Crisis and Commitment

the Life History of a French Social Movement

Sonia Alland, Alexander Alland Jr.

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9789058231994
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134437177
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

Using ethnographic field data from the Larzac plateau in Southern France, Alexander and Sonia Alland document one of the longest and most successful popular protests in modern French history - the Larzac movement. More than a record of events, the book describes the transformation from the early 1970s of rural defiance into a symbol of left-wing action for France and the world. This revised edition examines the activities of the movement since 1995, including the demonstrations at the Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organisation, the 'great hamburger war' against McDonalds, and the broadening of the movement to embrace struggles elsewhere, such as the anti-nuclear protests in French Polynesia. Particular attention is paid to the charismatic Jose Bove, who has become the figurehead and focus of the campaign during this period. This account will be of particular interest to anthropologists and historians of contemporary France and Europe as well as students of protest and social movements, and of contemporary politics in general

Part One

The Community Forms

CHAPTER ONE

Background

Wind-raked! Soaked in the fall and winter by rains carried inland by the sea wind (marin) that gathers its strength in the Mediterranean, burnt dry in the summer by the sun and fierce north wind, the Larzac is a region of climatic extremes. It is the southernmost of five great limestone plateaus, or causses, and is located in the department of the Aveyron, less than seventy kilometers from the sea. Like its siblings, it is composed of the sedimented remains of uncountable microscopic animals deposited in an ocean that once overflowed the land between the two most southern mountain chains of the massif central. Ranging from 560 to 950 meters above sea level and 1,000 square kilometers in area, the Larzac brings the cold winters of the massif central within sight of the clement south, the Midi. The natives of the Larzac see themselves as the stubborn inhabitants of a harsh and stingy land on which thin soils and unpredictable weather make pastoralism the only possible way of life. They are fully aware, and sometimes proud, of the contrast between “their” plateau and the valley floors on which a long and stable growing season favors the cultivation of peach, apricot, almond and olive orchards, as well as wine and table grapes. It is not uncommon to hear Larzac farmers refer to this other world, which in reality is only a few kilometers away, as if the distance were multiplied by hundreds. They are also proud of their ability to live and work in such an ungrateful environment. As Pierre Burguière, one of the protagonists in this book and a typical inhabitant of the plateau, has said of the Larzac: “As for me, the Larzac—I love it as if it were a handicapped child. The more it makes you suffer, the more you become attached to it.” Auguste Guiraud, whose roots are deep in the Larzac, expressed the same sentiment in different words: “The peasant is married to the land. Of course, here the bride is pretty skinny and her dowry’s not big either. But then, we are here to fatten her up.”

The Larzac also represents an area of “wide open spaces”—a Far West (it is actually referred to by some as lefar-ouest) in miniature that, until recently, was uncluttered and uninclosed by fences. Francois Boé, an outside militant during the struggle against the extension of the military camp, remembers the first time he saw the Larzac as a child: “My grandmother was a grape farmer on the plain near Beziers [a city in the nearby department of the Hérault]. Every fall she would drive up to the Larzac in her truck to hire local people to harvest her crop. Although I was very young at the time the extraordinary beauty and breadth of the landscape stuck in my mind. For example, as long as I live I will never forget my impression of a spectacular golden sunset glowing against the cliffs of Le Caylar.”

To the casual traveler on National Highway Nine (the road that splits the Larzac from north to south) the plateau can appear arid and deserted. Michelin’s tourist guide for the immediate area, the Gorges du Tarn, describes the Larzac as rocky, sterile, deforested and monotonous. Yet, below this inhospitable surface—referred to by some as a “moonscape”—is a reservoir that feeds sixty streams and rivers! The torrential rainfall of autumn and winter (the Larzac equals Normandy in total annual rainfall) rapidly disappears from the surface to infiltrate the spongy limestone where it forms the subterranean streams that surface in the river valleys below the causse. But, in most years, enough humidity remains to nourish the plant cover and provide at least the minimum amount of water necessary to support the rural population with its flocks of sheep. There are no water courses on the plateau, but the usually abundant rainfall is captured from house and barn roofs and stored in cisterns or, in the fields, in stone-lined depressions (lavognes), where sheep come to drink when they are out to pasture.

