“Let freedom shine!” This is the sentence that Roger Schaffter launches from the Town Hall of Delémont, and not his famous “It’s raining freedom!” On June 23, 1974, the sun crushed with its heat all the Jura people gathered to celebrate the plebiscite. From the first lines, Sara Schneider gives us a clue: we are in known times of a known world, but which is not exactly ours.
And the impression is confirmed a few pages later, after the reproduction of Coghuf’s famous poster “Save the Franches-Montagnes” and its gloomy landscape of specters and gallows. In this Jura, the parade ground was indeed created in the heart of the Taignon plateau. Here we are plunged into a strangely familiar dystopia, an anticipation that smells of pine, certainly far from the distressing nightmares of 1984 of Orwell or Brave new world of Huxley, but in this alternate reality, the Franches-Montagnes have become a large, teeming barracks.
In dirty sheets
Les Breuleux, June 2024. Mathis, our young hero, lives in one of these housing estates built to accommodate all this new population working for the army, “a neighborhood without soul”.
He will find souls. Riding his bike like a thoroughbred, this passionate young volunteer from the Musée rural des Genevez explores his land with his hair blowing in the wind and his glasses on his nose. But when he loses them in a peat bog mutilated by military diggers, his blurred vision reveals to him a ghostly presence, revolted by the outrages that are being inflicted on his land.
Against his parents but with the help of his classmate and an old anti-army activist, Mathis will set out to unravel the mystery that hovers around these specters.
