The Plateau de Millevaches, “a land of lawlessness”? Elected officials from Limousin affirm this in the face of acts of sabotage in this rural territory, where the historical and renewed presence of a population reputed to be close to the ultra-left feeds mistrust and tension.
In December, a rare event, the mayor of Aubusson and his majority on the municipal council voted to dissolve the community of communes Creuse Grand Sud, partly located on the Plateau de Millevaches, or “Limousine Mountain”. “It is becoming a land of lawlessness, with elected officials whose political objectives are not really of a republican nature, and who are conciliatory with the troublemakers”, affirms the city councilor, the ex- socialist Michel Moine.
“There could have been deaths! »
A few weeks earlier, he had seen in the sabotage of a motorcycle race, the En’Duo du Limousin, the “drop of water that makes a very full vase overflow”. On November 4, the course of the event had been deflected, disorienting several dozen pilots, some of whom, lost, found themselves in a state of hypothermia.
“There could have been deaths!, then lamented Boris Labrousse, organizer of the En’duo. Some opposed the race for ecological opinions, peacefully blocking a path, but behind there are others who sabotage and endanger”.
The gendarmerie is investigating, while the rumor on the Plateau designates the ultra-left, to which other facts that have occurred in recent years are attributed. “There are sabotages, threats and conflicts on a daily basis”, asserts Jouany Chatoux, a hemp producer who has filed around thirty complaints.
For this local farmer, the culprits are obvious: “It is the ultra-left with environmentalist excesses which has been increasingly present on the Plateau since 2008 and the Tarnac affair”, a village in the vicinity where presumed members of the “anarcho-autonomous movement” had been arrested for the sabotage of SNCF lines before being released ten years later.
Historic bastion of rural communism
The Millevaches Plateau, a territory of forests and fields populated by around 10,000 inhabitants over 1,800 km2 between Corrèze, Creuse and Haute-Vienne, was first a historic bastion of rural communism, recalls the historian Dominique Danthieux, before welcome “alternatives” from the 1970s.
“These people do not recognize themselves in the capitalist system, nor in the classical left. They came there thinking that the territory would be favorable to them, since very on the left, continues this specialist of the places. But the locals did not understand what these people, who had a university background and were promised a good rise in the big cities, came to do here”.
This misunderstanding seems to persist today between new arrivals and the native population. Farmer Jouany Chatoux thus describes “young people who have broken away from society, who have a high level of education and significant financial means because they are all dad-mom’s sons (…) who have started renting buildings, buy farms and build bits of cabins”.
“A very small minority”
In a forest between Creuse and Corrèze, on the edge of a lake, a former EDF holiday camp, where yurts and cabins have been installed, embodies these tensions around the way of life chosen by some. AFP tried to meet them but they did not wish to speak.
The “Syndicat de la Montagne limousine” observes the same media reserve. Created by inhabitants of the Plateau, this structure is accused of being a relay of the ultra-left for having called to mobilize, for example, against the “basins” of Deux-Sèvres or the En’Duo of Limousin.
She replied in a statement at the end of December: “No, the Syndicate does not aim to attack people individually but, because it takes seriously the commitments and the perspectives it has defined, it knows that it cannot unanimity and that democracy is necessarily conflictual”. For Dominique Danthieux, the radical militants are “a very small minority” among the alternatives of the Plateau, “mainly young people”.
Fire of gendarmerie vehicles and a TNT relay antenna
According to Baptiste Porcher, prosecutor of Limoges, the movement had claimed responsibility for the fire of five gendarmerie vehicles in a barracks in the city in 2017. The criminal court judges the facts on Tuesday. “The ultra-left also claimed responsibility for the arson, in 2021, of a TNT relay antenna at Les Cars in Haute-Vienne and of several vehicles in the Enedis enclosure in Limoges in 2020”, adds the magistrate.
The police officers of the anti-terrorist sub-directorate arrested six people for these facts, including the director of the school of Gentioux-Pigerolles (Creuse), a village of barely 400 inhabitants in the heart of the Plateau. She and two other arrested were indicted.
Other incidents fuel suspicions, such as the degradation of forestry machinery in 2021 in Creuse or the pollarding of 300 young Douglas firs in 2022 in Corrèze. In Haute-Vienne, four people were indicted on January 19 for the destruction of wind power equipment in 2022.
Concerns for the passage of the Tour de France
In Gentioux-Pigerolles, the arrest of the teacher, in her sixties, and the means deployed by the police had provoked strong reactions. “It was really excessive and it only heightened the tensions. Elsewhere, there would not have been dozens of vehicles [de police] to intervene,” said Mayor Benjamin Simons. The village is often cited as the epicenter of tensions, but the elected official denies any proximity to the ultra-left or the acts of radical environmentalists.
“There are very diverse tendencies in my city council and no call for sabotage, even for environmental reasons. We were opposed to the En’duo du Limousin because it crossed wetlands but we are in the peaceful defense of the environment, like many inhabitants of the Plateau for a long time, ”says Benjamin Simons.
On February 10, the prefect of Corrèze issued an order to prohibit access to a forest, where an upcoming clear cut is disputed, evoking calls to demonstrate relayed by a “media of the violent ultra-left movement”.
After the episode of the En’duo, some are worried about the passage of the Tour de France on the Plateau, on July 9, when the cycling event became the target of activists during its last edition.