Le Grand Pic is the kind of picture-postcard hamlet that seems untouched by time. Its two dozen stone houses have no shop, church or bus service, and the settlement is so remote that residents of the nearest village can struggle to explain exactly how to reach it.
When Adrian Maxwell, a retired City of London police detective and criminal barrister, discovered the tranquil corner of Limousin 25 years ago, he believed he had put the darker side of life firmly behind him.
But early on Tuesday, the 77-year-old British expat and an elderly neighbour found themselves as the unlikely witnesses to a dramatic operation that law-abiding French citizens had been awaiting since the previous weekend.
As the pair pushed a broken-down Renault along the road, they watched elite anti-terror officers pull on black balaclavas and bulletproof vests before forcing their way into a cottage. Their target was allegedly the ringleader of an ultra-Leftist group accused of setting fire to Limoges’s grand neo-Renaissance town hall.
The alleged anti-state attack, reportedly planned weeks beforehand, became the most striking and internationally reported episode of a notorious day of unrest, as disorder spread through towns and cities from the Channel coast to the Mediterranean.
Government officials fear the violence could return with even greater force across France today—and continue on Saturdays in the weeks ahead.
Limoges town hall in Haute-Vienne, in France’s Nouvelle-Aquitaine region, was engulfed by flames on October 17
Adrian Maxwell, a former City of London police detective and criminal barrister, now lives in Le Grand Pic, Limousin, south-central France
Elite anti-terror officers arrested the alleged leader of the ultra-Leftist group accused of burning Limoges town hall
The armed officers first searched the home shared by 34-year-old Hodei Ciarra Docampo and his parents, but he was not inside. They eventually found the alleged far-Left activist asleep in a garden hut. Docampo, who was convicted last year of striking a police officer during a demonstration, was taken away.
‘I’m a former London copper, so I knew straight away what was happening,’ Mr Maxwell told me. ‘It was not until later that afternoon, when a friend called after reading about the raid in the evening paper, that I discovered who the SWAT team had come for.’
He was astonished. Le Grand Pic was once a farming settlement but has since become a haven for New Age residents, including a group of English off-gridders living in forest yurts. As Mr Maxwell put it, it is ‘hardly the sort of place you’d expect to find an anarchist’s cell’.
His neighbour, an 82-year-old woman from Oxfordshire who has lived in the hamlet for 22 years and requested anonymity, shared his disbelief.
‘The most exciting event here is usually a herd of Limousin cows escaping their field and wandering into the village,’ she said. ‘Still, I suppose that is precisely why terrorists might select somewhere like this as a hideout.’
French intelligence officials, academics and politicians who have followed the unrest say her theory may have merit. If France is indeed approaching another revolutionary moment—this time fuelled by ‘organised ultra-Left groups whose aim is to bring down the Republic’, as President Emmanuel Macron warned this week—the planning may not be centred in major cities such as Paris, Marseille or, more recently, Limoges.
Instead, investigators believe the movement may be rooted in apparently peaceful rural enclaves such as Le Grand Pic, places where French citizens and Britons alike have sought a quieter existence. Intelligence services have also pointed to a loose network of ‘neo-ruralist’ Marxists living on the Plateau de Millevaches, a remote wilderness around an hour’s drive east of Limoges.
Hodei Ciarra Docampo, the far-Left activist suspected of involvement in the Limoges town hall fire
A burned-out vehicle after clashes in Paris during nationwide protests over the cost of living and rising fuel prices
David Lisnard, the Cannes mayor and Right-of-centre contender in next spring’s French presidential election, was born in Limoges. This week, he alleged that the sparsely populated region contains secret training camps where ultra-Left activists are taught the tactics of urban warfare.
Whether that claim can be substantiated, the plateau’s long-standing links to the extreme Left are widely recognised.
And there is compelling evidence that the anarchists who skulk in its communes are orchestrating the most virulent uprisings in France since the Left Bank riots of the Sixties. At the heart of the 1,350 square-mile plateau sits Gentioux-Pigerolles, another scenic village of just 398 people that has suddenly assumed a central part in the French political landscape.
