In 1967, the French sociologist Henri Mendras published La Fin des paysans. Translated as The Vanishing Peasant, the book’s argument was as iconoclastic as it was irrefutable. Marshaling more than a decade of meticulous fieldwork and data collection, Mendras concluded that France’s “traditional civilization,” exemplified by the peasant, was dying out. The economic benefits of the postwar Marshall Plan and Common Market, combined with the many scientific and technological advances ranging from mechanization to fertilization, had transformed not just the nature of agriculture, but the rural civilization on which it was founded. France was witnessing, Mendras declared, the “final battle of industrial society against the last patch of traditional society.”
In 1967, the French sociologist Henri Mendras published La Fin des paysans. Translated as The Vanishing Peasant, the book’s argument was as iconoclastic as it was irrefutable. Marshaling more than a decade of meticulous fieldwork and data collection, Mendras concluded that France’s “traditional civilization,” exemplified by the peasant, was dying out. The economic benefits of the postwar Marshall Plan and Common Market, combined with the many scientific and technological advances ranging from mechanization to fertilization, had transformed not just the nature of agriculture, but the rural civilization on which it was founded. France was witnessing, Mendras declared, the “final battle of industrial society against the last patch of traditional society.”
This winter of rural discontent in France reminds us that the final battle announced by Mendras is still being waged more than 50 years later. Last month, French farmers launched a series of protests across the country, ranging from blocking highways with their tractors to dumping rotting vegetables (or worse) in city squares or outside supermarkets. Toward the end of January, these protests threatened to climax with tractors, rolling toward Paris from several directions, threatening to form what some farmers called a “siege of Paris.”
After days of feverish speculation in the media about the coming stand-off between farming tractors and police armored cars—“Could Paris be starved?” asked more than one newspaper—the siege did not take place. President Emmanuel Macron’s recently formed government, led by the 30-something Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, accepted nearly all the principal demands of the unions leading the protests. Not only did the government, despite its previous commitment to budgetary restraint, promise an additional 400 million euros to boost the flailing income of cereal and livestock farmers, but it also shelved plans to phase out the tax break on diesel fuel, as well as its plans to ban the use of certain pesticides.
No less important, while Attal was meeting with farmers alongside their tractors, Macron took time from meeting with his peers in Brussels to vow that France would refuse to sign a free trade agreement between the EU and the South American trading bloc Mercosur, whose cheaper produce would undercut French farmers. Not surprisingly, Arnaud Rousseau, the head of the FNSEA, the largest farmers union, declared that he was satisfied by these gestures. The grievances of the members, he announced, “had been heard.”
Of course, farmers in several other European countries have also been heard by their governments on many of the same issues that spurred French farmers to threaten a siege of the nation’s capital. Whether expressed in Portuguese or Polish, Dutch or Deutsch, the reasons for this continent-wide mobilization often are the same. From the threat of cuts to agricultural subsidies from their governments to the threat of cheaper produce imported from non-EU countries like those represented by Mercosur, European farmers find that as their numbers and output dwindle so too does the prospect of a viable future.
Yet there is something exceptional to farmer protests in France—a quality that sets them apart, if only in cultural and historical terms, from the protests that have erupted elsewhere on the continent. To this point, Attal last week couched his government’s unconditional surrender in terms that were peculiar to France. Agriculture, he declared, was a fundamental element to the “French identity,” one that required a “French agricultural exception.” This new exception is “not a budgetary matter,” Attal insisted, but instead based on “pride and identity.” In fact, as the response to the protest suggests, the claim of “French exceptionalism” extends as far as the country’s extreme right and its response to the protests.
The place of la terre—the soil or earth—has long been central to the French identity. It is not an accident that the third and final volume of Pierre Nora’s landmark work of history Les Lieux de mémoire (“Sites of Memory”), which is devoted to traditions, begins with an entry on la terre. The author, geographer Armand Frémont, argues that the late arrival of industrialization in France has meant that the genealogical trees of French families “are rooted in soil of the countryside” more commonly than elsewhere in Europe.
