Ecology and Artifice: Shifting Perceptions of Nature and High Technology in Postwar France

摘要

The French do not enjoy a very positive image in the eyes of the world's green activists. During the early 1980s, when the German Green Party was clamorously making headlines in the Bundestag, the French environmentalists remained relatively weak and divided. While the Italians, British, Dutch, and Germans were taking to the streets, launching huge demonstrations against nuclear weapons, the French Left kept noticeably aloof. Indeed, to a foreign observer, the primary association between the Socialist government of Francois Mitterrand and the ecological movement occurred in 1985, when French secret agents blew up the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior— and the Socialists' response amounted to little more than a lame attempt at a cover-up.