The quest for another world

Hair blowing in the wind, Benoit Halgand, 25, hastily tied his bike that morning in front of the TotalEnergies tower at Defense, to join a “circle of silence” protesting against the company’s mega-oil project in Uganda. “We need such concrete actions,” defends the environmental activist. How was his militant fiber born? It is by integrating Polytechnique that this Angevin, from a practicing family of six children, confides that he “decided to move from an approach of individual eco-gestures to a desire to act collectively”.

In 2018, the former president of the school’s Christian community participated in the launch of the manifesto “For an ecological awakening” – since signed by 30,000 young people, wishing to get political and economic decision-makers moving on environmental issues – before to get involved in the eponymous collective. January 2022 marks a “great victory” for the group, with the termination of a research center project linked to Total on campus. But it is another sequence which contributes, six months later, to making Benoit’s face more familiar to the general public. On the day of his graduation, he indeed dares a virulent anti-system speech, denouncing the inaction of his course in the face of the climate emergency.

“I certainly had less duty of reserve than others, not counting on a career for the State or in a large company…”, he supports today. Trained for a year in theology at the Abbey of Hautecombe (Savoie), this explosive representative of Generation Z now plans to found a Christian community with a life centered on prayer, sobriety, anchoring in a territory and reception of a vulnerable public.

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