ZAD

From making our own bread to running a pirate radio station, planting herbal medicine gardens to making ‘rebel camembert’, from a rap recording studio to a pasta production workshop, an artisanal brewery to two blacksmiths’ forges, a communal justice system to a library and even a full-scale working lighthouse – the ZAD has become a new commune for the 21st century. This beautifully-imperfect utopia in resistance against an airport has been supported by a radically diverse popular movement, bringing together tens of thousands of anarchists and farmers, trade unionists and naturalists, environmentalists and students, locals and revolutionaries of every flavour. Everything changed on 17 January 2018, when the French prime minister appeared on TV to cancel the airport project – and in the same breath declare that the ZAD, the ‘outlaw zone’, would be evicted and ‘law and order’ restored.