Anger is brewing in the agricultural world.
In Europe and France where farmers have been carrying out blocking actions for almost a week.
Trade union organizations are demanding, among other things, better remuneration and a simplification of environmental standards.
“
The anger that is being expressed is not new (…) and what is happening today is the overflow of Franco-French but also European measures that are expected
,” said expressed Monday the president of the FNSEA on France Inter.
Anger, in fact, is old.
It is a continuation of the peasant movements that appeared in their modern form at the beginning of the 20th century after the jacqueries under the Ancien Régime.
They have since each participated in their own way in the development of a “
militant repertoire
” detailed by Édouard Lynch, professor of contemporary history at the University of Lyon II, in his book
Peasant Insurrections
published in 2019 by Vendémiaire.
1907, the southern wine crisis
“
There was a shift that took place at the beginning of the 20th century after a long period of relative calm
,” explains the historian to Le
Figaro
.
The agricultural protest as we know it comes straight from the year 1907 when the winegrowers of Languedoc and Roussillon revolted against the massive importation of foreign wines and fraud.
The mobilization is unprecedented in its scale and its structured organization which strives to bring together owners and agricultural workers.
Each action has an incredible media impact.
Le Figaro
, for example, devotes an article almost every day to the “
wine crisis
”.
The crisis in the Midi wine region excited the press in 1907. Marcelin Albert made the front page of the Petit Journal here.
Charmet Archives / Bridgeman Images
Every Sunday, farmers occupy the squares of towns and villages.
On June 9, a massive demonstration brought together between 600,000 and 800,000 people in Montpellier.
The leader is the café-winemaker Marcelin Albert from the village of Argeliers in Aude.
His popularity was so “
prodigious ”, noted
Le Figaro
at the time,
that his face appeared on postcards and cockades.
We go so far as to nickname him “
The Redeemer
”.
He is supported by the socialist mayor of Narbonne, Ernest Ferroul.
The latter threatens a secession of the South.
To put an end to the unrest, the Clemenceau government sent the troops.
Seven civilians were killed despite the mutiny of soldiers of the 17th Infantry Regiment who refused to shoot.
The capture of the prefecture of Chartres in 1933
It is indeed the memory of the bloody repression of 1907 which would have paralyzed the prefect of Eure-et Loir when the prefecture of Chartres was invaded in 1933 by angry peasants, recalls in an article the Archaeological Society of Eure-et - Dormouse.
They demand that the senior official call the Minister of the Interior to relay their demands.
This is the first time that such a symbol has fallen into the hands of demonstrators even if, here again, underlines Édouard Lynch, “
the violence is under control
”.
The revolt is led by the Agrarian Party, close to the anti-republican leagues while the agricultural crisis is sparking mobilizations almost everywhere in France.
They were eclipsed by the "Green Shirts", a fascist-inspired movement launched by a former journalist, Henri d'Halluin known as Dorgères, and supported by the National Union of Agricultural Unions (UNSA), one of the main organizations defending peasant world at the time.
It faded with the end of the agricultural crisis but the post-war period saw yet another revitalization of peasant movements, this time under the leadership of the National Federation of Farmers' Unions (FNSEA) founded in 1946.
Tragic dam in Montredon in 1976
In the 1950s and 1960s, farmers' demonstrations were frequent at a time of transformation of the agricultural model and major orientation laws.
It was the time of roadblocks, sabotage of electricity poles and destruction of foodstuffs as during the “Artichoke War” between 1957 and 1967 or the potato crisis in Morlaix in 1961. After the period of tension caused by the suppression of the indexation of agricultural prices, a “
modus vivendi
” is however established between the agricultural unions and Gaullism, underlines Édouard Lynch.
Protest is then an instrument that allows unions to arrive in force at the negotiating table.
On March 6, 1976, the winegrower Emile Pouytes, who died during violent clashes in Montredon two days earlier between demonstrators and the police, was buried.
JEAN-CLAUDE DELMAS / AFP
But the following years saw the rise of systemic violence.
It is encouraged by the tolerance of the authorities and the absence of sanctions.
State property is targeted, “
not people
”, the historian insists.
Until that day in 1976 when the confrontation with the police ended in bloodshed in Montredon near Narbonne.
As in 1907, the region's winegrowers were strangled by foreign competition and the decline in wine consumption.
They demand strong measures from the government of Jacques Chirac.
On the roadblock erected to block the national road and the railway line, hunting rifles appear.
Shots are exchanged.
Two men, a winegrower and a CRS, are killed.
The Champs-Elysées Harvest in 1990
“
Never again
,” the farmers want to believe.
“
Violence does not disappear from the activist repertoire
,” emphasizes Édouard Lynch,
“but it is more framed
.”
Edith Cresson, kidnapped and targeted by eggs in 1982, paid the price.
Just like Dominique Voynet whose office at the ministry was ransacked in 1999. More recently, the presidents of the Republic have not escaped attacks.
Thus François Hollande was particularly mishandled in 2016 at the Salon de l'Agriculture.
A year earlier, however, the tractors converged on Paris and reached the Place de la Nation in a good-natured atmosphere after muscular actions during a “night of distress” during the summer.
Because union leaders have become aware of the negative effect of excess violence and are seeking to invent another, more positive model.
Like this June 23, 1990 when the National Center for Young Farmers (CNJA), today Young Farmers (JA), transformed the Champs-Élysées into an immense wheat field.
An event which recalls the joyful and pacifist inventiveness of the protesters on the Larzac plateau in the 1970s. Like these sheep painted with the slogan “We will save Larzac” grazing on the lawns of the Champ-de-Mars in Paris or this swarm of bees dropped in the middle of an officers' ball at La Cavalerie.
In 1999, it was the turn of José Bové of the Peasant Confederation to pull off an unprecedented stunt by dismantling the McDonald's in Millau.
He spent three months in prison there but gained unexpected visibility.
Left-wing organizations favor a “
class reading
” of the farmers’ struggle, notes Édouard Lynch.
For them, the fight against the State must not make us forget the tensions which are increasing "
within the peasantry
": the poor against the rich who are the large owners or operators often linked to the interests of industrialists.
Today, however, beyond the demands linked to the price of agricultural products, it is the environmental issue which crystallizes the oppositions.