GRégoire Souchay has been a journalist for ten years, specializing in the environment, energy and housing. You can read his work in the online journal Reporterre or the daily Release. We can meet him, on a day not yet fixed in the spring of 2023, at the Rodez judicial court, where he will appear to have, on November 10, 2021, “fraudulently withheld bags containing rapeseed seeds” and have them “deliberately degraded or deteriorated”.
The journalist was present that day in the warehouses of the seed company RAGT, in Calmont (Aveyron). But he was there to cover up an action by the Voluntary Reapers movement – who had come to rip open seed bags of crops made tolerant to herbicides – not to take part in their action. His article appeared two days later.
Sisters and brothers from other media were also present that day, but only the journalist from Reporterre was worried. As Aude Dassonville said in The world, this is the third time that journalists from media devoted to the environment have been specifically targeted. In June and October 2020, many journalists covered the occupation of runways at Orly and Roissy airports: only those at Reporterre were fined and/or placed in police custody.
Either these journalists are victims of an unfortunate and extraordinary coincidence, or something else is at stake in this succession of obstacles to freedom of information. How not to see, in this manifest discrimination, a dangerous amalgam? The mere fact of belonging to a media focused on the environment seems to have become, in the eyes of the police and the prosecutor, an indicator of complicity or collusion.
Deleted recordings
This shift should come as no surprise. It is due, first, to the rampant criminalization of environmental activism. Since Emmanuel Macron came to power in 2017, this trend has continued to grow, while the spectrum of potentially reprehensible actions has grown ever wider. In 2019, an agreement signed between the Ministry of the Interior and the productivist agricultural unions set this trend in stone, by creating the Demeter gendarmerie cell. With the objective not only to fight against crimes against the agricultural world, but also to prevent “actions of an ideological nature” can only be “simple symbolic actions of denigration”.
Does journalistic activity fall into this latter category? It is in any case not very surprising that the assignment of law enforcement to such missions creates a kind of atmosphere. At the end of March 2021, a German journalist reporting in Argoat, working on the Breton agricultural model, exchanged a few unpleasant words with a farmer and recorded. She was amazed to see the gendarmes arriving at her hotel the same evening, accompanied by the person concerned, telling her to erase her recordings. Under the insults of her detractor, she must comply. This story was told in The world and elsewhere ; it did not arouse any particular emotion.
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