An interview with Nicolas Lambert, author and performer of
A Radiant Future, a stage play about France's nuclear history
This
interview, originally published in French in Avenir Radieux: Une Fission Française is published here as a “fair use”
excerpt for research and public education, and as a sample for publishers who
may be interested in obtaining rights for the English translation of the book
discussed in the interview. This material is not for commercial use without
permission of the publisher. For citation and publishing inquiries:
Nicolas Lambert, Avenir Radieux: Une Fission Française (Éditions L’Échappée, Paris, 2012)
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About the book and stage play:
Nicolas
Lambert prepared this play about nuclear for seven years, pouring over heaps of
articles and books, visiting nuclear power plants, attending public debates on
the EPR reactor proposed for Penly, meeting union leaders, intermediaries,
militants, corporate spokespersons for Areva and EDF—and then March 11, 2011:
Fukushima.
Then
this enormous task that he was conducting alone, in the shadows of a polite
indifference, took on a sudden significance. The silence of the media,
parliamentary apathy, the disdain for antinuclear activists (seen at best as
lovable old cranks), the reassuring refrain that there was no risk of a major
accident: all of these perceptions suddenly disintegrated. Barely finished, his
play now had an audience that was ready to listen.
Tour
de force: In two hours and in 23 characters, all performed by Nicolas Lambert,
we are taught how France became the most nuclearized country in the world,
beginning in 1945, when de Gaulle created the CEA (Commissariat à l’énergie
atomique) in order to make an atomic bomb, until our times when those who
wish to get out of nuclear remain inaudible.
Through
the choking laughter emanating from irradiated neurons, Lambert makes us see it
all: the fable of energy independence, the farce of public debates, the
discreet but essential role of great servants of the state like the stunning
Pierre Guillaumat, one of the key characters of this saga, the Eurodif Affair,
the terror attacks in Paris in 1986, the edicts of Messmer and Pompidou, the
procrastination of Mendès-France and Mitterand.
The
script of the play is supplemented with a long interview with the author,
background information, illustrations and a chronology. In short, everything
that the nucleocrats don’t want to think about.
The Interview
conducted by Jean-Baptiste Bernard
How did you become interested in
nuclear issues? Is this a struggle you were involved in before you began to
work on A Radiant Future: A French
Fission?
I was a
young adult at the time of the Chernobyl catastrophe, in April 1986, and that
obviously played a part in my awareness—as was my discovery of the region on
Cotentin, in Basse-Normandie, an extraordinary peninsula which is home to the
reactors in Flamanville and the factory called a “reprocessing center” in La
Hague. I was deeply affected by seeing the combination of this fascinating
natural setting and an omnipresent but almost invisible nuclear industry.
But in a
certain sense, this preoccupation with nuclear hibernated for a while until I
began work on what would become my project called “blue-white-red,” a
theatrical triptych on the specialties of our “terroir”: oil, nuclear and arms. At the start, I wanted to work on
the financing of the parties of the Fifth Republic, and particularly on the
party which became a permanent majority—the Gaullist Party—the one that created
a “république gaullienne” that it
could uphold and manage ad vitam aeternam.
In the
beginning, I wanted to understand how the Gaullist Party and the Gaullist République functioned, how the latter
assured the financing of the former. Little by little, working on this
question, I realized that three subjects were always there: oil, nuclear and
arms. Thus the idea became apparent: each of these subjects should be treated
separately in different plays. Naively, without understanding how much work was
involved, I thought I would finish this vast project in three years. I just
told myself “I’ll work on Elf for six months, then I’ll perform it for six
more; I’ll work on nuclear for six months, then perform it for six months;
etc.” At the same time, I had to earn a living by other means, which meant
taking minor roles in cinema. During most of the time I was working on Elf, the Pump of Africa, that’s how I
functioned. Small jobs helped me hold it all together, and then I realized I
was earning a modest living by the play itself.
