Action directe (armed group)

Action directe (AD) was a French revolutionary group which committed a series of assassinations and violent attacks in France between 1979 and 1987. Members of Action directe considered themselves libertarian communist who had formed an "urban guerrilla organization". The French government banned the group.

Founding

Action directe was set up in 1977 by two other 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 organization" and carried out violent attacks under the banner of "anti-imperialism" and "proletarian defence". The group was banned by the French government in 1984. In August 1985, Action directe allied itself with the German Red Army Faction.

Attacks

Action directe carried out some 50 attacks, including a machine gun assault on the employers' union 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 carried out robberies or "proletarian expropriation" actions, and assassinations, killing Engineer General René Audran, the manager of French arms sales, in 1985. They were also accused of Georges Besse's 1986 killing, a murder allegedly justified because he was the then head of the French automaker Renault. However, they denied it during their trial. Besse was also former president of Eurodif nuclear company, in which Iran had a 10% share. They also claimed joint responsibility for the 1985 bomb attack carried out by the Red Army Faction at Rhein-Main Air Base in Frankfurt, which killed two people.

Action Directe

Action Directe is French for direct action. It may refer to:

See also:

Action

Action may refer to:

Businesses and organizations

Technology and mathematics

Institut national de l'audiovisuel

The Institut national de l'audiovisuel (or INA, French for National Audiovisual Institute) is a repository of all French radio and television audiovisual archives. Additionally it provides free access to archives of countries such as Afghanistan and Cambodia. It has its headquarters in Bry-sur-Marne.

Since 2006, it has allowed free online consultation on a website called ina.fr with a search tool indexing 100,000 archives of historical programs, for a total of 20,000 hours.

Recordings

In the 1980s, it issued a large number of recordings on the label France's Concert Records. In the 1990s it launched its own label INA mémoire as the historical recording label of the Institut national de l'audiovisuel, and of the archives of Radio France.

History

The Institut national de l'audiovisuel was founded in 1975 by a law of 1974 with the purpose of conserving archives of audiovisual materials, research relating to them and professional training. In 1992, legal deposit was extended to television and radio, and the institute was to be the depository. This led to the establishment of the Inathèque in 1995, with the aim of conserving and making its holdings available to researchers and students. It was opened to the public in October 1998, at the Bibliothèque François-Mitterrand. In 2002, legal deposit was extended to cable and satellite television and in 2005 to terrestrial digital television. From September 2006, the institute has been responsible for archiving 17 radio and 45 television services amounting to 300,000 hours per year.