While other statesmen pay their respects on Armistice Day at the Tomb of The Unknown Soldier, beneath the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, Jean-Luc Melenchon, leader of the far-Left party France Unbowed, has declared his intention to visit a pacifist war memorial in Gentioux, just as he did on November 11, 2024.
When Macron and his prime minister Sebastien Lecornu this week accused the radical Left of ‘pursuing an agenda aimed at destabilising our institutions’, no one was in any doubt that they were pointing a finger at Melenchon, who will stand in next spring’s presidential elections. Yet with his every move under the microscope, the veteran firebrand, who makes Jeremy Corbyn sound like the voice of moderation, has chosen to venture to a place synonymous with anarchistic crime.
The plateau was the lair of Julien Coupat, who was accused, in a landmark trial in 2008, of leading nine members of his ultra-Left cell to sabotage a high-speed rail line. After a ten-year legal battle, he was acquitted on appeal.
Further attacks by separate ultra-Left groups on the plateau were aimed at a logging company and a cross-country motorbike race. Then, a few years ago, when saboteurs destroyed eight vans belonging to France’s state-owned electricity grid company and a huge aerial supplying TV and mobile phone signals to millions, the plateau was in the headlines again. Astonishingly, among those arrested was the 57-year-old headmistress of Gentioux-Pigerolles’s school.
Elsewhere, parents might have been appalled that their children were being taught by an eco-arsonist, yet they supported her with protests outside the court and daubed anti-police slogans on the school’s walls.
Given the events of recent days, however, an ageing Spaniard who stood trial alongside the headmistress – Fernando Ciarra Ramirez – has assumed greater significance than the anarchic school head. For he is the father of the Hodei Ciarra Docampo.
France is teetering on the edge of another revolution – this time driven by ‘organised ultra-Left groups whose aim is to bring down the Republic’ (Pictured: Limoges town hall in the aftermath of the flames)
Now aged 70, Ramirez is reportedly a veteran Basque separatist who decamped to France with his wife at the height of the ETA terrorists’ violent struggle for independence. Let off with a three-year suspended sentence for destroying the cars and antennae, he made a lofty speech outside court, calling ‘all people to civil resistance and disobedience’.
Like father like son? Certainly, that was the sentiment among some outraged folks this week. ‘If it were left to me, I’d have shot him [the alleged town hall arsonist] already,’ snarled a baseball-hatted workman, after a heavy lunch in the only restaurant within miles of Le Grand Pic. However, when his parents spoke exclusively to me at their cottage in Le Grand Pic this week, they presented themselves as a polite old couple, bewildered by their son’s arrest.
‘He is innocent, this is a fit-up –he is a calm, gentle person,’ his mother protested. ‘The police raid was terrifying. There were 20 of them, and they smashed down the door’.
Her husband interjected: ‘They don’t want responsible justice. This is all about repression – they just need a scapegoat. Why would my son do this? He is a pacifist.’
Before I could ask the old anti-capitalist how this squared with his own acts of sabotage, he ended the conversation.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE: NYC Woman Stabs 3 Before Police Shoot Her During Home Invasion: Sources
At dawn on Thursday, a second man was arrested for helping to start the fire. This time the anti-terror police swoop came 75 miles away . . . and where else but Gentioux-Pigerolles?
The new suspect is said locally to be a 66-year-old pillar of the community, elected to serve on the municipal council’s forestry protection committee, which could support claims that the ultra-Left are infiltrating local authorities. According to local sources, after his arrest the officers searched a disused property and a yurt said to be owned by Ciarra Docampo.
Last night, both men were being held in custody under hastily revised laws extending the time people accused of riot-related crimes can be detained without charge. The older suspect, whose name has not been released, is accused of damaging the town hall and endangering life – and Docampo is being investigated for arson and attempting to murder police officers.
For as Limoges’ mayor Guillaume Guerin revealed, the building wasn’t unoccupied when the mob stormed it. Cowering inside were some 20 people: elected officials and police officers.
A fire burned and destroyed the city hall after a group of individuals forced entry into the building during ongoing protest action against the ‘high cost of living
This didn’t concern the ringleaders, who had brought with them all the objects they would need to burn down an edifice that stood, in their minds, as a totem of the detested French establishment, including fuel and a battering ram.
