“No one was prepared for anything so violent,” admits Lucas, aged 23. “It was utterly shocking. People I've spoken to about it, people who've already experienced this kind of confrontation, told me that you couldn't last five minutes. Some had umbrellas but the grenades were blowing up the umbrellas. The police launched five thousand grenades in two hours. There was nothing we could do. Some managed to get near the fencing, to break through the first barbed wire, but the second, it just wasn't possible. If you got in there it was certain death.”
On Saturday March 25th Lucas was following the first group of protestors seeking to get through the police line blocking the path to the crop irrigation reservoir, the object of their demonstration at Saint-Soline in the west of France. Like others taking part in these water protests, he threw stones. He saw the rain of grenades that fell, and witnessed injured fellow demonstrators lying alongside a muddy path.
Lucas knew beforehand that there would be a lot of police and gendarmes present, and that crowd control grenades would be used too. He was advised to take earplugs to protect against the noise. But no one, not even the most battle-hardened protest veterans, had predicted how many grenades the police and gendarmes would be ready to deploy to protect this planned agricultural reservoir.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
It was the first time Lucas had been at a demonstration of this type. “I'm a student studying the environment and that's what motivated me to go there,” he says. The week before he had been at a spontaneous protest, also for the first time. After twelve-and-a-half hours of hitch-hiking he joined up with a convoy of 80 cars and arrived at the site in west France at around 10am that Saturday. He had planned to meet up with some friends but they had already joined another section of the protest, the pink cortège or procession. “I didn't want to waste energy going to look for them so I set off with the blue procession. It was the particularly angry procession. I was all alone. I was listening to the conversations. We were expecting police officers to be there waiting for us and that people would get hurt. But the goal was to get to the reservoir, to plant flags on top of it. In the end, that wasn't done.”
In addition to earplugs Lucas also had ski goggles and an all-in-one FFP2 mask. “We walked for some while. It was quite a way,” he says. “Some youths from a village joined us. They were in tee-shirts, they didn't even have an FFP2. I was laughing about it. I told them 'You can't come like that!' They said to me 'It's okay.' I wonder what became of them, those youngsters. They were really at risk.”
The procession advanced through the middle of a ploughed field. As they approached the reservoir, and even though it was still some distance away, the first shots of tear gas formed white streaks in the sky. To general surprise, gendarmes approached the procession on quad bikes.
“They started to gas us, but there were a lot of us, they retreated. And the wind was with us. The drums had started to play, my shoes were full of mud. We were still thinking that it was 'okay'. It was quite festive, some people were laughing.”
The protestors then discovered that the police had positioned a long line of gendarme vehicles all around the future irrigation reservoir. At the end of the path, in front of the giant water basin, a white lorry faced the approaching crowd. It was the riot police unit's water cannon. The crowd in the field spread out and started to walk along the side of the blue gendarme vans.
“We tried to surround the reservoir. The blue procession moved and started to get attacked with a lot of gas. The first explosive grenades were launched. We were 100 metres away and we saw the police officers from a little closer. And then suddenly we were being fired at. There were several groups who had reinforced banners, and umbrellas behind them. There were some very determined groups near me. I was calm but some people were very worked up. We hadn't expected there to be lorries lined up right around with the cops well hidden behind. I experienced my first sound grenade which unnerved me a bit. It's really scary.”
“Spread out and surround them!” said someone through a megaphone. “We had to try to open up several points and get on the reservoir. A group tried to move forward. Another group tried to bury the tear-gas canisters.”
The groups hesitated over which strategy to adopt. The yellow procession started to get closer. “Then a group with banners rushed ahead all alone. They got to within ten metres of the police officers. They were repelled with tear gas and sound grenades. They were only 20 of them against 100 cops. They quickly retreated. But we moved forward on my side. There were explosions everywhere. Someone shouted 'Grenade! Grenade!' and we moved out of the way. At one point we saw smoke and we heard there'd been a breakthrough. We started running to the left.”
Lucas followed the crowd that lined up around the reservoir, and the blue vans, right to the opposite side, where one of the lorries had caught fire. “We were close to the cops, there was a clash. The stone throwing started. At ten or twenty metres from the lorries you could throw stones and actually hit them.”
It was like a war scene. People were running in all directions.
