🇫🇷 🇬🇧

Les désobéissants

About - Les désobéissants

In Normandy, in Chefresne, a small village of 310 inhabitants in the South Manche, farmers, citizens, and local residents are fighting against the installation of a Very High Voltage line in their fields.
RTE and the State have turned their lives upside down in a long-term fight that will last seven years. Martine, Yves, or Jean-Claude would never have imagined one day entering into resistance like this. Their land is being ransacked for the sake of the general interest and their cows will suffer the health consequences of this 400,000-volt line. They are faced with an injustice that affects their deep identity. They have become activists and resistance fighters out of necessity. A resolute opposition to decisions that were nevertheless taken within a legal and democratic framework.
Xavier Renou is a professional activist. He has made it a way of life. Today, he is at the head of a real network of Disobedients. He is an activist by conviction. He is in the direct line of the great precursors of civil disobedience: Henry David Thoreau, Lanza del Vasto, Gandhi. This former student of Sciences Po was trained in civil disobedience techniques by Greenpeace. Today, he passes on his know-how and campaigns wherever protest is active.
On the one hand, the premeditated, planned, deliberately publicized activism of Xavier Renou. On the other, the need for resistance but also the solitary despair of the inhabitants of Chefresne.
While in Chefresne, citizens are subjected to aggression, Xavier Renou seeks confrontation. While in Chefresne, farmers resist by respecting the law, Xavier Renou and his collective deliberately break it. A clearly assumed strategy