You began working on Elf, the Pump of Africa, in 2003, at the
height of Chirac’s time of triumph…
In my
mind, I saw the play as an anti-Chirac war machine, anti-RPR. I felt an
urgency, a responsibility—to make a blockade. But the motivation came from
farther back at the beginning of the millennium, in the formulation of an
alternative to globalization. It also came from the awareness of the many ways
labor laws were under attack. I could see that behind these moves a new reality
was being planned. I said to my friends in the struggle, “They’re coming after
our job security. We have to take up arms and engage our adversary.”
I believe
that these affronts say a lot about the state of our society, especially since
as a reaction, workers launched a lot of great initiatives. There was a real
shake-up, with a lot of interesting projects happening. I remember especially
one guy who dramatized a recalculation of all subsidies and expenses: he showed
what they really were with graphics and charts. I thought, “Great. We are going
to do everything.” It was clear we were on the attack.
With the majority party as a target…
In 2003, I
had started to follow all the trials that the RPR [Rassemblement Pour la République, a neo-Gaullist party formed in
1976] was involved in. Whether it was the Elf trial, the trial about
non-existent jobs (where Juppe was, in the absence of Chirac, at least
condemned for having deceived the sovereign French people while entrusted with
carrying out a “democratic public mandate.”). But little by little, as I
studied these trials, I understood the subject was much more complex than I had
realized. It became apparent how everything was connected: one had to be
interested in arms to understand how the press functioned, in civilian nuclear
to understand military nuclear, and French Africa [Françeafrique] to know how the majority party was financed, and so
on. So I widened my field of inquiry, always wanting to be really aggressive in
my desire to confront the way this République
functions.
There is something a little quixotic in your work, like you’re a
solitary man tilting at windmills… Is this why you work solo?
Not at
all! I work solo because it costs a lot less, because I’m not subsidized.
Working solo annoys me a little. Elsewhere, in radio and in theater, I worked
for a long time collectively. I always worked with my close friends: Sylvie
Gravagna, Michel Cochet, everyone in the Cabarets
de Charlie Noé. [1].
But a word about this “being alone on the stage.” It wasn’t really a choice as much as a necessity. I had no way to do it otherwise. Putting on a piece of theater requires money. You have to pay the actors, the technicians. It’s an actual business enterprise. When I created Elf, the Pump of Africa, I didn’t have a cent. And this type of subject doesn’t captivate the people who subsidize the arts.
The simplest solution was to do everything myself. I told myself, “Let’s see if I can get by with a shoestring budget and manage everything myself.” That meant tackling the subject, research, direction, promotion, sales, lighting, stage management etc.
It took a
while. During the first twenty or thirty showings of Elf, the Pump of Africa, I did absolutely everything. I felt I was
going crazy. I played all the characters, but I also organized the touring, the
sales, and the technical aspects of the show. For the lighting, for example, I
had installed a small system behind the curtains upstage, and I controlled them
each time I exited for a few seconds. It was unmanageable. I decided I really
needed someone to handle the technical and administrative stuff. Someone else
just had to do it. Then I was fortunate to meet Erwan Temple, who became my
collaborator. This allowed me to concentrate on playing the roles and improve
my performance.
On the
stage, it really gelled. I was able to really bring to life, on my own, all
these diverse characters. And for the first time in my life I had a show that
didn’t cost anything to put on. My companion, Hélène Billard,[2] took charge of
the music playing cello, and that was it. It took off. I performed the show
once, twice, ten, thirty times… eventually we reached 400 performances.
Now, with A Radiant Future: A French Fission, I no
longer feel “alone on the stage” because I asked a splendid musician, the
bassist Eric Chalan to work with me. He or Hélène Billard accompanies me behind
the big screen on the set. On this big screen we project the video images and
lighting produced by Erwan Temple. The characters were developed under the
precious guidance of Nathalie Brücher. For someone supposedly working alone on
the stage, it’s starting to get crowded, isn’t it?
But still, you are playing all the
characters. This makes us think of the master of the genre: Philippe Caubère.
I
discovered his work at that time. I didn’t know it before. Perhaps I shouldn’t
admit this, but I’m not very well-cultured in the theater. Going to the theater
costs a lot of money, and I don’t make much. Before I became an adult, I went
to the theater only once during a school trip. Furthermore, shows are performed
at night, and when I’m working I don’t have time to see the work of others.
