Authority there was, in the form of powerful police, inhibited public expression, and special courts. But in the sense of stable political structures, Vichy was worse than the “old regime.” Awaiting the peace, forced to improvise, based on a fatal geopolitical miscalculation, Vichy became, in that vivid French expression, a basket of crabs.
Return to the Soil
The idiocy of rural life
…
—
Karl Marx
He takes a handful of that rich soil, full of air, which bears grain. It is good soil. He feels the goodness between his fingers.
—
Jean Giono
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I
T WAS AN ARTICLE OF FAITH AMONG
F
RENCH SOCIAL
conservatives that self-supporting peasants made countries strong
while city populations made them insecure. Fecund, practical, rooted in a traditional social hierarchy, the peasant family was the antidote to the decadent, abstract, rootless culture of city masses. Peasant battalions had snuffed out every revolution since June 1848. Peasant tenacity had, it was argued, won at Verdun. In the early 1930’s when France seemed less subject to depression than Germany, Britain, and the United States, social conservatives like Lucien Romier gloried in the agrarian self-sufficiency that spared France the frantic swings of credit-based consumer economies.
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Family agriculture, wrote Romier at about the same time, “assures better than anything else the duration of nations and societies.”
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The vanishing peasant had been a subject for concern since the French census of 1891 revealed the steady decline of the rural population. Concern turned to alarm as Franco-German tensions called attention to the relative decline of Frenchmen as compared to Germans, and when the First World War scythed out the best of a whole generation. In the 1890’s Maurice Barrès had already discovered that cities uproot young people while attachment to “la terre et les morts” solidified their character. After World War I, the novels and plays of Jean Giono praised primitive rural life as ennobling rather than stultifying. What Karl Marx, Honoré de Balzac, and Emile Zola had agreed was the “idiocy of rural life” now came to seem the fragile and precious fountainhead of a dwindling national vigor.
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Some of this sentimental rural nostalgia spent itself between the wars in a folkloric revival. Folklorists such as Joseph de Pesquidoux set out to revive local songs and dances, as Cecil Sharp had recently done in England. The youth hostel movement spread to France in 1929, at about the same time as several variants of the boy scout movement. Emotionally and symbolically, some of this rural nostalgia set itself against the Third Republic’s urban style. “With him [Doriot],” wrote Pierre Drieu
La Rochelle, “the France of camping-out will vanquish the France of the apéritif and party congresses.”
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Some of this energy went beyond the folkloric to form a political force—peasantism. Insofar as agricultural interests had been organized before the First World War, it was a “syndicalisme des ducs,”
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associations of large landowners, such as the aristocratic Société des Agriculteurs de France, headed by two generations of Marquis de Voguë, and the Union Centrale des Syndicats des Agriculteurs de France, closer to the republican Ministry of Agriculture. Between the wars, those who cultivated their lands themselves began to assume organized political weight for the first time. In particular, in 1934 the Union Nationale des Syndicats Agricoles (UNSA) came under the energetic leadership of Jacques Le Roy-Ladurie, son of a cavalry officer who had resigned at the time of the use of the French Army to carry out the separation of church and state in 1905 and who had turned to direct exploitation of a family property in Normandy. The UNSA became the major agricultural pressure group of the 1930’s. No less large proprietors than their predecessors of the SAF, this new generation had a different tone. Often expertly trained in agronomy, they cultivated their own properties and took pride in the term
peasant
, solid landowners though they were.
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Peasantism also moved in the 1930’s from traditional pressure-group activities to direct political action. The Parti Agraire et Paysan Français, founded in 1928, staged some major demonstrations in the early 1930’s and managed to elect one deputy from the Vosges in 1932 and eight in 1936, mostly from the Massif Central. Henri Dorgères’ Défense Paysanne mobilized widespread rural resentments in a form of direct political action
much more clearly derived from fascist models: a private militia clad in green shirts, mottos such as “believe, obey, serve,” and demonstrations promising to clean out the Parisian nest of bureaucrats. Dorgères claimed 400,000 members in 1939.
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The fundamental stimulus for the new peasant activism of the 1930’s was, of course, the depression. French farmers were no more immune than any other farmers to the world decline in agricultural prices of the 1920’s, the first warning signal for the downtown to follow. But having prospered and paid off mortgages during and after World War I, their resentment had the sharper edge of those who had known better times. Their activism in the 1930’s, and much of its political language (such as the repeated demand that real cultivators replace Third Republic politicos at the Ministry of Agriculture) simply expressed agricultural depression in political terms, with a strong flavoring of typical 1930’s antiparliamentarism.
The precise remedies proposed by agricultural spokesmen in the 1930’s link them to a protectionist and cartelizing tradition with roots in the first great modern agricultural crisis of the 1870’s–1890’s. Like industrialists, French producers in the most heavily capitalized, market-oriented sectors of agriculture found ways to organize their markets against competition. Most striking was the case of the growers of sugar beets. The child of wartime application of chemistry to the search for a substitute for cane sugar during the Napoleonic Wars, sugar beet cultivation struggled after 1815, when trade with the cane-sugar producing Caribbean colonies was restored. During the depression, sugar beets won a government subsidy in 1884, however, and as production multiplied twentifold between the 1840’s and 1900, a scheme was worked out whereby the French government bought excess beet sugar for distillation into alcohol. This card-house of artificial prosperity was watched over by a special lobby founded just after World War I, the Confédération Générale des Planteurs de Betterave, headed vigorously by a professional lobbyist, Jean
Achard.
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Anyone who has driven through the mournful plains of northern France can see the monuments to his success stretching as far as the eye can reach. But sugar beets are only one spectacular case. The winegrowers, having learned to organize to combat the American parasite
phylloxera
in the 1880’s organized to control the market when cheap Algerian wines began to force prices down after 1906.
