March 18, 1945: while the war continues beyond the Rhine, the first official congress of the General Confederation of Agriculture, born in the maquis, ends at the Paris City Hall. Congress where a union was invented exclusively composed of farmers, without the land renters and other lords who monopolized agricultural representation before the war: the National Federation of Farmers’ Unions (FNSEA). Within it, two opposing currents are merged: that of the rural right, Catholic, protectionist, often anti-Republican, led by the cereal growers; that of farmers, sharecroppers and small owners of mixed farming and livestock, social Catholics, even socialists, sometimes communists.
The first has built since the end of the 19the century a sprawling network of local professional unions, where farmers can buy inputs, take out insurance, access a mutual aid service, financial loans, a social protection organization for their employees… embryos of what will become a banking network (Credit Mutuel), a social security fund (MSA), an education system (agricultural schools). This network is reinforced by associations specialized by production (wheat, milk, wine, potatoes, etc.). The whole is under the control of the union, which also controls rural development, with the network of chambers of agriculture and the popularization of technical progress with agricultural competitions.
The second current has to its credit the economic success of cooperatives, a banking network (Crédit agricole), the link with agricultural workers’ unions and the hope of building a better world after the war. But its union network is less dense than that of its rival.
The desire to turn the page on the war and the urgent need to feed the country – ration tickets lasted until 1949 – were not, however, enough to unite this team of divergent interests between large and small farmers. What unites the enemy brothers is agrarianism, an ideology disseminated by the Society of Farmers of France (SAF, which became Agrillées in 2018), which unites farmers, agricultural workers and large landowners in the same community to resist the city, a place of loss of moral values which, being only good at buying agricultural products, should not have a say in the economic organization of the countryside. Beyond their differences, the proponents of agrarianism see the future being built around the family farm and its property, the cornerstone of the order of the fields and the “peasant community”.
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