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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
From the Sivens forest in France to the Hambach forest in Germany, from the Broadback forest in Canada to the rainforests of Borneo, something has shifted in these wild spaces over the last decade or two. People have begun to inhabit the forests, oppose the loggers and use their bodies as shields, motivated by the determination to resist the lethal ecosystem of commercial exploitation. Forests have become a battleground in the struggle between groups with fundamentally divergent aims and objectives. Forests are made up of insurgents. Jean-Baptiste Vidalou went to see some of these forests and meet those who are defending them: he discovered a completely different way of understanding the world, sharply opposed to the mentality of planners who see forests as just one more territory to be managed. Here he recounts this encounter, relays what these forest peoples and struggles convey, not to offer any recipes or ready-made solutions to the crises of our times but to be the forest, like a force that grows, stem by stem, leaf by leaf, slowly becoming ungovernable.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright Page
Epigraph
1 Where We Live, We Struggle
Notes
2 A Country Like No Other
Notes
3 A Little History of the Map
Notes
4 Frictions on the Ground
Notes
5 Welcome to the Park!
Notes
6 A Genealogy of Territorial Planning
Notes
7 Devastating Accounting
Notes
8 The Physiocrats and the War on the Commons
Notes
9 All That is Solid Must be Liquidated
Notes
10 Total Calculation
Notes
11 From Castrametation to Logistics
Notes
12 Forests versus Wood-Energy
Notes
13 Bringing the Outside In
Notes
14 Returning to Forests; Becoming a Secessionist
Notes
15 The New
Nomos
of the Earth
Notes
16 Phenomenology of an Infrastructure
17 The Mystique of Interconnection
Notes
18 The World, or Cybernetics
Notes
19 The Forest Overflows
Notes
References
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Dedication
For the free communes, for the ZAD, for friends…
We are Forests
Inhabiting Territories in Struggle
Jean-Baptiste Vidalou
Translated by Stephen Muecke
polity
Copyright Page
Originally published in French as Être forêts. Habiter des territoires de lutte © Éditions La Découverte, Paris, 2017
This English edition © Polity Press, 2023
Excerpt from Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West by William Cronon. Copyright © 1991 by William Cronon. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Excerpt from La foresta-radice-labirinto by Italo Calvino. Copyright © Estate of Italo Calvino, 2002, used by permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Limited.
Excerpt from On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects by Gilbert Simondon appears by permission of the publisher; translated by Cecile Malaspina and John Rogove (University of Minnesota Press). Copyright © 2017 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. Originally published in Du mode d’existence des objets techniques. Copyright © Aubier (department of Flammarion) Paris, 1958 and 2012.
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5651-9 – hardback
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5652-6 – paperback
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022948598
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
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Epigraph
Every day there are new shoots in the devastated wastelands. Us and no one: the forest.
Le Groupe Épopée, 2012
1WHERE WE LIVE, WE STRUGGLE
Inhabit, populate, start from the situation you are in. Always stand in the power of.
Alain Damasio, Le Dehors de toute chose
This era no longer seems to stand for anything much. It is an era escaping its own disaster in the confines of ‘spaceship Earth’. Having invested so much in the religion of Progress, it now finds itself at the whim of a drifting globe, stripped of all meaning, utterly extra-terrestrial. An era that thought it was taking control of the world is now irreparably distanced from it. Until final lift-off. It still claims that technocratic management is its last chance for survival.
Because that is all we do in this era now: manage. We manage ecosystems, we manage populations, we manage bodies, just as we manage an electricity network, a control room, a cockpit. We wanted to build a paradise; now we live in a complete hell. The only road map we have available to us now opens onto a devastated landscape: on the one hand, gigantic construction sites where living things are being destroyed; on the other, biodiversity museumified.
There has never been so much talk about the ‘planet’, the ‘climate’, the ‘global environment’, as at the very moment when we find ourselves locked in the smallest of worlds, the world of engineers. Never has there been so much talk about ‘climate diplomacy’ as when everything is being judged by calculations and algorithms.
We might as well talk about ‘carbon’ just in order to plan markets for it. Natural environments such as the verges or hedges in our countryside are becoming infrastructures like anything else, AEIs – ‘agro-ecological infrastructures’ – with their ‘ecosystem services’ monitored by satellite.