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Some types of agriculture lent themselves much more effectively to market organization than others. They also suffered more from price fluctuation. One thinks of heavily capitalized monoculture, cash crops such as wine and sugar beets. Others, like milk, meat, and wheat, could be organized only by bringing very large numbers of varied units into a control system. At the other extreme, family farms and such products as fruits and vegetables could hardly adapt to cartels and self-regulated markets at all.
One finds differing emphasis in the peasantist movements between the wars, therefore. An older generation tried to shore up the declining family farm, with the enthusiastic support of social traditionalists. Pierre Caziot, for example, an agricultural economist with a long career in the land bank (Credit Foncier) and the Agriculture Ministry who claimed that his 30-hectare family farm in the Berri went back five or six centuries, began in 1920 to promote a government program for the “internal colonization” of rural France, to stem the peasant exodus by promoting new family farms. His book,
Solution du problème agraire: la terre à la famille paysanne
(1919), sought to “reconstitute the French agricultural population.” In other words, his main aim was neither higher productivity nor organization of the market against overproductivity, but restoring a labor-intensive polyculture for reasons of social stability, at whatever cost
to efficiency. His 1920 bill died in parliament more through inertia than opposition, but the idea persisted in interwar peasantism.
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On the other hand, the more highly capitalized, market-oriented proprietors turned to corporatism. The piecemeal cartels set up by winegrowers, sugar-beet growers, and wheat growers in the early twentieth century became models for a whole system of public organization, in which the growers themselves would control production and halt the ravages of free competition in a glutted world market. This was the approach of Jacques Le Roy-Ladurie’s UNSA. In part, they demanded the protection of French agriculture from foreigners within and without, as Le Roy-Ladurie asked in Colonel de la Rocque’s newspaper
Le Flambeau
as early as 1933.
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By the later 1930’s, however, simple protectionism, by tariffs or quotas upon immigration or imports, no longer filled the bill. At the Congrès Syndical Paysan of 1937, Jacques Le Roy-Ladurie proposed a fully corporatist system in which the existing agricultural organizations (such as his own UNSA) would autonomously run French agriculture themselves “with the arbitration of the State” and with direct representation in a corporatist legislature, or “council of corporations.” The peasantry, in such a corporatist state, would be the “first order in the nation.” The theoretician of agrarian corporatism Louis Salleron pointed up the political implications of this program: agricultural organizations could remain as they were in the new scheme; it was the state that would have to change.
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This scheme promised two great advantages. The self-administered agricultural corporations, run by leading farmers themselves, could control the market, limit production, and avoid another world price collapse. They could also help keep social order. The language of “peasant unity,” like the industrial corporatists’ assertion that workers and managers in a single industry
had more in common than in conflict, was a device to help control rural conflicts between landowners and laborers by denying the existence of class.
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The Popular Front of 1936 had attempted to organize the grain market with the Office national du blé. The ONB attempted to reach a negotiated price for wheat through a system of councils and then applied that price in a regulated national grain market. But the program was too consumer-oriented and too statist for the proprietors and their professional organizations, and agricultural lobbyists such as Pierre Hallé for the Association des producteurs de blé and Jean Achard of the sugar-beet growers’ syndicate remained closer to Jacques Le Roy-Ladurie’s corporatist UNSA than ever. Defeat and occupation turned the French agricultural problem upside down: from overproduction to dearth.
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At the same time, the Third Republic’s discredit opened the way for the interwar peasantists to assume power. Third Republic political ministers of agriculture, like the perpetual Henri Queuille of the Radical party, were replaced by “experts”—men with a little horse manure on their boots and corporatist doctrines in their heads. It is typical of Vichy that the flamboyant, green-shirted Henri Dorgères, the most “fascist” in style of the interwar agrarians, was shunted into a relatively minor role in the Peasant Corporation while the interwar leaders of proprietors’ groups and agricultural cartels took the major jobs.
In agriculture as in other social realms, the social traditionalists dominated the early days at Vichy. Pétain’s 12 October 1940 speech on social policy described “family agriculture” as “the principal economic and social base of France.” Pierre Caziot, who had failed twenty years earlier to persuade parliament to revive the family farm and who held parliamentary anarchy and the “automatic antipeasant reflex” of the “citadins” responsible for the long decline of peasant populations, was minister of agriculture until April 1942. With his Vercingetorix moustaches and
rural homilies, he seemed to personify the victory of peasant proprietors over bureaucrats (though he had been a civil servant as well as a farmer all his life). He welcomed the chance to govern without parliament. “Return to the soil” was officially promoted by granting subsidies to families who would restore abandoned farms. Other programs took up the cry, such as the Chantiers de la Jeunesse, which put every French young man in a rural work camp outside the noxious influence of cities for eight months of his twenty-first year.
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There were, of course, good practical reasons as well as reasons of social stability for promoting a large rural labor force at a time of scarcity, when millions of peasants were still held in German prisoner-of-war camps and when there was no fuel for the occasional French farm machine. Caziot could not reject the goal of efficient production altogether. The family farm was safe, but it could also improve its yield. Most important was the law of 9 March 1941 that made it easier to regroup scattered parcels of land into unified farms (
remembrement
). World War I had heightened interest in consolidation of scattered farm plots, but the law of 27 November 1918 required the association of at least two-thirds of the villagers concerned before lands could be transferred.
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Caziot’s law permitted consolidation by majority vote and gave the state a proposing role as well. This law was retained after the war with slight modifications, and the Commissariat du Plan used it to promote a major program to regroup 500,000 hectares in 1947 alone.
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