Known as the Tarnac Nine, four men and five women aged 22 to 34 are being investigated over far-left terrorism following dawn raids by police in November that targeted several addresses, including a farm with a few goats, chickens and vegetables. Those arrested include a Swiss sitcom actor, a distinguished clarinettist, a student nurse and Benjamin Rosoux, an Edinburgh University graduate who runs the grocer’s shop and its adjoining bar-restaurant.

The alleged ringleader, Julien Coupat, 34, is still being held in prison despite a judge’s ruling that he be released. A former business and sociology student from an affluent Parisian suburb, Coupat moved to Tarnac in search of a non-consumerist lifestyle, saying he wanted to live frugally. The poor village of 350 people is home to a growing number of young people who have escaped the city for a simple life and sense of community. Together, the newcomers ran the shop, a mobile delivery service, the restaurant, a cinema club and an informal library.

But the bourgeoisie proper –the co-coordinating, managerial classes- are always cast as villains. In “To Live With Fear” Mary Ingalls is hurt by horse and needs surgery. Though the doctor is a good fellow who wants to do the right thing, the man in charge of the hospital finances, refuses to extend Charles credit. That is, until he is threatened with direct action.

To earn the money to pay him, Charles works in a dangerous and desperate job, dynamiting a hole through a tunnel, and takes irresponsible risks at the behest of his foreman, who is working at the behest of a railway executive. This is an example of the power relationships in hierarchy. The lowest manager, Charles, runs risks because he is desperate, the one above him does so from fear of being fired and the man above him, does so from sheer greed. The men at the bottom are killed by this sick dynamic.

Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side … The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them

– Orwell, Notes on Nationalism