Although the rain- and wind-tortured—but often breathtaking—rock formations are the most visible features of the plateau, the expressions “desertlike” and “moonscape” are best applied elsewhere. The Larzac is actually one of the most varied floral areas in Europe. Crossing the plateau at a hundred kilometers per hour, or more, one’s eyes—when they are not on the road—are naturally drawn to the dramatic, inorganic rock outcroppings. Unless the observer has a passion for open country, he or she will scarcely notice the slightly undulating surface on which grass, wild thyme, juniper, thorny scrub and boxwood grow. Only a very few farms are to be seen from the road, and these, at some distance. Flocks of sheep are rare. This monotonous scenery is deceptive. The majority of farms are far from the main highway, and the predominant wild vegetation—most apparent in the spring when there are few tourists (the annual migrations toward the beaches of the Mediterranean and Spain begin at the end of June and last for only two months)—consists of relatively hidden, low, seasonally flowering plants. Located between the Mediterranean and the Cévennes Mountains and on the divide between the Atlantic and Mediterranean drainages, the Larzac is host to about one-quarter of all wild plant species found in France. Plants typical of the Mediterranean region, the steppes and the Alps all flourish on various parts of the causse. Among its riches are wild narcissus, irises and a large number of orchid species. In late June, “Angel’s Hair,” a silvery-headed wild grass particular to the causse, undulates in the wind like a snow-white inland sea. Huge, flat thistles (cardabelles) hug the dry soil. As they mature in the fall, their centers turn into lemon-yellow suns surrounded by thorny, green spikes.

The oak and beech forests that once covered the Larzac are mostly gone, although their remnants can still be found on the northeast rim of the plateau that overlooks the river valley of the Dourbie. In the deforested areas the untrained eye will confuse the shaping force of human occupation, including in some places flora typical of overgrazing, with what appears to be an impoverished, if untamed, natural area. The surface of the plateau, wild-looking as it is, has been lived upon and worked by humans since Paleolithic times. What the traveler who cares to notice sees on the Larzac is not a virgin chaos of rocks with an unvarying plant cover but a rich, natural and cultural synthesis—the end product of centuries of human activity.

Here and there, clay and other soils deposited in low-lying areas of the causse trap humidity that otherwise would have rapidly found its way down to the underground rivers. These fertile sotches are cultivated to provide winter forage of various grains, hay and alfalfa for the flocks of sheep that graze in spring and summer on wild parcours, or uncultivated pastures. For the interested traveler who wishes to drive a few kilometers off the main road on one of the many local paved lanes that connect the hamlets and isolated farms of the Larzac, it becomes apparent that, in addition to the sotches, there are other areas sufficiently fertile for cultivation. These areas can be quite extensive, and where they are, permanent settlements have developed. They range from individual farms, small hamlets with a few houses to rather substantial villages. Indeed, the national highway itself bisects the largest fertile area on the Larzac where it also splits the two most populous communities, L’Hospitalet and La Cavalerie. The latter once had over 1,500 inhabitants and now boasts a permanent population of about 800. La Cavalerie’s population consists of farmers, shopkeepers and hoteliers, who offer their services to local farmers, passing tourists and the military camp that covers about 3,000 hectares of what was once largely communal land.

Today, as in the past, the primary resource of the Larzac is sheep, the majority of which are milked for the production of Roquefort cheese. The milk for this luxury product is collected on the Larzac, the rest of the Aveyron, and four surrounding departments. It is then taken to centrally located dairies where the cheesemaking process begins. In the dairy, the milk is curdled, the whey disposed of, and the solid matter pressed into large, round loaves that are inseminated with the mold Penicillium roqueforti. After a few days the loaves are transported west to the village of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon, just below the plateau. There, each loaf is made ready for aging. They are salted and pierced with long needles to allow air to circulate in the developing cheese. Thus prepared, the loaves are stored in deep natural caves that provide a unique environment for ripening before sale.