This stratospheric vision stems from the idea that we live on this globe as if it were a 1:1 map, a surface on which we could flatten out living things and objects in real time. Just as you can scroll through this or that population variable on a screen, with this or that biomass indicator. Always points that are registered, flows that are controlled. Everything that is still heterogeneous, everything that lives on profusely but in shadows, is always too chaotic in the eyes of the ‘planetary stewards’, and is compelled to integrate into this generalized equivalence, made legible and manageable.
Not surprisingly, Google is working with NASA to compile and transform millions of satellite images accumulated by the Landsat Program over the past four decades. An algorithm constantly analyses the evolution of the new satellite images received and, once seasonal or weather-related variations have been eliminated, it can detect global fluctuations in forest cover in real time. Through Global Forest Watch, Google boasts that it is the first to offer professionals and the general public very high-resolution images of the state of the forest. Of course, an app for smartphones is available. The fact that a company whose aim is to map the entire planet, as well as the entire lives of its inhabitants, is now interested in forests says a lot about how intense this hegemonic control is becoming. The fact that these spaces, these forests, only have meaning once they are measured, measured by the yardstick of their very destruction, is in itself a disaster. Quantifying the unquantifiable! Google tells us that the Earth lost 2.3 million square kilometres of forest between 2000 and 2012, the equivalent of fifty football fields per minute!
It seems that you can judge an era by the way it treats its forests. This one will be judged by the way it measures, pixel by pixel, its own annihilation.
A Sumerian legend, dating from 2700 BCE – probably the first written history of humankind – tells of the journey of the first great ‘hero’: Gilgamesh. This legendary king of a Sumerian city, obsessed with death and driven by a desire for eternal fame, decides to undertake a journey to the cedar forest. To acquire the glory due to his rank, he has to kill Humbaba, the demon of this sacred forest. Once the sacrilegious murder has taken place, Gilgamesh cuts down the cedar forest and sends the logs back to the city, floating on rivers, like corpses in funeral rites. King Gilgamesh thus destroys another, more ancient law, the law of what is ‘outside’ the city walls. The law of the forest. Epic narratives aside, Sumerian civilization seems to have been the first to massively deforest, with its uprooting of the famous cedar forest of Lebanon. There was never enough: they had to go further and further north to find resources, until the mountains were all denuded. The story of Gilgamesh perhaps recounts the first ecological catastrophe, the catastrophe that is civilization itself.
Epics were the chronicles of their times; today we don’t even have stories to understand ours. We are left gazing at screens to contemplate the disaster. And our eyes weep. The devastation of the world has become an object that we watch from ‘above’, from our satellites. In any case, we are strangers to it. Cut off from the sensuous world. Moreover, what do we see from so high up, via these satellite data-feeds? Not a forest full of life, that’s for sure, nor the profusion of plants, nor the teeming life of the soil. If the epics had ‘signs’, translating the world into actions, now there are only ‘signals’ on a touch screen.
But if we come back to Earth, if we break through this screen placed over reality, the forest will give itself to us in a completely different way. If we go into the forest, if we collect or cut wood, if we gather, if we hunt, if we play, if we stroll, if we defend it, if we fight in it, we will grasp it in a different way than in terms of numbers, resources and data. Another relationship to the world can then be built, made up of spaces that are irreducible to each other. A way of standing up straight. No longer bowing one’s head. Taking root but also springing forth. Spreading out. Something like a new verticality. This is perhaps first and foremost what a forest is and what we want to defend in it: it is a vertical event. Something that, against the strangeness of the administered world, is finally there. Fully there.
Western civilization has been built, stone by stone, on the ashes of the forests, and there is no absurdity in thinking that the forests are now fighting back, as they have in other moments of intense historical conjunctures. Every day, new shoots are breaking through the concrete slab of our era.
This is not so much about the Forest as it is about the uses and links we have with forests. Better still, it is a question of seeing how we are forests. Forests that are not so much a piece of ‘wilderness’ as a certain alliance, a special composition of links, of living beings, of magic. Not something spread out, but a growing strength, both in its heart and at its edges. Forests are a sensitive reality, not so much a ‘tree-covered space’, as its common definition suggests, as a singular way of arranging the world, of imagining it, of becoming attached to it. Perhaps those who live in their neighbourhoods, their fields, their workshops or their woodlands could come to the same conclusions. In any case, it is a question of the forms we give ourselves and the materials we follow, like following wood-grains under the smoothness of the hand. Like this beautiful timber framework which comes from the nearby forest and which our companions went to find with this precise aim in mind, scanning the trees and already seeing there the structures that the new dwelling will enclose. It is also a way to look after themselves, a healing during devastation. And to defend themselves together.