There were no longer really any separate processions left by this point. But people carrying banners from the yellow procession had managed to approach the lorries. “We quickly joined them. I was slightly to the back but I had some stones in my pocket. There were some launchers in the groups. I improvised one myself. Someone with a banner got close. At the front they opened and set fire to a lorry. Our banner retreated. The police did too, as it was burning. We were in a cloud of gas. In five to ten minutes it was over as they got hit really hard. It was really like a war scene. The earth was exploding, people were running back in all directions, you couldn't see anything.”
Behind there was a hillock, a path that crossed the fields. Lucas went back for a moment. “There was a lot of stone throwing. After a while I couldn't do any more. You couldn't breathe any more. My mask was sticking to my mouth. I just had my scarf. Lots of gas was coming. Fortunately the wind was with us. But when the cops fired behind us we were immediately hit by it. I thought I was going to be sick. I couldn't take the fog any more. I took off my mask, [the tear gas was making me] drool, I was crying. I composed myself. And then I returned to make a launcher.”
A battle began. Stones against grenades. Lucas grabbed a shopping bag and filled it with stones with someone he did not know. “I filled the bag in the heat of the action but you can't collect stones, look at the ground and look at the sky all at the same time. You had to watch out for grenades. I was taking it in turns to look at the ground and at the sky. That type of grenade can blow your foot or hand off. I filled the bag and took it forwards.”
Having gone back once more to clean his mask, Lucas then headed off again towards the clashes. “The banner in the field had moved. Someone was saying 'Take time to aim' but you throw three stones and you're exhausted. And the grenade throwing was constant. There were times when three were going off. Everywhere. It was carnage. They fall and don't explode straight away, then blow up afterwards, or sometimes they explode straight away and that's really dangerous. Sometimes you don't have any time. Some grenades are round, some long. Once on the ground the long ones burst open and send out lots of tabs [of tear gas]. There were people falling down. And people crying 'Medic!'”
Lucas got closer. “I was throwing stones at the cops, and the lorries, five to ten metres away. We were very close. The burning lorry was to our right. We were close to the police, we were opposite a lorry.”
Suddenly a demonstrator next to Lucas was injured. “A grenade exploded two metres from me. A guy held his head. A girl took hold of him and removed his ski mask and I saw a huge hole near his nose. Blood was gushing out. He must have been hit by shrapnel. Four people started to carry him and then put him on the ground. I hurriedly ran back shouting 'Medic!'”
The student ran some distance towards the rear to get medical help. But along the side of the path he found a line of badly-injured people surrounded by friends or first aiders. “Just then I saw a grenade explode next to one of the injured people and injure his thigh, it made me mad,” says Lucas.
Shortly afterwards he came across the demonstrator who had fallen close to him. People were around him and he had been placed on his side in the recovery position. Lucas withdrew to the side of the hillock, two hundred metres from the police.
“I tried to calm down, I took off my mask. Physically I was fine. But mentally I couldn't take any more. I spent half an hour sitting like that. People asked me if I was okay. I told them 'I'm going to come back.' We were three hundred metres away. I approached once again but everyone was now pulling back.”
The police quad bikes had appeared again. “They arrived suddenly, formed a line and threw tear gas at the pink procession, at families.” The police helicopter was circling above the crowd. A dazed and shaken Lucas stayed back from the fray for some time.
When he got up some small groups were still active around the reservoir. But on the megaphone someone announced that “the medics are overwhelmed, we'll have to stop the clashes” and “move back”.
The withdrawal and the return to the start took a “very long” time. “We shuffled around a lot because we waited for everyone to leave with us so that no one would get nicked.” The three processions were now just one. “We headed back. We were exhausted, our legs were messed up,” says Lucas.
Then he returned home. Images from that day still come back to him. The clashes, the injured, the questions. Haunted by a desire to cry or shout, he has not resumed his lessons. The sizzling of a saucepan, the flashing of lights, it all brings back the “battlefield” memories. “I ask myself what kind of world we live in,” he says. “In essence we're a movement to save the planet … the state couldn't care less about what we might have to say. We're not listened to, and instead the police injured 200 and almost killed people.”
He concludes: “The image of the person I saw, his blood gushing out, that will stay with me for the rest of my life. That could have been me. It's crazy that it's come to this.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter