Deep in the French countryside, pockets of anti-capitalists and environmentalists are preparing for the end of civilisation – or even humanity itself
Michel Rosell gathers up a mass of papers and divides them into two piles. On the left are bills: a single sheet. On the right is a sheaf of letters from friends and lovers. “If the pile of letters is growing faster than the pile of bills, you’re on the right track,” says Rosell. “If it’s the other way round, you’re on the wrong track. It’s not that hard, the revolution I’m proposing.”
We are sitting on a wooden bench at a wooden table beneath a ceiling made of braided ribbons of wood, in Rosell’s house in the Cévennes, a mountain range in the south of France. Rosell looks like someone who has been fighting a revolution for half a century: untamed white hair, bare chest and feet, grubby black tracksuit bottoms. A weatherbeaten Robinson Crusoe, still hale and eager to take on cannibals – or capitalists – at 73.