For the past ten years, whether it’s in the ZAD [zone to defend] of Tronçay woods in the Morvan, in the woods of Sivens, in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, in the Chambarans forest in Roybon, in Bure or in the Cévennes, it’s obvious that something is happening in the forest and other ‘low-density spaces’, as they say in some sordid office of some sordid boss. Some people have begun to inhabit these spaces, and really intensely.
In fact, they have begun to inhabit them in opposition to the planning that has come down from on high. Against this planned future that would like to see them converted into ‘enterprise systems’, ‘pre-urban zones’, ‘productive spaces’ or pure ‘relegation zones’. There is a determination to exit the empty world of the economy, to block the infrastructures of death. A completely different relationship to the territory then takes shape. Another sensibility begins to form. A common sensibility that is built against the militaristic science of territorial management, here opposing a dam, there against a leisure centre, an airport, biomass extraction. But this is not just a local matter: the peasants of Guerrero in Mexico have been fighting for more than fifteen years to free their forests from loggers; the Cree trappers of Canada are defending the boreal forest of the Broadback Valley against deforestation; the Penan of Borneo are building dams and arming themselves with blowpipes against oil palm plantation companies; in the Hambach forest in the Rhineland, resistance is being organized to block open-cut brown coal mining and the destruction of Europe’s last old-growth forest; in Greece, near Irisos, people are fighting to defend the Skouries forest against a gold and copper mine. Struggles are being waged everywhere that resonate with this same idea: the forest is not a deposit of biomass, a future development zone, a biosphere reserve, a carbon sink; the forest is people rising up, it is organized defence, it is an imaginary that is intensifying.
Starting from where we live, and trying to recover some control over our lives, we went to meet our forest, our forests and also those who defend them. We discovered a perception completely different to the strangulation of territorial management. We discovered countless continents, new paths, unshakeable friendships. A perception of the world that made breathing possible again. We also encountered other times and other countries which, although they may seem very distant, were nonetheless close, almost intimate. A new geography was thus opened up for us to see and explore. Beings and things became active, inhabiting our places and our minds. We have only tried here to amplify this encounter, to propagate what is carried by these forest peoples, these struggles, these imaginations, revealing the special things they have in common. Something fundamentally of this moment. With the keen sensation of becoming stronger. And from there, to be able to reach the awareness, while avoiding eternal victimhood, that a war is being waged against us.
There are places like that which crystallize irreducible attachments, attachments that cannot be broken. To inhabit them is also to inhabit a whole history, with its insurrectionist past. Here, in these mountains they call the Cévennes, the past can be read right into the territory itself. Its sharp ridges [serres] and valleys [valats] have been the sites of various forms of revolt, whether through the Camisard war in the early eighteenth century or the anti-fascist maquis during the Second World War. Then, in the 1980s, when the popular struggle against the Borie dam was victorious. As if these mountainous areas were favourable for refuge and for original forms of resistance. The Camisards’ war is emblematic, where the balance of power was determined not only by the geopolitics of the wars of religion, but also by a whole territorial reality and by the repeated efforts of the powers that be to smooth out these deep valleys and sharp ridges. To make a smooth, easy-to-read map. What is happening today with the project of the German energy company E.ON, with its biomass megacentre in Gardanne, which came to the Cévennes for its wood-energy, is not foreign to this logic of ‘penetrability’. It also reinforces the region’s tradition, since the 1960s and 1970s, of exploiting wood, tourism and the museumification of nature. It is not a contradiction that these poles overlap point by point. Preservation and exploitation are today the two sides of the same colonization, which wants these mountains and plateaux to be opened up and to march to the tune of the economy. Here, as everywhere else on this Earth, what is known as ‘territorial management’ must be understood as a low-intensity war. A war waged not only against the places it annihilates, but also against the living themselves.
Any unduly determined people making trouble on the ground will sooner or later have to give in, or face up to the planning authorities and their military. Forests are just one front among many, but they are almost always in the front line of deadly plans. With a few nuances, more or less democratic or more or less fascist, the same strategies prevail without exception on the surface of the globe. Evacuate, raze, extract, exploit. Whether it’s a dam, shipments of wood for fuel, a Center Parcs resort with a tropical leisure dome, a radioactive waste burial site, an airport; in every case, it’s a question of moving raw materials and their rubble around, but moving them around on the ruins of the world.
Is it any wonder that the very word ‘management’, which dates back to the seventeenth century, means the ‘art of managing forests in an administrative manner’ by organizing felling, selecting reserves and defining rotations? Indeed, it was the forests and the people who lived on their edges who first had to endure the oppression of the powers that be, royal and then state. In France, the gigantic royal forests of the seventeenth century were laid out for hunting like real cities, with their roads, star-shaped crossroads, roundabouts and geometric plans. In the eighteenth century, with Colbert’s mapping, the forests were rigorously parcelled out and systematically demarcated. The military engineers of the time, such as the famous Vauban, were also accomplished experts in forestry economics. The reduction of blind spots, perspectives and firing lines was first used to make forests into hunting chases before being used to build new kinds of fortification. In the nineteenth century, forest management established its domination and finally transformed the forest into a controlled space. At one time recreational mythification, at others a source of wood. In both cases, it was simply a ‘resource’ to be managed. And to access it, roads, roads and more roads had to be built. Reticulating power, which is now sending out its tentacles everywhere in the world, through so many motorway hubs, optical fibres, extra-high voltage lines and data centres, has its origins not in some distant utopia, but in the management of forest zones.
This is our starting point, from a damaged world whose accelerated destruction it would be madness to allow to continue. In order to give ourselves the means to find a practicable, less disastrous path, we would already have to know how to free ourselves from the material domination of these networks. And by the same token, to reappropriate our conditions of existence. It is a question of locating power: where does it go, how does it circulate, who does what? As the Invisible Committee rightly says, current power is defined not by its political institutions but by its infrastructures. It is architectural rather than representative. It arranges spaces, it administers things, it governs people. Against this very material power, it has become pointless to turn to representative symbols. One has to turn to engineering, territorial management and network design to understand what we are dealing with. ‘Identifying this system, tracing its contours, detecting its vectors, is to return it to its earthly nature, to bring it back to its real status. This, too, is a work of inquiry, the only way to tear the aura away from the would-be hegemon.’1
The current configuration of the forest is based on this ‘managed’ axis. It is less an institutional object than a set of flows, resources and energy. And the state body that still claims to manage it can only be understood insofar as it is, historically, a body of engineers. The transformation of forests into energy infrastructures is obviously the point of contact, the flagrant symptom of the fusion between the functions of ‘heritage management’, ‘development’ and ‘energy production’, since no relevant distinction can be made between political power and infrastructural power. The partnership between E.ON and the Cévennes National Park around the project to exploit the Cévennes forest for its wood-energy, taken by many as a betrayal on the part of the public authorities, should not deceive us about the primary policy of such a scheme, which consists of turning the forest into a ‘recreational myth’ and an ‘exploitable resource’, invariably an infrastructure. In this sense, the E.ON biomass power plant is obviously not just for the ‘locals’.
So, investigating what happens here, locally, sooner or later implies facing up to the way the world is organized. E.ON, the world’s third largest energy group and a paradigm of this infrastructural power – a producer of nuclear power, gas, oil, electricity and biomass, but also of aluminium, steel, logistics, packaging and electronics – is planning a forestry operation here within a four-hundred-kilometre radius, which means that it could be very close to the Gardanne power station, the Bouches-du-Rhône, Vaucluse, Var, then circling out to Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, Gard, Hérault, then Aude, Aveyron, Lozère, Ardèche, Drôme, Hautes-Alpes, Alpes-Maritimes and finally, at the farthest point, Pyrénées-Orientales, Ariège, Haute-Garonne, Tarn, Haute-Loire, Isère, Savoie, in short, almost half of France. The group plans to extract no less than eight hundred and fifty tonnes of biomass per year! Knowing that the conversion of the power station (from coal to biomass) was done with an injection of funds of some two hundred and twenty million euros, financed in part by the Deposits and Consignments Fund and its ‘infrastructure’ subsidiary, it is easier to understand the enormous stakes that this kind of ‘clean energy project’ puts into play.
