After French Rail Sabotage, Some See Signs of a Murky ‘Ultraleft’
Who sabotaged France’s high-speed train lines last month?
Clear answers to that question have been elusive so far, more than a week after coordinated arson attacks that disrupted rail travel for hundreds of thousands of travelers before the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games.
There have been no arrests, and no suspects have been publicly identified. For now, the country appears far more invested in its Olympic medal count than in the outcome of the investigation. That is probably a good thing for the authorities, because such cases, though not uncommon, are notoriously difficult to solve.
Officials are not ruling out any possibilities, including foreign interference. But much suspicion has fallen on what French authorities label as “ultraleft,” anticapitalist groups that are less interested in gaining notoriety for their actions than in disrupting the workings of the state.
Railway sabotage is a “traditional method of action” for such groups, Gérald Darmanin, France’s interior minister, said in the aftermath of the attacks.
France’s domestic intelligence agency also has said that arson has been “a preferred modus operandi” for the “ultraleft” movement, “which regularly launches campaigns aimed mainly at energy and telecommunications infrastructures.”
But in France and elsewhere in Europe, “the number of arrests for left-wing and anarchist terrorist and extremist offenses is generally not very high,” Europol, the European Union agency for law enforcement cooperation, said in a report last year.
While experts caution that last week’s sabotage case remains open, they also say it bears some hallmarks of the insurrectionary anarchists, who frequently use low-tech methods like arson and cutting cables to target railway or telecommunication sites.
One potential clue being examined by investigators is an anonymous email which was sent a day after the attack to The New York Times and other media organizations and which celebrated the sabotage. It claimed that the attacks were intended to disrupt the Olympics, which the email called a “celebration of nationalism” and a “testing ground” for mass policing that shows how states “subjugate populations.”
It is unclear if the email came from the actual saboteurs, but the Paris prosecutor’s office, which is handling the investigation, said that was being examined. Several experts on far-left movements and sabotage said that the tone and arguments of the email were consistent with an anarchist ideology, and they noted that sabotage carried out by anarchist groups was often followed by similarly fuzzy claims of responsibility.
Victor Cachard, a French author who has written extensively about the history of sabotage, said that it was hard to ascertain with any confidence who was behind the attacks. Still, he said, “when you look at the recent history of claims that come after this kind of action, the insurrectionist anarchist movement is often behind it.”
The email, which was signed “an unexpected delegation,” in a reference to the Olympics, was sent from an anonymous email address created on Riseup, a platform that “provides online communication tools for people and groups working on liberatory social change,” according to its website.
The text of the email criticized France’s weapons export industry, condemned police brutality, castigated French companies like Total or Alstom for wreaking social and environmental havoc and took a dim view of France’s high-speed train system.
“Railroads are not an innocuous infrastructure,” the email said. “They have always been a means of colonizing new territories, a prerequisite for their devastation, and a ready-made path for the extension of capitalism and state control.”
Practically speaking, targeting railway systems or telecommunication networks “requires the least energy for the greatest efficiency,” Mr. Cachard said. France’s rail system is especially vulnerable — too vast to be completely secure, and centralized, with all four main high-speed lines running out of Paris.
That makes creating a bottleneck easy, though train traffic quickly returned to normal after France’s railway company scrambled to repair the damage after the rail attacks. Another spate of vandalism last week against fiber optic cables caused limited disruption.
“The goal of the sabotage is to frustrate the state and to send the message to other groups with similar ideas,” said Thomas Dekeyser, a researcher at Aberystwyth University in Wales who has studied past cases of sabotage in Europe.
He and other experts say that in recent years more activists have become attracted to sabotage. They include climate activists who believe that traditional methods like petitions or protests have made little headway, as well as militants who object to the spread of infrastructure like 5G antennas.
France’s telecommunications infrastructure — phone lines, fiber optic cables, relay antennas — is targeted by about a dozen small-scale acts of vandalism or sabotage every month.
“There is a willingness to push the boundaries, to act not against human life but infrastructure,” Mr. Cachard said. “Throughout history, you see that sabotage goes up a notch when the state is unresponsive to traditional modes of action.”
Indeed, infrastructure sabotage is hardly a new phenomenon.
Aurélien Dubuisson, a historian and affiliated researcher at Sciences Po in Paris, who is an expert on extreme-left movements, said that sabotage was sometimes used in the labor movement’s early days. For instance, figures like Émile Pouget, an anarchist journalist and trade unionist who was active in the late 19th century and early 20th century, advocated such tactics.
Sabotage of railway lines was famously used by French resistance fighters of all political stripes during World War II. Disruptions like temporary power cuts have also been used by French labor unionists opposed to President Emmanuel Macron.
Last year, France’s interior minister said that the authorities were monitoring about 3,000 “ultraleft” activists. But Mr. Dubuisson and other experts caution that officials often use a broad brush that is not always helpful in understanding whom they are talking about.
“It’s a bit of a catchall term,” he said. “The ultraleft label has become a political and media expression for almost anything on the left that involves the use of illegal practices, whether violent or nonviolent, within a political framework.”
And arrests are rare in sabotage cases, making it even more complicated to establish a pattern or blame a specific group, experts say.
Insurrectionist anarchists and similar groups are rarely interested in converting the general public to their cause or in using the press or the legal system to their advantage, experts said. They are generally loosely organized, with no formal hierarchy or structure; smaller groups may form to take specific action before disbanding just as quickly.
Anarchists and other fringe, left-wing activists are also accustomed to working with like-minded groups in countries like Italy, Germany or Spain, making it easy to slip across the border, experts say.
In Germany, Tesla was forced to halt production at an assembly plant in March after someone started a fire at a high-voltage pylon that cut electricity to the factory and the surrounding region. A group declaring ties to the antifascist movement claimed responsibility for the attack, but there have been no arrests in this case either.
“They don’t want to draw attention to themselves, but instead focus on action and vulnerability of the infrastructures,” Mr. Dekeyser said of groups like insurrectionist anarchists. “They are not interested in building a platform from which to speak.”
Melissa Eddy contributed reporting from Germany.
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