From Sainte-Soline to X/Twitter: The Fabric of a “Radical” Collective Action

We mobilize a configurational approach inspired by Norbert Elias (1998; Fillieule, 2019; Fillieule & Broqua, 2020) to analyze the online and offline fabric of a “radical” demonstration against a mega-reservoir in the village of Sainte-Soline in France. The demonstration (organized by the French movement Les Soulèvements de la Terre), which gathered around 30.000 people, took place on March 23, 2020, and was violently repressed. A considerable number of police forces was deployed on site, and during the demonstration over 5000 grenades were fired, injuring several hundred people, two of whom were put into a coma. More specifically, the aim is to show, through the analysis of 35 interviews (with journalists, activists, organizers, media-activists, etc.) and a corpus collected online (23 992 tweets and 542 059 RT), the various experiences/tactics of the demonstration –that cannot be reduced to the moment of the march itself–. We analyze how a common “knowing how to demonstrate” (radically or not) emerges and we are particularly attentive to the relationships and interdependencies between social groups, but also between spaces of actions –online and offline– to question the fabric of this demonstration. The configurational approach enables to think all the participants including the demonstrators themselves (who represent a heterogeneous group differentiated by various levels of “radicality” and of “determination”), the police and the journalists, in terms of interdependent relationships. A configurational approach to understanding the making of a protest permit to have 1) a focus on interdependence and relationships; 2) an attention to on-line and offline territories; 3) and on the ways in which discourses (particularly the discourse on “violence”) circulate between spaces and, in so doing, to the discourses accompanying action that are produced on digital platforms and 4) how “radical” environmental movements practices and strategies are configurated.