But because I was told that I’m doing something similar to the work of Philippe Caubère, that I was using a “grammar of performance” similar to his, I finally went to see one of his shows. It is true that he is fascinating. What a great actor! And what a great use of space. The man is a dancer.
You may not be a dancer, but you
manage a vast undertaking of documentation before writing your plays. How do
you proceed?
My basic
dogma is very simple: I go find the information and I report it to the
audience. Theater consists of just taking the public by the hand and not
browbeating them. I have an ambition to speak to everyone, a desire which our
institutions lack. I always wanted to perform elsewhere, outside of theaters,
in order to not always be facing the same, often stereotypical, segment of the
public. So the idea is simple: since people don’t go to the theater, the
theater will go to them. From 2002 to 2004, I participated with Antoine Chao,
at Grenier de Lutz, de Sylvie Gravagna. It was an ensemble of spectacles and
events, but also reporting and radio plays, all based on the memory of one
imaginary family called Pantin as they immigrated to the suburbs of Paris.
Everything was staged in schools and prefab trailers. Today, I continue to
practice a form of militant theater, with the prices posted in chalk whenever
various groups sponsor one of my shows.
This is how I try to reach as much of the public as possible. And above all, I don’t convey nonsense. For Elf, the Pump of Africa, I went to the Elf trials, which lasted four months, from March to July 2003, three days per week. I hardly missed a single day. In the beginning, I was thinking about making a fictional-documentary, in the form of a radio show, as part of the project Ephemeral Frequencies started by Antoine Chao.[3] Because recording devices are not allowed in court, I wanted to take notes and then turn them into a script for radio. This is when I got the idea of doing it on stage.
In your shows, do you practice a form
of documentary?
Not a
“form of.” I think it is a documentary! For Elf,
as it is for A Radiant Future, all
the dialogs are verbatim, and everyone is named. That’s the principle: I think
it is essential to name the adversary, and that obliges me to be rigorous. I
identify with the famous slogan: “Don’t hate the media, become the media.” All
my work is driven by this desire to become media, to attempt to explain the
world. I also lead an inquiry, in the journalistic sense of the word, but
instead of broadcasting it on the radio or in the press, I become the means by
which an intelligible documentary comes to life. The idea is to put theater
where it doesn’t presently exist, and to integrate it with political
reflection.
You are situated at the frontier of
theater and militancy?
For me,
they go together, even if the audiences often differ. I don’t feel comfortable
claiming to be an artist. I see myself more as an artisan who refines content
and form.
When I
began doing Elf, the Pump of Africa,
many theater people told me that this wasn’t theater. According to them, it was
more documentary. I had to wait until the 200th performance for a member of the
establishment to allow me to perform in her theater. The possibilities of this
genre then multiplied, and the same persons who had denied that I was a man of
the theater started to speak with interest about my work.
So there is a divide between what you
do and “proper” theater?
As a
spectator, I go to theater that I feel passionate about, that I admire—that
which helps me understand the world. It has to be interested in life and not be
merely solipsistic.
But this
is not how one finds the necessary support to produce a play. In France,
theater is Culture—it even has a minister! And the institutional structures don’t
necessarily dream about supporting artists who criticize institutions. Instead,
they concern themselves with their mission of deciding what defines Culture and
Art, and propagating these throughout the country. We must remember that when General de Gaulle
created the Ministry of Culture, with André Malraux as the head, the curtain
was being lowered on the Ministry of Colonies. The result: the functionaries of
the old ministry were reassigned to the new one. And they brought with them
certain quaint habits. This is why they always live with a sense of mission to
bring good news to the ignorant natives. But they don’t look into themselves,
and don’t pay respect to local cultures.
Frank
Lepage describes very well this cultural system in Gesticulated Conferences. He really deconstructs the whole thing
from the inside. He finds there is a “Qultural Machine” (insisting on the
capital Q) that drives itself. He is right. This system is headed for its ruin.
But all is
not dark, fortunately. Resistance is still alive. For example, I belong to a
reading group called Words Discovered,
created by the actor and director Michel Cochet. It has about 100 members all connected in one
way or another to theater. We exchange texts that we are reading, discussing,
criticizing and sometimes staging. The sole purpose is to help new authors
discover what they have to say.
