When Journalism Meets Civil Disobedience

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/19/insider/when-journalism-meets-civil-disobedience.html

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Times Insider delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how news, features and opinion come together at The New York Times. In this article, Adam Nossiter, a Times correspondent in Paris, grapples with one of the unintended consequences of investigative journalism.

To find Cédric Herrou, the French olive grower who smuggles African migrants, you have to climb a steep rocky slope in the foothills of the Alps outside Nice, circumnavigate Mr. Herrou’s chickens, geese and ducks, and push through mud, brambles and thorns. Mr. Herrou will then receive you, courteously, on a bench outside the rudimentary farmer’s shack he has fixed up for himself and whatever migrants he happens to be sheltering at the time in his minuscule hillside compound.

Mr. Herrou — a slight, soft-spoken, pony-tailed 37-year-old — will earnestly explain that he is not helping migrants enter France illegally for ideological reasons. It’s just that he can’t bear to see people suffering. He takes minimal precautions to hide what he is doing high up in the Vallée de la Roya, because he doesn’t think it is wrong. In fact, he thinks it is the French government that is in the wrong.

His habitat — remote, wild, rocky, traversed by a single narrow, winding mountain road — is an appropriate setting for his semi-clandestine project. High above, as you drive that road to get to Mr. Herrou’s farm, are perched ancient villages improbably clinging to the cliffs.

Mr. Herrou’s stance has turned him into something of a folk hero in France. And that’s in spite of the strong reservations many, if not most, in France have about opening up the country’s borders to African migrants. It has to do as much with a kind of innate French respect for the person who resists authority and thumbs his nose at the government as it does with what Mr. Herrou has actually accomplished.

It has also landed him in court, where he faces an eight-month suspended sentence, partly because of a profile I wrote about him in The Times in October, as he ruefully acknowledges. Even the prosecutor at his trial this month acknowledged the role of the Times piece — which he called a bel article in court — in bringing the authorities’ attention to what Mr. Herrou does.

I had gotten a decent man in trouble while pursuing a good story: It has happened before in my three-decade journalism career, and I felt badly about it. But Mr. Herrou knew the risk he had taken in opening up to me. We both knew it. He could have refused to speak with me. But he feels he has nothing to hide or be ashamed of. Outside the courthouse in Nice, he jokingly absolved me.

Later he sent me a text message: “Thank you for your article. It allowed us to democratize our action.” By which I think he meant that the piece had brought him many supporters, and helpers.

In court, Mr. Herrou stood up to justify what he had done, and said simply at the end, “I am a Frenchman.” He was eloquent in his own defense; I felt that he had effectively turned the tables on the magistrate questioning him. Hundreds of people had gathered outside, in the lovely paved square in Nice’s picturesque Old City, to cheer Mr. Herrou on.

I found Mr. Herrou through an aging lawyer I know in Paris, a remarkable woman and an irrepressible spirit with a deep distrust of authority: Françoise Cotta. From her darkened offices near the Louvre, Ms. Cotta is one of the few in the French bar to risk the defense of those accused of terrorism. She is a native of Nice, she has a house near Mr. Herrou in the Vallée de la Roya and she too takes part in the informal migrant-sheltering network of which Mr. Herrou is the kingpin.

If you want to see Mr. Herrou accomplish the act that has gotten him into so much trouble with authorities — ferry the migrants undercover to an inconspicuous French train station for onward transit — you have to get up early in the morning. You have to climb the hill and wait for the migrants staying with Mr. Herrou to gather their few belongings.

Then you follow them down the hill and see them pile into Mr. Herrou’s van. I watched them, bleary-eyed in the cold, and was moved by their remarkable good humor. I thought, this is just one more step for them, a small move forward in a life-menacing journey over desert, sea and finally land. They were not frightened or anxious, and why should they be? They had been through much worse.

You then follow the van down the winding mountain road, and try to keep up with it as it swings crazily through the Nice-region traffic, avoiding police vehicles, until Mr. Herrou finally finds a railway station that will take his migrants. His dodging and weaving skills proved no match for mine; eventually I lost track of them on the highway.

In spite of the sanctions against him, Mr. Herrou is unrepentant. “They’re telling people, if you see a black person lying on the side of the road, you have to ask him for his papers before helping him,” he said outside Nice’s Palais de Justice earlier this month. “That’s the problem.”