, you don't really know what to say
It gave strength
Strength, unity.
The population of Chooz is mainly working class,
with the worry of finding a job,
where there's a lot of unemployment.
managing to effectively resist this pressure to say
"You're completely determined by the pressure of employment"
and to say "no, we refuse this project even if we're offered jobs",
I find that incredible, I find that surprising.
Hi
When did we see each other the last time ?
You remember, in Brussels ?
Brussels ! The concert
at the Boléro !
Yes
And so, many people thought
if Mitterrand was elected,
what had he said, Mitterrand ?
"We won't impose.."
"We will never impose a power plant
against the will of the population"
Anyway, a sentence that was put up everywhere..
There was the whole period that followed :
the disillusionment period.
We didn't really know what to do
and especially, the problem was there was no more enquiry.
And the movement at Chooz, how and when did it structure itself ?
It always structured itself around the enquiries,
that was when the cops were here,
when we had to prevent the course of this pseudo-enquiry
and the file, and that it was all happening.
But then, nothing was happening any more !
So then, there was a demo in december, I think,
and then there were others
where we started the motto of "Chooz saturdays"
it was the last Saturday of the month,
we'd meet at Chooz, those opposed to the Chooz power plant,
and it was a relatively important movement,
an important initiative
we were shaking up the calendar
we took the initiative that time.
And that was something..
"Now, let's start something",
it can last years and BAM, here we go :
the last saturdays at Chooz.
Today it's for the Ardennes they're preparing their cement
But the Ardennais learn the methods of the bretons
let's defend ourselves, let's resist,
against the power plants, in each region,
let's stick together, let's stick together,
let's defend ourselves, let's resist,
against the power plants, in each region,
let's stick together, let's stick together
The wild boar are peaceful as long as they're not provoked
But they become terrible when you try to bring them to heel !
let's defend ourselves, let's resist,
against the power plants, in each region
Denis Jean still lives in Reims.
At the time, he was part of the Reims group
that frequently went to Chooz.
Jean-Noël knows Denis well.
They struggled together
for several years in the same town
and they seem to share the same traces of time
that kept them modest and incorruptible.
In their political office,
to come back to the struggles in Chooz,
obviously gets them grinning
about the good times spent battling.
But it also means coming back to forms of struggle
they'd like to see come back.
I think, on a militant level,
it's one of the most important moments
I've lived through in the past 40 years.
We lived through really cool things,
meaning we lived through very very strong things
with the people there, who mobilized,
welcomed us well,
then discussed with us.
We had plenty of exchanges.
I think I must've done 100 000 km
between Reims and Chooz over 5 years,
with my traditional 2 horsepower
that got there and was instantly spotted
by the police, because at the time,
there were people in Chooz who listened in on the police
and when we arrived from Reims,
it was signaled on the police frequency that the rémois were here.
I ended up once in a family
where the wife did everything,
in the kitchen and everything.
I intervened and went to the kitchen
and did the dishes,
and it shocked all the people there.
So there were many super important things
because in this struggle, finally,
a bunch of problems were approached.
I always wondered : a bunch of problems were approached.
I always wondered :
Why didn't people get discouraged quickly
relative to the repression that happened there ?
We had, in front of us, the french State
that went all in.
We had in front of us a lobby
and economic projects so important
we knew it wasn't a population of a few hundred
or a few thousand people
who could push France back,
as Morroy said so well.
We didn't have any illusions
even if we always hoped to win.
In a struggle, you always hope you'll win,
that's what lets you hold out.
And there was, in my opinion, another important thing,
there was the story of Chiers,
where there was the link between a company that was relocating, there was the story of Chiers,
where there was the link between a company that was relocating,
closing its doors
even if well, it was the steel industry,
the restructuration of the steel industry.
There were many antinuclear people in Chooz
who were working in this company
and who were offered work at this power plant
when the Chiers would be closed down.
So that allowed for one hell of a debate
about what nuclear power was at the level of capital, of capitalism.
What happened at Vireux,
a few kilometers from Chooz ?
Even if the antinuclear meetings, on the last saturday of every month
kept on bringing many people together,
you could imperceptibly feel resignation
showing its vapour.
And suddenly the rushed closure
of the Chiers factory in Vireux reanimated the opposition.
The wind of the nuclear power plant was going to bring the desert.
Frantz Hubert was the spokesman of the Chiers inter-union.
Iconic figure of the struggles in Vireux,
Frantz Hubert had been given, at the time,
the nickname "Walesa des Ardennes",
a reference, obviously, to the mustache of Lech Walesa
and especially to the grave events
happening at the same time in Poland
where, like in Vireux, tanks were charging through barricades.
But this nickname, Frantz Hubert doesn't like remembering it.
Walesa is too much of a "yes-man", he told us.
69 years old, Frantz Hubert
works out in the exercise hall in Givet.
This is where we met him.
I entered the union in 1965.
And in 1975, went from the CGT to FO.
So I had a unionist past behind me.
During the events of 68,
I was, at the time, one of the older ones,
if not the oldest union representative.
The closure was announced
during a company central committee meeting,
and that was after the european accords on
the restructuration of the steel industry
that brought every concerned country
to have production quotas determined by Brussels,
and applied in france by the concerned steelmaking companies
that then closed down production units,
one of which was Vireux, unfortunately.
In the choice of which unit to keep,
there were similar units operated by Usinor.
There was the Vireux unit
and a unit at the Marière in Saint-Etienne.
The choice was made
with the pretext that an additional nuclear unit
would be created in Chooz
that would absorb part of the dismissed workforce.
As to the Chooz power plant,
they were against the implantation of the Chooz power plant
because they're antinuclear,
we were against the implantation of the Chooz power plant
because it was eating up our jobs.
So the motives were different
but the goal was the same.
Most people didn't want to go work at Chooz
when they already had a job on site in Vireux.
Me, with the experience I'd had with LIP,
I said it's better to fight the social struggle,
try to negociate our dismissal as well as possible.
the creation of the inter-union, I put out one condition When we arrived at a consensus on
the creation of the inter-union grouping, I put out one condition