I want to stress that we sometimes receive some impressive political texts. There have been even more in the last four or five years (unfortunately, the cultural system doesn’t necessarily give much funding to these texts). This makes me believe that things are starting to shift.
It takes time, a bit like it does to
prepare a show…
It’s
always a long process. It comes down to the work of documentation: as I get
into a subject step by step, an entire network of people, resources and
relationships becomes apparent. The general outline becomes progressively clear
until I finally begin to understand what is at stake. It takes patience. I
started working on nuclear as soon as the preparatory work on Elf, the Pump of Africa was done—that
is, after 2004. For seven years I systematically collected documents, articles
and books on the subject.
And you also went out to make contacts
with…
Theater is
a physical experience, which raises an essential question: how can one put
flesh and bones on concepts and subjects that are so austere? How can they be
incarnated?
To do
this, I had to feed myself with encounters and information. In short, I had to
give it life. For example, I went to thirteen public debates[4] concerned with
the construction of an EPR reactor in Penly. I also attended numerous
antinuclear meetings—and to be frank they were sometimes really boring. I
watched every documentary I could get my hands on. I even met with public
relations officers for Areva and EDF [Electricité
de France] to pose very naïve questions. That’s one way to understand how
things work. Finally, I interviewed people from the IRSN (Institut de radioprotection et de sûreté nucléaire) and the ASN (l’Autorité de sûreté nucléaire) and I
visited the nuclear power plant at Penly.
And it was because of what you saw at
the public debates that you decided to focus on the fate of the subcontracted
workers?
At the
first of the thirteen public debates in Dieppe something happened that the
organizers had not expected. It was the raising of a question about these
workers. They are not EDF employees, but they work for EDF all the same. They
are employees of a subcontractor, which might also be subcontracted by another
subcontractor, and so on up the chain. At this debate, a few of these guys
protested: “It’s a scandal. You say nothing about us!” They said it in a way
that was very raw and touching, but almost inaudible. They aren’t accustomed to
speaking out, and they speak in very technical terms. I didn’t understand much,
but their emotion struck me. There was something about seeing these
subcontractors show up here, expressing themselves very awkwardly in front of
these public relations professionals. This made me very interested in them.
So this
subject is in the play as the reading of a letter written by Daniel Luengo. He
is a subcontracted worker in the nuclear industry, and for several years he has
been denouncing the working conditions that EDF imposes on thousands of his
colleagues. Under crushing pressure, these people do the maintenance operations
on reactors and take on the highest health risks, while EDF has no concern for
them. The letter by Daniel Luengo is very moving. How could it not be? My job
as an actor is just to let his words be heard.
You also incarnate the subject by
showing us a gallery of portraits—that of Pierre Guillaumat, for example, was
particularly effective.
It’s not
always easy. The text for this character, one of the key figures in the nuclear
story, didn’t come together until the last moment. It was only after grinding
through every sense of the material in the play that I realized that I should
perhaps use the interview that I had read in Damocles [5], a defense journal. Then it struck me to what extent
he had played a pivotal role in everything that concerns oil, nuclear and arms.
So Pierre
Guillaumat is the human element that links the three subjects that I work on.
In Elf, the Pump of Africa, he is
mentioned only twice, even though he created Elf and managed the oil company
from 1962 to 1977 and never ceased his efforts to preserve the colonial French
empire for the sake of oil. In A Radiant
Future, he appears as a key figure: he was the general administrator of the
CEA (Commissariat à l’énergie atomique
française) from 1951 to 1958, and he supervised the French atomic bomb
project. And, in my future play on arms, he is there again. He was Minister of
the Army from 1958 to 1960 in the midst of the Algerian war.
Presenting these figures isn’t enough.
You also have to bring them to life on the stage, give them a physical
presence.
Actually,
it really takes some time. In A Radiant
Future: A French Fission, there are twenty-three characters, and I had to
spend a few days on each one. And on the stage, there has to be a smooth
transition from one to the other. It’s not always the case, but sometimes I
have to re-invent them.
