Reservoir Hogs

by Christopher Ketcham

In our new issue, Christopher Ketcham chronicles France’s antireservoir movement, which pits environmentalists, students, small farmers, and eco-saboteurs against big agriculture and police repression.

This story was produced in partnership with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, a nonprofit news organization.

ON THE MORNING OF March 25, 2023, an estimated thirty thousand protesters set out across the countryside near the village of Sainte-Soline in western France. They marched for miles in muddy fields and on country roads before coming in sight of the object of the protest: the unfinished 190-million-gallon Sainte-Soline reservoir, a taxpayer-funded boondoggle intended to create a surplus of water for irrigated agriculture. At that time, it was nothing more than a hole in the ground, fifty feet deep and as wide as several football fields. When filled with groundwater via pumps driven below the water table, however, it was to become part of a system of more than two dozen reservoirs in the Vendee, Deux-Sèvres, and Charente-Maritime departments of western France. Proposed in the late 2010s, the reservoirs’ broad purpose was to help large agricultural operators meet their already enormous water needs in the production of corn, a singularly thirsty cash crop, as heat waves and drought worsened across the country.

Put another way, the reservoir complex was a form of climate adaptation, but one that attempted to monopolize a public good—water, that basic necessity of life on Earth—for the benefit of private interests. The protesters considered this both unwise and unjust. At Sainte-Soline, the largest of the planned reservoirs, they wanted construction stopped, the site demolished. By occupying the reservoir for a day, the intention was to make their displeasure known by their numbers, defying local authorities’ ban on such demonstrations.

As the first group of marchers crossed the field toward the site, they saw that on the towering berm around the reservoir hundreds of cops had massed, and thousands more were posted in the cover of a forest that edged the field. Then, according to reports, the police attacked without warning. Tear gas sent the crowd running, a toxic haze obscured the landscape, and helicopters whipped overhead while armored vehicles were deployed in the distance. A hail of sting-ball grenades exploded in the air and at people’s feet, sending rubber shrapnel in all directions. A man’s skull was blown open, a woman’s foot shattered, and several people lay blinded by tear gas. As the injured screamed in agony, a few of the marchers fought back. A group of young men, masked and wearing only black and carrying wooden shields, threw Molotov cocktails and rocks dug out of the dirt; others shot fireworks at the forces de l’ordre. Per news accounts, the protesters set at least three police cars on fire and injured sixteen officers.

“The antireservoir movement, radicalized and well organized, had succeeded in monkey-wrenching agribusiness in France.”

The battle of Sainte-Soline, as it became known, did not issue out of a political vacuum. It was the culmination of years of conflict over the expanding reservoir system in western France. A coalition of French citizens—antireservoir activists, smallhold farmers, environmentalists, students, eco-saboteurs, and black-clad anarchists—demonstrated against several reservoirs in the Deux-Sèvres and Charente-Maritime departments in 2022, with some of the marchers tearing out pumps and pipes and ripping up and setting aflame the huge plastic tarpaulin linings that kept the water from percolating into the ground. Others had sabotaged reservoirs across the region under cover of night and escaped undetected. The police expected similar property destruction at Sainte-Soline.

After two hours, the battle was over, the protesters forced to flee. The government claimed that nearly fifty police were injured but only seven demonstrators required medical aid. Protest organizers, however, counted two hundred injured in the fighting, including one who fell into a coma from a sting-ball grenade that exploded by his head. The authorities had launched as many as five thousand grenades and tear-gas canisters. Around 3,200 cops had marshalled for the attack, deployed along with nine helicopters, four armored vehicles, and four water cannons, directed from a command center overlooking the field of battle. The attack had been effectively greenlit by Gérald Darmanin, the interior minister in the Macron government, who in the days and weeks following the bloodshed denounced the marchers as “ecoterrorists.” Human rights investigators with the UN had a different view. They called the violence at Sainte-Soline “alarming” and “anti-democratic” and noted that France is the only country in the EU known to deploy tear gas and stun grenades against a peaceful assembly. The repression arose, in part, because the antireservoir movement, radicalized and well organized, had succeeded in monkey-wrenching agribusiness in France—direct action against entrenched interests that could not be tolerated.

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