Lluny enllà el cel del sud ; Així els fem la guerra

In Far Away in the Southern Sky, Joseph Andras begins to walk around Paris chasing a ghost; that of Nguyên Ai Quoc, a young Vietnamese who arrived in the city in 1917, or in 1918, perhaps even in 1919, and whose name has been forgotten by those who remember the name he later took: Ho Chi Minh, independence leader and emblem of communism. Searching for the rebel who preceded the revolutionary, Andras rescues the man, through his failures and hesitations, and rejects the hero, the black-and-white figure; and, in the Paris of the yellow vests, the traces that he finds (in archives, in old buildings, on plaques in little-traveled streets) are mixed with the traces of other struggles. In This is how we make war on them (the second of the two titles included in this volume) the struggles are different, but in reality they are the same, although, like the three episodes of a triptych, they span several countries. and of an entire century: in London in 1903, the vivisection of a dog for experimental purposes sparked some of the first animal protests, which met with resistance from medical students but ended up leading to a pioneering trial; in 1985, in California, the Animal Liberation Front rescues Britches, a macaque that has been blinded to test the operation of a sonar; in 2014, in Charleville-Mézières, on the other hand, it is a cow that seems to rescue itself, jumping together with its calf from the truck that was taking them to the slaughterhouse to embark on a frantic escape through the streets of the city.