In truth,
I’m not really alone when I play these characters. I realized I have a partner:
the public. That’s because it takes several performances for me to really get a
grip on the play, even if I have mastered its technical aspects.
Once on
the stage, the trick is to let go. It’s not me leading the vessel. It escapes
me. My task is to work on technique and make myself available as a vector for
the play. That can be tricky. For example, the physical difference between two
characters that I play, Joseph Dupuis, director of the EPR at Penly, and Didier
Houi, the moderator of the public debate, wasn’t apparent to me. These are men
cut from the same cloth, from the same milieu, and they don’t have very
interesting voices. So I had to find some way to differentiate them.
After a
while, I put my finger on it. It was a kind of discomfort. Didier Houi always
seemed to be bothered when he spoke. This was because he had his ass between
two stools: he believed in his democratic mission, but he also knew that his
role was a sham. He admitted it elsewhere off record. The decision to construct
the new reactor had already been made at the Élysée [executive branch]. But he continued with the charade
anyway.
He belongs to that class of
professional speakers that you mentioned earlier?
Didier
Houi was rather like a dinner host. He manages the Arpe (Agence régionale pour l’environnement) in Midi-Pyrenees, so he is
not necessarily pro-nuclear. The debate commission is not stupid. By using
someone neutral they can neutralize a lot of criticism. They can say, “See!
It’s not all decided in advance.” Except there are machinations in the
background all directed by EDF. It’s EDF that finances the public debate and
sets its parameters.
I really
became aware of this at one of the thirteen debates. I was sitting in the
amphitheater, just behind one of the EDF people playing a key role in design of
the debate over Penly. He was leading the ensemble as a producer with his
fingers on the purse strings.[6] While a man was explaining to the crowd, in
plain language, what an EPR reactor was, I started to get interested in a
little binder the EDF man was holding. I could see what he had written there. I
could see that the statements made to the public had been planned with extreme
precision. It wasn’t a general outline. Everything had been planned almost down
to the last word. The script even included language errors and false starts
like, “Yes, well, um, you’re going to tell me…”
This is
what I mean by professional speakers. Their text is ready, and the
interpretation has been thoroughly worked over. They’ve already repeated this
public debate. It too is like a piece of theater, except they don’t present
themselves as actors. And they have in front of them people who are tired,
coming after a day of work, using their free time to inform themselves or
struggle. The imbalance is striking.
And do the inhabitants of the region
come out in big numbers?
In Dieppe,
there are already six reactors in the area, in Penly and Paluel. And the
commission is supposed to ask them if they want one more? But they sort of
don’t give a damn, right? At the discussions I heard people say often, “Six
reactors or seven. What’s the difference?”
In any
case, not much was done to make people turn out. To advertise the debates,
there was an announcement in the local paper, one poster among a dozen on the
notice board outside the community center. Me, I wouldn’t risk advertising for
a performance this way. I would want to be as obtrusive as possible. A debate
of this importance should at least be broadcast on a public service channel.
This
reminds me of one meeting when the subject of potassium iodide pills came up.
Afterwards, a man came up to me and said, “I’m the mayor of town X, a little
village a few miles from the reactor. You said something there about potassium
iodide pills. What are they?” This village mayor, living just over ten
kilometers from a nuclear power plant, had never heard of this way of defending
oneself against thyroid damage during a nuclear catastrophe. That’s because in
France only persons living less than ten kilometers from a reactor need to be
given potassium iodide pills. Yet the WHO (World Health Organization) says this
distance should be 500 kilometers. This enormous difference is quite revealing.
Of a collective indifference?
For sure!
When I started in the years 2000-2010, to speak to my friends about my interest
in staging a play about nuclear, they said to me, “Why do you want to bother
with that? It’s a lost cause. And anyway, nothing has happened.” They
reproached me for being out of step with the times.
The
Fukushima catastrophe happened the very month when I was doing a first run of A Radiant Future. All of a sudden I was
doubly out of step with the times because I was speaking about nuclear without
mentioning Fukushima. It wasn’t the topic of my play anyhow, but I finally
added a bit by using the statement Sarkozy made after the catastrophe. He
explained that those who predicted the demise of nuclear were asking for
nothing but a return to the Middle Ages.