Eighty percent of Roquefort cheese is made by a single producer, Société de Roquefort, which is in turn owned by Besnier, a French producer of Camembert. The remaining 20 percent is made by five independent producers. The cheesemakers control the production of Roquefort through the activities of an association, the Fédération des Industriels de Roquefort. This association jealously guards its ancient monopoly over France’s most expensive dairy product, which was granted by decree of the Parlement of Toulouse on August 31, 1666.

Milk producers for Roquefort are also grouped in an association, La Fédération Régionale des Syndicats d’Eleveurs de Brebis (SEB). The cheese producers’ association and the SEB negotiate problems concerning production, milk quality and prices among themselves within yet another association, La Confédération Générale des Producteurs de Lait de Brebis et des Industriels de Roquefort. In general, the SEB is controlled by the larger milk producers, although they constitute a minority of farmers supplying milk to the Roquefort industry. In 1990 a group of small milk producers, inspired largely by Larzac militants, founded its own union, Le Syndicat des Producteurs du Lait de Brebis (SPLB), but so far it has not been allowed to participate in negotiations with the cheesemakers.

While the Larzac furnishes several of the smaller producers with the majority of their milk supply, it provides, overall, only about 3 percent of the milk used in the fabrication of Roquefort. Yet, the plateau—with its open space, unpolluted environment, and tradition of production by small peasants—remains the symbol of purity and rural wholesomeness that—the industrialists never cease to remind the buying public—is the sine qua non of their product. It is even claimed that the best quality Roquefort is made from the milk of Larzac sheep fed on grasses native to the causses (Develotte 1979).

The relationship between the masters of the cheesemaking industry and the regional peasants is more paternalistic than symbiotic. While it is true that Roquefort needs locally produced milk to maintain its image and pays a good price for it, the farmers are the dependent members of an unequal partnership. Their vulnerability, however, became evident only recently when increasing production (originally encouraged by the industry and the leading agricultural bank, the Crédit Agricole) led to large milk surpluses. In response, the cheese producers, acting through the Confédération and, therefore, with the apparent agreement of the SEB, imposed quotas (beginning in 1988) on the amount of milk that would be bought at top prices. These quotas differ from farm to farm according to a complicated formula based largely on past production. Beyond these quantities, milk is still bought, but at a much lower price—a price that frequently does not meet costs. Those who suffer most from the quotas are small-scale producers, especially young farmers in the process of building up their flocks who have borrowed heavily from the Crédit Agricole and who need to increase output in order to survive.

The reader will have noted by now that I have tended to use the terms farmer and peasant interchangeably when referring to agricultural activities in the region associated with Roquefort. The meaning of farmer should be clear enough but the same is not the case with the word peasant. For most anthropologists, this word is used specifically in reference to groups of people who are essentially subsistence farmers, more or less independent of the money-based economy of the nation in which they happen to live. Many also agree that peasants are distinct from farmworkers who, as members of an agricultural proletariat, are paid wages for labor. The term may also be applied—as it frequently is in Latin America—to poor tenant farmers who occupy the land of absentee landlords, paying their rents in cash or in kind.

Peasants are said to differ from the preliterate populations of the “Third World”—often studied by anthropologists—in that, unlike these populations, they do not have their own distinct culture or language. Rather, they make up a special, if underprivileged, enclave within a national entity. For this reason, peasants have been referred to as groups having “part cultures”—somewhat distinct, but not separate, from the culture of the larger society in which they are imbedded. Thus there can be French peasants or Chinese peasants defined as such within the context of a national culture. What peasants everywhere have in common (if indeed they have anything in common beyond their being poor farmers) is a set of negative characteristics, based on their exploitation by some other segment of the national culture, their isolation from the mainstream of that culture, or both.

