Action Directe was a French left-wing urban guerrilla or terror group which committed a series of assassinations and violent attacks in France in the 1980s.
Action Directe was set up in 1977 by two far left groups, GARI (Groupes d'Action Révolutionnaire Internationalistes, revolutionary internationalist action groups) and NAPAP (Noyaux Armés pour l'Autonomie Populaire, armed core groups for popular autonomy), as the "military-political co-ordination of the autonomous movement". In 1979 it was transformed into an urban guerrilla organisation and carried out violent attacks under the banner of anti-imperialism and proletarian defence. The group was banned by the French government in August 1982. In 1984 Action Directe allied itself with the German Red Army Faction.
Action Directe has carried out some fifty attacks, such as a machine gun assault on the employers federation headquarters on 1 May 1979 as well as attacks on French government buildings, property management agencies, French army buildings, companies in the military-industrial complex, and the state of Israel. They have carried out robberies or "proletarian expropriation" actions, and assassinations, killing Engineer General René Audran , the manager of French arms sales, in 1985 and Georges Besse , the former head of the French car maker Renault, in 1986.
On 21 February 1987, the main Action Directe members, Jean-Marc Rouillan, Nathalie Ménigon, Joëlle Aubron, and Georges Cipriani, were arrested and later convicted to life imprisonment. Régis Schleicher had already been arrested in 1984. Joëlle Aubron was released in 2004 for health reasons. There is an ongoing campaign from some sections of the French far-left that the Action Directe members still imprisoned should be paroled.
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Last updated: 07-24-2005 00:58:36