‘They knew exactly what they were doing,’ said the mayor, who stood watching the blaze – with tears streaming down his cheeks. ‘They were shouting ‘You’re going to burn! We’re going to kill you!’
‘For 25 years I haven’t cried, but that evening I wept tears of rage and sadness,’ added M. Guerin, who says he is now receiving death threats on social media. ‘I don’t just think that this was all planned in advance – I know it.’
Among the mob, he tells me, about 1,000 people were from the Black Bloc (extreme-Left thugs who disguise themselves in black hoods and clothing). But there were also hundreds of ‘brainless idiots’ who clapped and cheered as one of France’s most iconic buildings was destroyed.
There were similar scenes across France, for the rioters clearly had a plan to target any building of symbolic significance to the state, from banks and public offices to the Republican Guard barracks in central Paris.
Yet according to leading French academics, October 17, will be remembered as a day that changed the nation for another, more worrying reason. The French government, they say, now faces the wrath of a powerful new enemy.
For the first time, militants of the far-Left succeeded in joining forces with marginalised young people from the poorest neighbourhoods, students angered by school conditions, and ordinarily law-abiding people angered by the cost of living and substandard services.
As the first batch of arrested rioters appeared in courts this week we saw a snapshot of their backgrounds.
Manuel, a chef, had travelled to Paris on his 21st birthday with ingredients for a homemade Molotov cocktail in his rucksack. He failed to convince judges that they were for ‘lighting a barbecue’.
Students Mathilde, 19, and her boyfriend Francois, were caught near the Bastille – she with a gas mask, he with knuckledusters. They had exchanged phone messages about their intention to ‘beat up’ the police.
Hector, also 21, a talented trumpet player who attends an elite music college, was described by his lawyer as a ‘staunch pacifist’.
Claiming to have been carrying sulphur and ammonia in the thick of the Paris rioting to ‘make stink bombs’, and that he had worn gloves to protect his trumpeting fingers, he was among the few defendants to be acquitted.
Many were shocked to be sent directly to jail, as judges followed the justice minister’s demand for harsh exemplary sentences.
These everyday missile-throwers and opportunist thieves made up 80 per cent of the 2,400 arrested rioters, according to the authorities. The others were hardened anarchists, some of whom had travelled from other countries, including Britain.
Adam, from Switzerland, told a court in Lyon he had gone to stand up for his ‘political convictions’, though quite how they justified looting a supermarket and striking the officer who arrested him, he was at a loss to explain.
Making clever use of the internet, however, the majority of last Saturday’s mayhem-makers remain free as the riot’s architects outmanoeuvred the inept police.
They used apps to monitor the deployment of riot squad officers, then warn protesters where to avoid. False messages were posted to deceive the police; and genuine ones to ramp-up the violence.
All this prompted Contre-Attaque, a militant Left website, to boast: ‘This is unprecedented in France’s contemporary history: for the time the police ended the day without having the situation under control.’
The site also published a graphic photo showing gaping wounds to the leg of an elderly female British tourist purportedly hit by a police grenade as she took shelter.
However, its editorial said, although the police had ‘lost’ and ‘the revolution had been within reach’ on Saturday, it had not been achieved because ‘we lack a vision [and] we need the regime to fall’.
Today, these morally bankrupt fanatics are expected to resume their nihilistic mission.
By making a bonfire of a 143-year-old civic hall designed by one of France’s greatest architects, they have demonstrated their ruthlessness.
Known as the ‘arts of fire capital’ because it produces beautiful porcelain, enamelwork and stained glass, Limoges’ age-old soubriquet now carries a bitter irony.
Yet the aim of the French extreme Left is not just to destroy the nation’s great monuments. They are plotting to sabotage the entire democratic system.
Of course, their attack on the values that proud Frenchmen and women hold dear – liberty, equality, fraternity – is playing directly into the hands of hard-Right leader Marine Le Pen, already streets ahead of Melenchon in the presidential polls.
Upright French citizens will be praying the Black Bloc’s shadowy leaders are rooted out before a dangerously fractured and febrile country succumbs to their dystopian ideology.
Additional reporting: Rory Mulholland