In the French language the term paysan is fraught with semantic traps. Rogers notes that in France the term is “a highly charged and manipulable symbol” (1987:56). In some cases, it is used by writers on agriculture interchangeably with the term agriculteur to designate anyone who farms for a living. (The word fermier, however, refers unambiguously to farmers who rent their land.) In other cases, paysan is used to refer to small, traditional farmers in distinction to those who run large, modern enterprises.

In current usage, traditional farmers, native to a particular area, often use the term self-referentially to contrast themselves with newly installed farmers, whatever the size of the newcomer’s farm. One Larzac native, for example, on looking with us through a book about the history of the struggle against the military camp extension, made a point of distinguishing paysans, those whose roots were in the immediate area and whose families had been farmers for generations, from the more recently installed farming population on the plateau. Most of the latter come from outside the Aveyron. For our informant these were, most emphatically, not paysans and he considered it dishonest to label them as such.

Turning now to the anthropological treatment of peasants that I will apply in this study,¹. I would first argue that, until the beginning of the 1950s, the majority of farmers in the Roquefort basin shared many, if not all, of the characteristics attributed in the literature to peasants. Indeed many, if a reduced number, still maintained these characteristics at the beginning of the 1970s. In the 1950s the typical farm was minuscule and extremely poor. Farming methods were backward, little changed from those used over the course of previous centuries, when farmers led relatively autonomous, if miserably poor, lives. Production figures from this period indicate that even those farmers who were lucky enough to sell their milk to Roquefort were barely able to live above subsistence levels. Flocks rarely exceeded sixty animals and each sheep yielded only fifty to sixty liters of milk per year—far from the present day average of 150 to 200 liters (Pilleboue et al. 1972:458).

Second, when looking at the ideology of the movement, it needs to be stressed that the Larzac struggle began in the context of the immediate post-1968 period, which coincided with the first blush of the ecology movement. In this context the term peasant, which up to then had pejorative connotations for some, began to be used as a term of positive affirmation. Small farmers, who, before 1968, had preferred the term agriculteur, seized upon paysan as a badge of honor—a claim to a special and strategic place in French society.

Third, and still within the realm of ideology, the term peasant was consciously chosen as a form of self-reference by the farmers of the Larzac from the very inception of their ten-year struggle against the extension of the military camp. It served as a cover for real cultural and economic differences among them, facilitating their presentation to the outside as a united and homogeneous force. Yet, on the Larzac itself, while all peasants were equal some were clearly more equal than others.

Shortly after the struggle began, natives of the plateau developed a new term of self-reference, pur pore, to distinguish themselves from the pioneer settlers of the immediate pre-struggle period. But even the purs pores were not a homogeneous group. Three large, economically successful farms in the northwest of the plateau were occupied by purs pores. In the northeast, in contrast, several pur pore farmers were more traditional, small-scale agriculturalists. The same was true for a number of farmers in and around La Cavalerie, the site of the military camp, but two of them, Robert Gastal and Louis Massebiau, were partners in a large modern farm. Like peasant the term pur porc as a reflection of rootedness was an invention of the struggle and does not indicate class membership or real common interests other than a certain emotional approach to human relations that can be seen in the division, to be discussed in chapter nine, between affectives (mostly purs pores) and politicals (mostly pioneers and new settlers). In reality, as shall be demonstrated below, the “peasants” of the Larzac were a varied group of geographically distinct, small and large farmers (natives, pioneers and, as the struggle developed, squatters), as well as assorted agricultural laborers, including a significant group of underpaid shepherds.

Without the Roquefort industry, the plateau (except for some secondary residences) would have become largely depopulated in the last hundr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction to the Second Edition
• Introduction: The Larzac and Invented Tradition
• List of Acronyms
• Part One: The Community Forms
• Part Two: The Community Evolves
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index