After the Limoges town hall fire, the case against the Millevaches plateau

According to franceinfo, the Limoges town hall burned on 17 October. Since then, the mayor (LR, the Républicains) has pointed to "the far left" and its alleged "rear base" on the Millevaches plateau, one of the least populated areas of France. The residents, again according to franceinfo, denounce "amalgamations" and find the situation "almost funny" if it were not setting people against one another.

Let us say it plainly: an arson attack, if that is indeed what this was, has nothing to celebrate. And the dispatch does not tell us who lit it, under what circumstances, or on what evidence the designation of an entire territory rests. What we do not yet know is precisely what should call for caution. Yet caution is not the most sought-after commodity in a time of political tension.

For here is what we read in this, and it is our interpretation, not an established fact: the mayor's gesture turns an investigation into a trial of a landscape. A plateau, its villages, people who live there, farm there, build cooperatives and collectives there, find themselves summoned to answer for an act for which nothing, in what we have before us, makes them accountable. The word "rear base" smacks of military vocabulary: it manufactures an enemy within, with a front and a rear, where there are neighbours.

The manoeuvre is a classic one. When local government struggles to respond to what people are living through, it is convenient to name a convenient adversary: far from the centres, few in number, and therefore poorly placed to answer back in the media. One gains a narrative of order and loses the debate on what truly weighs on the city and its countryside. Institutional theatre replaces discussion.

One must also beware the opposite error. Defending the plateau against lumping everyone together does not amount to absolving anyone of a fire, nor to romanticising everything that goes up in flames. A tradition that believes in mass action knows that a movement's strength lies in its openness, its capacity to persuade, to organise in the light of day and to learn as it goes. The lone match has never won a strike; above all it serves those who demand more policing and fewer questions. Luxemburg observed this from revolutionary Russia: it is not flashpoints that steer great movements, but collective organisation.

What the investigation will establish remains to be seen. In the meantime, the real smoke is elsewhere: that of a rhetoric which sets people against one another, as the residents themselves say. Town halls can be rebuilt; trust broken by collective suspicion, far less quickly.