The
catastrophe certainly provoked a certain interest in the atomic energy
question. Five months after Fukushima, the sociologist Francis Chateauraynaud
published a study showing that between March and July 2011 more words had been
printed on nuclear energy than in the entire preceding decade.[7] But to be
frank, I believe that this opening has already closed again. Now, at the
beginning of 2012, the catastrophe is already off the radar. Until the next
one?
There will at least be your work that
broaches the subject. Was it hard to immerse yourself in the arcane knowledge
of things atomic?
I had a
lot of trouble understanding how nuclear energy works. I realized I knew
absolutely nothing about science, and high school courses were a distant
memory. So it took me a long time to relearn things until I got the general
principle. And this is what I concluded: Nuclear energy is amazing! To succeed
in using the energy that constitutes the atom in order to permit people to boil
water. It’s pure genius! If, of course, we don’t consider the dangers. Bernard
Laponche, who worked in reactor physics at the CEA before becoming a figure in
the anti-nuclear struggle, often said that nuclear was the most dangerous
method of boiling water. Once you realize that, you have to ask yourself, “Is
it really necessary to boil that much water? Do we have to spend so much on
stupid electric radiators?”
What do you think?
To know
whether nuclear is useful to the economy, you can consider this fact: Japan
operated 54 nuclear reactors until March 2011 [6] but they have all been shut
down since that time.[8] The Japanese economy still carries on well enough. As
for Germany, which lowered its electricity consumption by 30% over ten years,
it doesn’t give the impression of being a low-performing European country. If
that’s a return the Middle Ages, there are worse fates. And I haven’t even
mentioned the twelve members of the European Union who don’t use nuclear at all.
Related to this, it’s worth remembering that in spite of a large number of
reactors (150) nuclear supplies only 15% of European electricity needs. If we
can do without it, why don’t we try? The French Court of Audit (La cour des comptes) which is hardly made
up of anti-growth zealots, came to the same conclusions. In January 2012,[9] it
published a report showing it would be as expensive to shut down nuclear energy
as to continue it. It even states that the choice between the two is a
political choice.
I think we
should immediately stop the French nuclear complex, and by doing so we would
avoid great troubles. When you look at a map of Chernobyl fallout and compare
it with the size of France, you realize the dimensions are about the same. If
you could guarantee me that an accident won’t happen, I’d take the risk, but
everything changes when the statistics show that a major catastrophe happens
once a decade. Bernard Laponche and Benjamin Dessus, president of Global
Change, explained it in June 2011 in an article published in Libération, concluding, “Rather than continuing
to calculate surrealistic probabilities of events occurring, events which we
can’t even imagine—as was the case with Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and
Fukushima—isn’t it time to take account of the reality and draw lessons from
it. The reality is that the risk of a major accident in Europe is not so low.
It is actually a statistical certainty.” Couldn’t we from now on avoid this
major problem by ceasing to use that which produces consequences beyond our
control?
We always prefer to believe that the worst will not happen. And we prefer to hypnotize ourselves by what we say among each other because we don’t want to tell ourselves, for example, that the nuclear power plant at Nogent is 80 kilometers from Paris and we couldn’t evacuate the region in the event of a serious problem. Everyone tries to accommodate himself to this reality.
Were you trying to prove something
with A Radiant Future?
Frankly, I
was thinking of doing more on the relations between politics and the industry,
but in the end I didn’t do it. I didn’t talk at all about how the political
parties are financed, as I did in Elf,
the Pump of Africa. I didn’t touch on Bouygues, either, the company that
builds nuclear power plants and manipulates public opinion with TF1 [a national
television network]. After all, I regret that I covered only a few topics in
the play. But how else could I do it?
At one
point, I set a limit of a certain number of words: there are 13,000 and that
corresponds to two hours on the stage. That indicates that there is enough for
three main themes to be covered in A
Radiant Future, such as the link between the terrorist attacks of February
and March 1986 in Paris and Iran’s nuclear project, which involved Eurodif [the
French uranium enrichment plant]. It’s something that’s not very well known. At
the end of the play, I enumerate the attacks committed as a litany that sounds
a bit like a chant.
