In France, as elsewhere, the railways have always been an easy target for criminals, saboteurs, terrorists and other miscreants. It’s not difficult to work out why. The tracks stretch thousands of miles, sprawling out across every type of landscape, unprotected for long stretches except for easily mountable fences. No police force or even the most sophisticated CCTV system can fully guard over this vast infrastructure.
So while today’s brazen assault on the French network, just hours before the Olympics officially open in Paris, is no doubt shocking, it is perhaps not altogether surprising. In fact, the history of the country’s railways is dotted with similar events – suggesting it is particularly vulnerable both because of the importance of trains to its transport infrastructure but also because of the French people’s penchant for social disruption.
Taking that into account, the perpetrators of this clearly well organised series of attacks, which saw signals along the tracks set on fire and cables severed, are, probably unknowingly, the direct descendants of the saboteurs who wreaked far greater havoc to the system in the run-up to D-Day.
The French rail workers, fondly and universally known as les cheminots, were under pressure to undermine the running of the train service as soon as the Germans invaded in 1940. Initially, there was some reluctance to do so because the system was needed to ensure French people could be fed. But gradually, as the German occupation became ever more repressive, increasing numbers of cheminots joined the fight through Resistance Fer, the organisation through which they coordinated their anti-Nazi activities. Their efforts were synchronised through announcements on the BBC to resistance leaders across France and supported with the RAF dropping explosives and other supplies by parachute .
As D-Day approached, a scheme to disrupt the whole French railway network, Plan Vert, was drawn up in order to ensure the railways could not be used by the Germans to bring reinforcements to the beaches and push the Allied forces back into the sea. Their efforts, which reached their height on the night before the Normandy Landings, were supported by the Allied air forces ‘Transportation Plan’, itself a misnomer as it was actually a scheme to destroy the rail network. And the twin efforts of the Resistance and the bombers paid off. By D-Day, the 6th of June 1944, the French rail network had been reduced to a series of disconnected lines, greatly hampering German efforts to bring up reinforcements with troops reduced to marching or riding bicycles to the front instead.
Most of these acts of sabotage required the involvement of the cheminots because undermining the system effectively relied on their technical knowledge of it. Today’s TGV attackers appeared to borrow from their playbook, targeting cabling for signalling and telecommunications, knowing this would cause maximum damage while not risking lives.
There may be political parallels too. The cheminots in WW2 were dominated by the Left though also encompassed many of de Gaulle’s moderate supporters. Some security sources are suggesting the ‘extreme gauche’ may be involved in today’s attacks too, perhaps alongside Russia, or Iran. But it is yet not clear who was behind the sabotage and, given the polarisation of French politics, extremists from either end of the political spectrum could be involved.
That is a wider point of concern. But because of their inherent vulnerability, the railways are fundamentally dependent on societal trust and cohesion. In a world where these unifying forces are weakening, we can expect more such incidents. However, as the French railway company SNCF has shown by quickly diverting services, railways can be surprisingly flexible and reasonably easy to patch back together. That has been amply demonstrated by the Ukrainians who have managed to maintain performance levels in terms of punctuality and cancellations that are better than ours. The bad guys may disrupt railways but they will never be able to stop them.