So, too, for the very notion of “peasant.” Though Mendras concluded that the paysan had been replaced by the agriculteur and that France’s “thousand-year-old peasant civilization” was dying out, many French farmers never surrendered the word, much less the death sentence announced by Mendras. One prominent member of the (tellingly labeled) Confédération Paysanne, Christian Boisgontier, recalled that when he first read Le Fin des paysans as a young man, he gladly described himself as an agriculteur. But no longer. To identify as a peasant, he observes, is to identify with “a tradition that respects the soil, the grains, and the animals.”
However, it is also to identify with a tradition that, if not yet dead, is on life support. Agribusiness is one of France’s biggest businesses, accounting for nearly two-thirds of agricultural production. The approximately 1 million men and women indirectly or directly employed by these huge firms do not plow fields or raise cattle, nor do they identify as peasants, much less lead lives that resemble the fading images of sowers and harvesters of the 19th-century painter Jean-François Millet.
Rather, it is the 400,000 or so small farmers, representing about 1.5 percent of the nation’s workforce, who confront an existential crisis. They have been whipsawed between the compounding and, to their eyes, often punitive regulatory demands from Brussels and the government’s plans for a green transition. At the same time, they fear that the quality of their products is undermined by the intensifying land consolidations by the agribusiness sector and widening market control of large distribution chains. A recent poll reveals the French public sympathizes with the farmers on both counts, with nearly 40 percent blaming EU regulations and 32 percent the large supermarket chains like the aptly named Géant Casino and Hyper U.
Moreover, as the influential sociologist (and former student of Mendras) François Purseigle notes, the population of farmers has been shrinking at an unprecedented rate in France. From 500,000 farmers 10 years ago, there are fewer than 400,000 today. Even more worrying, Purseigle argues, is that another 200,000 farmers will have reached the age of retirement by 2030. Most of them will not be replaced. The consequences are vast: “The world of farming today has nothing at all in common with that of yesterday, and this world will be no less different come tomorrow. A revolution that defies description is unfolding.”
A woman waves a French flag as farmers take part in a nationwide day of protests in Agen, France, on Jan. 25. Christophe Archambault/AFP via Getty Images
While the relationship between the soil and those who work it may be revolutionary, the idea of the soil has also long proved fertile ground for French reactionaries. Since the late 19th century, individuals and ideologies on France’s right and far-right have staked claims to la terre as their lieu de mémoire. This claim extends from the nationalist (and antisemitic) novelist Maurice Barrès who believed “la terre et les morts” (the soil and the dead) was the foundation of the French identity, through the fascist (and antisemitic) Henri Dogères and his interwar agrarian movement, the Green Shirts, to the authoritarian Philippe Pétain, the head of the collaborationist (and antisemitic) Vichy regime, who declared that “la terre ne ment pas,” or “the earth tells no lies.” (A line coined, ironically, by the Paris-born and Jewish writer Emmanuel Berl.)
Enter stage right, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally. As rural unrest neared critical mass last month, the party founded half a century ago by the populist (and antisemitic) Jean-Marie Le Pen pulled on its collective rubber boots and descended on farms across the country. Jordan Bardella, who will head the party’s list for the upcoming European elections, seemed drawn to the farming life—as well as the cameras recording his rural rambles. In an open letter to the farmers, Bardella praised them as the representatives of a country which “wants to live in dignity on and from its soil and proudly pass on the fruits of their labor to their children.”
For Bardella and Le Pen, the rural protests are a gift in the lead-up to the elections. Their party portrays both the bureaucrats in Brussels and the politicians in Paris as the enemy. And “enemy” is not too strong a word. On Jan. 28, as the tractors approached Paris, the vice president of the National Rally deputies in the National Assembly, Sébastien Chenu, declared that “they” sought to “efface our farmers and rurality itself because a life rooted in the soil does not correspond to their model of society.”
Less than four months remain before French choose their country’s representatives in Brussels. Given that the European elections are most often the occasion for voters to express discontent, it is time for the French left to make the case that France’s future lays in respecting not just the soil, but the men and women who work it. As Armand Frémont would remind them, “the values of the soil in France are the oldest but also the freshest as long as there are still peasants to till it.”
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