I use this
device twice during the play. The first time is when I list all the French
reactors, which are supposedly the product of our energy independence and
technological inventiveness. Yet in fact they were all built under license from
Westinghouse—a reality that is almost never mentioned, so I settle for listing
the reactors one by one. The second litany comes back to the link between
France and Iran during this time of the attacks, attributed at the time to
“dangerous islamists.” This list of the dead and wounded is, by the end, very
hard to listen to. At the conclusion of it, the voice of Pierre Guillaumat
returns saying, “There is no relation between civilian and military
applications of nuclear technology.” It’s another way of saying “to be
continued” at the end.
At the start of the play, you put the
emphasis on military applications with Guillaumat, with the bomb… You stress
how much the civilian and military pursuits are linked, how the former follows
from the latter.
This is
another thing that is hardly discussed. I noticed this particularly when I
followed the members of the Mouvement de
la Paix [7] who met at the UN in New York. There was even a delegation of
elected officials, some of them from the PCF (parti communiste français).[10] I asked some of them what they were
doing there, and they told me they were opposed to military applications of
nuclear. But when I asked them about the nuclear power plants in their
districts and told them about the links between civilian and military, they
withdrew very abruptly, saying, “OK. That’s enough. I see what you’re trying to
do.” I was even insulted by a few of them. This is because the discourse of the
PCF, before Fukushima, was very simple on the subject. It was “nuclear is
wonderful,” perhaps because EDF contributes so generously to the unions
affiliated with the PCF. It is a subject that they are forbidden to discuss.
The link between civilian and military is taboo. If you go through Areva’s
financial reports carefully and look for the numbers related to their military
activity, you’ll wear out your eyes with this wasted effort. But there must be
a place where they built the bomb, right?
I believe
we cannot comprehend our République
if we do not apprehend its relationship with Africa, oil, nuclear and arms. We
also cannot comprehend it if we don’t grasp why it is so rare in this country
to speak ill of Bolloré, Bouygues, Lagardère, Dassault or Areva, simply because
they provide jobs and industrial activity.
Theater
can do this: help us understand the world we inhabit. Better still, it must.
Interview
conducted by Jean-Baptiste Bernard
Notes
[1] From
1998-2003, the Charlie Noé Company,
founded in 1992 by Sylvie Gravagna and Nicolas Lambert, produced 15 shows as
cabarets combining contemporary authors, songs and dance. This project was
revived in 2010 under the name Nouvelle
Revue Vivante, appearing regularly at La Java, in Paris.
[2] Both
play instruments fabricated by Yves Ducloux, a luthier cabinetmaker who lives
on the slopes of Mt. Ventoux.
[3] Ephemeral Frequencies is a pirate radio
station having as its goal to “convey its message to those that the media do
not see.”
[4] The
procedure for public debates was created by the law of February 2, 1995. It
instituted an authority responsible for conducting debates, la Commission nationale du débat public.
The law charged this commission with the duty to involve the public in “the
elaboration of projects concerning management or equipment having an impact on
the environment or on land management.” To carry out this mission, a commission
for public debate is assembled for each project in question. It must hold a
certain number of meetings open to all before producing a report which is
purely advisory.
[5] In the
dossier “CEA, a Half Century of Nuclear Power,” in the journal Damoclès, Autumn 1995.
[6] A
million euros in salaries and relocations etc…
[7] See
the chronicle “The Meaning of the Irreversible: Chronicles of Civilian Nuclear
Technology after Fukushima.” http://socioargu.hypotheses.org/2447
[8] The
last Japanese nuclear reactor was turned off in May 2012. But Japan has not
given up the prospect of restarting reactors in the future.
[9] “The
Costs of the Electronuclear Infrastructure.” Thematic public report, January
2012.
[10] Still
active today, the Mouvement Pour La Paix
[sic] is an organization founded by Frédéric Jolie-Curie in the 1950s.
Translator’s note: the group is also known as Mouvement de la Paix (Peace).
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