Today, the energy crisis itself is merely a means of experimenting with new forms of government and the exceptional measures that go with them. In the daily mobilization brought to us by the ‘energy transition’, it is clear that this is not an alternative to the current disaster, but rather an attempt just to provide an illusory remedy to the fiasco of the body politic. In the offices of the EU or NATO, the world’s leaders would not be so focused on the issue of ‘transition’ and its infrastructures if this strategic issue did not represent a rearrangement of human governance – and a desire on their part not to ‘transition’ (what a joke), but to give themselves some breathing space. ‘The era of epochal change is over, at least since 1945. We are no longer living in an epoch of transition before other epochs, but in a respite,’ said Günther Anders, with a keen sense of history.2
For those who would dare to question, just a little, this new idol of ‘transition’, the threat of a shutdown from the political leadership is the only response of this government. Obey, or there will be chaos. Cooperate, or it will be back to candles in caves. In the strategic vision of RTE [Electricity Transmission Network], the social link is the electricity network: ‘To meet the challenge of the energy transition, we must rely on what connects us: the electricity transmission network, the energy highways.’ This says a lot about exactly what ‘social links’ we have left, but also about the kind of total network that is being prepared. In the new religion of ‘green energy’ and smart grids, the authorities claim to be working towards the goal of survival, but it is nothing other than even tighter control of the population. More smart meters, connected objects and sensors. This is the idea of governmental power: predicting everything, calculating everything – in other words, reducing everything to economics.
Starting from where we are living, and where we are struggling, what we are gambling on is the radical opposite. Not everything is calculable, not everything is economics. There are beings and things on all sides that resist this total equivalence. Living forces that can no longer stand this existential eradication. As they attempt to desert the social machinery and its circuits, they create new spaces in line with their desires, right here on Earth. They aim to start again, from the gravity of this – clearly political – situation. Of course, this does not mean stopping meetings or travel, but drawing up other lines, life lines, lines of struggle, crossing each other, proliferating. What happens here is already resonating elsewhere, further away.
We are not here to hand out any recipes or ready-made solutions. We are trying to be the forest. Like a force that grows, stem by stem, root by root, leaf by leaf. Right up to cover the peaks, between heaven and earth, becoming ungovernable.
Notes
1
Comité invisible,
À nos amis
, Paris: La fabrique éditions, 2014, p. 192.
2
Günther Anders,
Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen
, Vol. 2 (Munich: Beck, 1980), p. 20.
2A COUNTRY LIKE NO OTHER
It would already be over had they wanted to march in a larger company, but at any moment they split up and go through the woods, rallying to engage and immediately afterwards they disappear again, dropping into places that one cannot imagine.
Letter from Marshal de Broglie, 1702
Abraham Mazel, a wool carder, was one of the prophets of the Cévennes who led the Camisard insurrection. In October 1701, he had a dream. He saw well-fed black oxen grazing on plants in a garden. The black oxen represented papists and the Protestants had to chase them out of their gardens and sanctuaries. Following this inspiration, Mazel decided to go and free the prisoners of Pont-de-Montvert in the residence of the Abbé du Chayla, archpriest of the Cévennes, inspector of the missions, schools and roads, and one of the most hated torturers in the region. With him he had a small troop from way up on Mont Bougès. They liberated the prisoners and murdered the abbot, igniting eight years of guerrilla warfare in the Cévennes mountains, carried out by small, mobile groups with the support of the population and a thorough knowledge of the terrain. In this way, two to three thousand men held twenty-five thousand soldiers in check. The Camisards resorted to guerrilla tactics by intercepting the royal convoys linking Florac to Saint-Jean-du-Gard (the present-day Corniche des Cévennes) and by organizing nightly ambushes throughout the territory. This territory was described by Basville, King Louis XIV’s intendant, a sort of prefect at the time. In his melancholy reports, he described the ‘impracticality’ of the area. It was to remedy this singular topography that he had his famous roads [pénétrantes] drilled to allow his troops to pass. This country is too ‘hemmed in’, despairs Broglie, Marshal of Languedoc, who in a letter of 1702 notes with contempt:
If this country were like the others, it would be easier to deal with such an affair, but when no one wants to talk and everything is a mountain and a precipice where torrents flow, it is difficult to find anything except with the greatest of luck. […] It is necessary, by dint of coming and going with detachments continuously on the run, to try to find them and to beat them, which will not fail, if one can only locate their companies.1
‘A country like no other’, where the terrain is perfectly suited to warfare by ambush, with its succession of deep valleys and ridge lines, its woods, its labyrinth of hamlets, farms, springs and paths, holding no secrets for the children of the country, with its abundance of caves and hiding places. The Camisards are first and foremost partisans who fight in their valleys or their mountains. Their strength is their rootedness and the total support of the population. It is a telluric power. Taking advantage of a slope protected by shade, of a wood, a rock, a cave, a hamlet, to hide, to hold meetings, to organize an ammunition depot, a makeshift hospital for the wounded, to get supplies. But it worked just as well on the plains, far from their mountainous bases. Inviting themselves into towns, the Camisards seem to have been able to hold out for some time and use a thousand tricks – particularly by disguising themselves and setting up ambushes – to deceive the royal forces. And this is the most important thing: the Camisards are not defending the forest, they are the forest, they are the mountain. A forest that prophesies, fights, heals, a mountain that moves, that plots, that is victorious. The prophets’ and prophetesses’ bodily outbursts, their emotional outpourings, their quaking, apocalyptic speeches, were signs not of any hysteria, but of the collective strength emerging from the experience of having seen their institutions and their pastors flee to Switzerland or England, rather than fight alongside them. These outbursts had been diagnosed as ‘fanaticism’, a kind of new mental disease, by the learned doctors of Montpellier, as they explained away what they did not understand.
