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Summary

A French-language step-by-step manual on organising nonviolent resistance and non-cooperation — roles, autonomy, and spotting authoritarian escalation — for citizen-defence contexts.

Body

Manuel citoyen pour une défense civile non-violente is a French-language manual published in the lineage of European citizen-nonviolence networks and the broader désobéissance civile tradition [source: manuel-citoyen-defense-civile-nonviolente]. The manual frames nonviolent resistance as a citizen discipline — the practical skills and operational patterns a community needs in order to defend itself against authoritarian pressure without resorting to violence [source: manuel-citoyen-defense-civile-nonviolente].

Coverage: roles — the operational roles in a nonviolent defence group (organiser, communicator, observer, medic, legal liaison); autonomy — how to keep the group’s communication channels under its own control (no dependence on state-aligned infrastructure); spotting authoritarian escalation — a checklist of how an authoritarian regime typically moves from soft pressure (administrative harassment, surveillance) to hard pressure (mass arrests, violence, infiltration), and what counter-measures a nonviolent group can take at each stage; non-cooperation — the operational forms of non-cooperation (work-to-rule, refusal to comply with unjust orders, withdrawal of cooperation, refusal to participate in ceremonies of legitimation); protection — the basics of personal and group security under pressure [source: manuel-citoyen-defense-civile-nonviolente].

The manual is free PDF; license is not explicit (treat as link-only). It is distinct from the desobeir.net operational training — desobeir.net is about action prep, this manual is about civil defence under sustained pressure [source: manuel-citoyen-defense-civile-nonviolente].

Use it for

Designing a non-cooperation campaign; training a citizen-defence group; reading the escalation checklist when planning a sustained campaign.

Open Questions

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