In March 2023, nearly thirty thousand protesters clashed with three thousand two hundred French gendarmes and policemen on agricultural land near Sainte-Soline in Western France.The “Battle of Sainte-Soline” culminated two years of protests by the Soulèvement de la Terre movement,demonstrating against the construction of a megabassine – one of two hundred water basins,up to eighteen hectares in size,desired by the French agricultural industry to guarantee water reserves during droughts.
the project, still underway, risks devastating agricultural effects: megabassines collect water by draining aquifers during winter, damaging them; they irrigate intensive crops, especially corn, requiring more water than seasonal cycles naturally provide; and they serve large industry without considering local communities’ needs.
The police deployment was massive, equipped with weapons for a guerrilla war: helicopters, anti-riot gear, armored vehicles, water cannons, and grenades. Hundreds were injured, some severely. Twenty protesters were mutilated, two fell into comas. Following the battle, the Soulèvement de la Terre was disbanded by Interior Minister Gérald Damarnin and declared illegal.
Born in France in 2021 to contest the Macron government’s environmental and energy policies and advocate for a new social and economic model around ecology, land exploitation, and resource accumulation, the movement unites local militants, farmers, and gains solidarity from national and international groups. Between 2021 and 2023, the Soulèvement de la Terre organized marches, demonstrations, and sabotage actions, facing increasing repression.
In response to the March 2023 events,You don’t dissolve an uprising (“A revolt does not melt”) was published,translated for Orthotes by Giovanni Fava and Claudia Terra as Soulèvement de la Terre primer in late 2024. The Abbecedario is a collection of thirty-eight short interventions by Soulèvement and solidarity activists. Each text begins with a keyword, arranged alphabetically to form a constellation of political positions and analyses, effectively composing the movement’s manifesto.
Reading the Abbecedario prompts reflection on the practical, urgent issues climate change demands; how resistance organizes against unsustainable economic systems; and the use of language in politics, especially concerning collective and structural, rather than individual, issues.
The Abbecedario gathers diverse interventions. The Confédération paysanne, a trade union confederation protecting small farmers, signs “Farmers and peasants”; the scientific collective Scientifiques en rébellion writes about “Climate urgency”; and anthropologists Philippe descola and Eduardo viveiros de Castro discuss…
Even in Italy, the institutional vocabulary that defines the forms of dissent is increasingly vague and opaque, and because of this very reason increasingly dangerous. Legal categories born in completely different past contexts – think of the notion of “subversive association with terrorist purposes” – are today applied to environmentalist groups or movement networks that contest fossil infrastructures, such as regasifiers or methane pipelines. The very concept of terrorism is stretched, bent, to include anyone who carries out an unauthorized conflict, anyone who practices a form of opposition outside institutional channels. The problem, then, is also semantic: it is in the power of those who assign the names. If the institutional narrative is capable of imposing a label, it can erase the complexity, to the point of devitalizing the conflict and avoiding any confrontation.
In this context, linguistic reflection becomes a primary political issue. what’s our name? What do we want to be called? Which words are imposed on us, and which can we reappropriate? The battle is played out not only in the squares or in the courts, but also in the ways we talk about the squares and the courts. And also in the ways we talk to each other. For this reason the *Abbecedario* is a precious object: because it builds a common language without imposing it. Because it shows that we can speak from different positions, with different styles, but in the same direction, breaking the hierarchy between those who think and those who act, between those who write and those who fight.
The fact that the *Soulèvement de la Terre primer* was written after sainte-Soline indicates that it is indeed not a program of action, but an attempt to understand retroactively – with words and forms of thought – what had already been done. First the body, then the tongue; first the collision, then the syntax.If the politics of Soulèvement had its first articulation in the physical presence, in disobedience, in the collective gesture, it was only after the clash that the construction of a grammar became necessary. The intellect comes a posteriori,as a form of sedimentation,and not as a prior architecture. This subversion of the traditional logic of militant thought is perhaps the most powerful key to *Abbecedario*: the action is not justified by the theory, but precedes it. And the theory is not intended to explain, but to accompany. It’s not a strategy, it’s a cure.
Every word used in political discourse is an object of contention: saying “ecologist”, “militant”, “resistance”, “activist” is never neutral, it is indeed a choice of camp.
In this sense, the *Abbecedario* is not a book that prepares for the struggle: it is indeed the book that remains after the struggle. And precisely for this reason it is all the more precious for those who fight today,elsewhere. As it offers an example, not a model. Because it can be taken, read, copied, folded, adapted. And as it contains a form of collective intelligence that is not proposed as truth, but as a shared gesture. in a time in which the repression of dissent becomes more pervasive every day, even in Italy, and in which the distance between the political gesture and its public representation is abysmal, the *Abbecedario* becomes a strange and vital object. A form of knowledge that does not claim hegemony, but relationship.
If today those who dissent in an organized way – be they students, climate activists, workers or cultural workers – are registered,