Faced with this unprecedented revolt, the logistical strategy of Intendant Basville was to build on three fronts: enlarge churches, build forts (Nîmes, Alès, Saint-Hippolyte, all built by the military engineers of the fortification corps) and dig roads to transport troops and materiel. The development of the road network (through roads and side roads) was becoming increasingly essential. Military plans cannot, therefore, be separated from those of engineers, working in parallel. These people, much appreciated by Basville for their multi-faceted skills, played an important role in Languedoc in town planning, architecture, the construction of ports, canals and gardens. The royal roads in the Cévennes were grafted on to the economic and military traffic routes, the maintenance of which was financed as a priority by the States of Languedoc. On this network of plains, Basville cut his pénétrantes (strategic roads) through to the north, aiming better to control the Cévennes massif. As a former prefect wrote in 1992, not without some technocratic admiration for the intendant’s logistics policy:
The pénétrantes were the first royal roads in the Cévennes, and were still called, not so long ago, Basville roads. True to his method, Basville called on engineers specialized in road construction techniques to establish the routes and cost estimates, which were a function of the difficulty of each section. The basic manual to which all those responsible for roads, whether military or civil engineers, sub-delegates of the intendant, or road inspectors, referred was Le traité de la construction des routes by the engineer Gautier (one of the first general inspectors of the Ponts et Chaussées [Bridges and Roads]), who later participated in the construction of the Canal du Midi). This book advocates new methods for establishing road profiles, and for blasting passages through hard rock. […] Basville deliberately mixes up all other sorts of paths, from oxcart tracks to mule tracks, the only means of transport known in the High Cévennes until the end of the eighteenth century.2
Despite these ‘penetrations’, the Cévennes remain largely inaccessible due to their very topography and the ways of life that are rooted there. It is as if something irreducible were constantly resisting this desire for legibility and colonization.
It should be added that the royal troops did not stop there. Faced with a revolt that they could not control, they decided in the winter of 1703 to ‘raze the Cévennes’. It was a question, in a way, of flushing the game. By terrorizing the population, destroying bread ovens and burning houses, the insurgents would find themselves ‘out in the open’, without material support. The populations of several villages were completely deported: the men condemned to death or sent to the galleys; the women imprisoned in the Tower of Constance or in Perpignan; the children sent to Catholic families. These techniques of psychological terror were to be used again and again in colonial wars until the twenty-first century.
This guerrilla war waged by ‘fanatics’ was in fact the insurrection of an entire people and the common defence of a territory at war. A territory that was both geographical and imaginary, since it went beyond just the Cévennes to spread throughout all the neighbouring regions and as far as the countries of exile, in Switzerland and England. The Camisards’ war has become, well beyond what the Protestant community memorializes, a textbook case studied by experts in counter-insurgency strategy so that ‘military lessons can be drawn from the mountains of the Cévennes for the relief of Afghanistan’.3 Experts have identified it as a typical case of asymmetric warfare ‘against a background of religious fanaticism’. Imposing their own narrow view on this singular event, some have turned it into a kind of ‘war on terror’ in the middle of the eighteenth century, long before Algeria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.
