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Feature One French Rave Repression 2001-

"Chansons d'amour - je t'adore."

Oooops - we did it again!!

Well the legal situation in france sure is different to the UK - like Alex said, it took 3 years for the Criminal Justice Act to outlaw parties in the UK - In France it was nearly there in 3 months!

The key thing the authorities wanted was advance warning on the sites of the parties - if that is given - so they said - then most things could continue as normal - but have a look at this email that just came in -

> after 6 wks of talks with prefect of ardeche talks
> breakdown when prefect states he is to give nothing in
> the way of aid or co/operation with teknival we dont
> have his authorisisation and allso he is not against
> the continuation of the festival
> every request made by representives of those agencys
> sans risk and sante were refused
> those sites given to prefect in good faith now closed
> down and impossible to utilise
> prefect asks to trust him and give the address of
> other possible sites so that he can assure the police
> custums and military police can be in place before the
> sounds and public
>
> question , are we stupid
>
> question , do we give him all possible sites so that
> we can have mass strip searches and control
>
> question ,do we trust the prefecture
>
> question ,do we continue
>
> we will make no move untill we have news from the
> result of these questions
>
> this email is a part has been sent to 1000 people in a
> seire of 10
>
>
> make the decision yes all is go or no we stop
> do we suport the idea of a chart
> are we a culture or are we terrorists
>
> respect to all

So you can see that the idea of just giving the location on the sites and then everything being fine isn't really that true

For an excellent resource on this issue check out

http://free.underground-music.org

Dialogue is what they wanted more than anything else - you can be sure of it. The real reason that the French government cracked down of french free parties this summer with a jagged, red-hot poker swathe of machine gun legislation was not because of the environmental destruction that was occasionally happening at peak parties in the summer, nor the increasing out of control drugs economy that is present at tekno parties, No you can be sure that the real reason was that no-one likes to be ignored. And surely once you enter into Dialogue with people then it's easier to threaten them to expoit their hopes for legitimacy, the carrot and stick of cultural inercia.

Sorry to go one about one - but certainly that's the way it seems

Anyway Defcore have got some good photo's of the demonstration in Paris on 16 June that pulled up 100, 000 people - apparently the party was a revolt and the revolt was a party. Oh really!

http://www.defcore.net

Also on a Toulouse web site there is a summary for people that don't speak French

Summary for people who don't speak French

So they got some dialogue alright. Once the normally ad-hoc party groups had formed themselves into geographical collectives to accurately represent their views - they got to grips with the mostly distasteful business of talking to politicians and Parisian Bureaucrats and trying to cut the crap and find out what the new laws actually threatened to do.

You can be sure that strangeness ensued.

It's a culture clash - quoi- The meeting of the bureaucrats and the hardcore tekno rebels.

 

we'll get translations and all that if we can

if you can help out

email

mickfuzz <at> rocketmail.com