Direct action

Direct action (AD) is a clandestine group (with the influences initially Anarchiste S but which was distancié of this ideology to marry the cause Marxist-Leninist (Communiste) borrowing their name from the anarchistic principle of the libertarian political theory of the direct action. They asserted about fifty Attentat S or Assassinat S on the territory French between 1979 and 1987. Direct action was prohibited by a decree of the August 19th 1982 pronouncing the dissolution of the organization for terrorist activities. Its members were judged by a special training of the Court of Assizes of Paris.

History

Direct action is the result of the fusion of the members of the GARI (Action groups revolutionist internationalists) which did not want to arrange the weapons after the death of Franco and the NAPAP (Cores armed for popular autonomy), which leads in 1977 to the creation of a “internal coordination politico-soldier to the autonomous Mouvement”. This coordination is transformed into 1979 in a “organization of Guérilla” which then starts to assert its attacks under the name of Direct action, expression borrowed from the Anarcho-syndicalisme of the beginning of the 20th century but with which the practice of AD does not have anything to see, in the name of the fight against the capitalist Impérialisme, of the symbols of the power of the State, the large-scale employers and the defense of the Prolétariat. They do not make whereas property damages. Several of its members are arrested and imprisoned.

After the election of Mitterrand in 1981 the new government plays the appeasing and amnesties condemned. The majority of the militants gives up violence then, giving up until the name and with the initials of Direct action but a minority (gathered in a Parisian branch and a Lyons branch) chooses to pass to the armed struggle. Starting from 1984, the Parisian branch Direct action is combined with the Fraction Red Army within the framework with the strategy of “unit of the revolutionists in Western Europe”, the Lyons branch turning to the attack of banks and the attacks against Israeli objectives.

Direct action or of the members of AD in particular took part:

with the corrosion of the seat of employers on May 1st 1979;
with the holdup of Caluire on October 29th, 1980 during which a security guard is killed;
with attacks against Ministry S, the Sonacotra, estate agencies, buildings of the French Army , companies related to the French military program;
with attacks against the Israeli State (corrosion of the commercial mission of the embassy of Israel, the March 31st 1982, bomb attack against the Citrus Marketing Board off Israel, the August 11th of the same year);
with the assassination the March 13rd 1982 of Gabriel Chahine, member of the GARI and police informer which had allowed the first arrest of Rouillan and Ménigon in 1980;
with the assassination of two police officers (by wounding a third seriously) which occurred Trudaine in Paris the May 31st 1983;
with the holdup of the avenue of Villiers to Paris the October 14th 1983 during which one of the participants, Cino Rizzato, is killed;
with the holdup of the Victor-Hugo place to Lyon the March 27th 1984 where the general of gendarmerie Guy Delfosse is killed while trying to interpose;
with the assassination of the general Audran (responsible for the sales of Weapon S of the French State) on January 25th 1985;
with the attempted murders missed on Henri Blandin (general inspector of the armies) in 1985 and Guy Brana (vice-president of the CNPF, ancestor of the MEDEF) in 1986;
with the bomb attack the July 9th 1986 in Paris in the buildings of the Repression brigade of the banditism, quay of Gesvres, in which the inspector Marcel Basdevant is killed;
with the assassination of Georges Besse, chairman of the Control Renault on November 17th 1986. It is as a representative of a company with international vocation that Georges Besse is killed, but also as a leader of a company employing a watchman who killed a militant Maoist. However, the journalist of investigation, Dominique Lorentz, blamed the question of the assassination of Besse, by underlining the proximity of this business with Eurodif, that Besse had directed, and the Iranian Nuclear program (in which France took part then)
with many armed robberies not having involved not died of man and asserted by the group like “ proletarian expropriations ”.

Overall, this group was the expression in France of a current asserting Marxisme and defending the idea that the violent actions were a legitimate means to reverse a mode considered as oppressive. During what one called the “Années of lead”, of many bunches took again the ideology of the “Propagande by the fact” preached by certain anarchistic militants during the two last decades of the 19th century: the Red Army Fraction (or “Bandages in Baader”) in Western Germany, the red Brigades in Italy, Red Army Japanese woman with the Japan, 17-November in Greece, WILL GO in Ireland, fighting communist Cellules in Belgium, ETA with the Basque Country, Weathermen with the the United States, MLSBP and Devrimci Sol in Turkey, etc

The February 21st 1987, the principal members of Direct action, Jean-Marc Rouillan, Nathalie Ménigon, Joelle Aubron, and Georges Cipriani were stopped in a farm with the ford Girault locality of the commune of Vitry-aux-Loges, in the Loiret. They were all the four condemned (just like Régis Schleicher, stopped in 1984) to the life imprisonment, together with an incompressible sorrow 18 years.

The sorrow of Joelle Aubron was suspended in June 2004 for health reasons. She died with Paris on March 1st 2006 of a brain tumor. Jean-Marc Rouillan holds a chronicle on the prison universe in the newspaper CQFD . The requests for early release of Governed Schleicher and Nathalie Ménigon until were now pushed back by the court of the application of the sorrows. Nathalie Ménigon was victim in prison of two cerebral vascular accidents which left it partially hemiplegic.

At the end of March 2007 a petition of 6.500 signatures for the release of the prisoners of Direct action was brought to the minister Justice Pascal Clément (UMP).

May 10th, 2007, the court of application of the sorrows of Paris granted a mode of semi-freedom to Nathalie Ménigon, imprisoned since 1987. She will work the day and will turn over to sleep in prison, but the parquet floor immediately made call of this decision. On Thursday, July 19, 2007, the room of application of the sorrows of the Court of Appeal of Paris finally granted the mode of semi-freedom to him.

Nathalie Ménigon, to whom a mode of semi-freedom was granted starting from August 2nd, was transferred Tuesday, July 24, 2007 of the detention center of Bapaume (Pas-de-Calais) to that from Toulouse.

See too

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