Farmers now represent only 2.5% of the working population - they were still 8% in 1985. If the Agricultural Show remains, year after year, a compulsory stopping point for the President of the Republic, the ministers and politicians of all stripes, it is no longer primarily to reach an electoral “target” that has become very small. Nor is it out of nostalgia for a lost world. But on the contrary, because the peasant world, beyond the statistics, conceals a vast symbolic dimension in the eyes of all French people.
Behind the agricultural world stricto sensu, there is the rural world. If only one French in forty lives in the countryside, one in five lives in the countryside. These two populations do not have the same activity, but they have the same living environment. And these rural people know that without the peasants, their environment would be only a dead set.
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As for urban residents, the 80% of French people living in cities, many feel peasants by
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