History of a concept. It appears on the t-shirts of angry farmers and appears in political speeches. While the word “peasant” is no longer used in other European countries, in France it remains associated with a strong identity, an imagination marked by territorial anchoring and a particular relationship to the land and living things. This idealized figure is also the subject of battles between the different actors who project opposing values and propositions, between nostalgia for the past and the aspiration to invent new sustainable models.
This polysemy tells in its own way the “great upheaval” of the French countryside described by the historian Fernand Braudel, that of a world which has shifted into modernity in a few decades to the point of exploding all its benchmarks, and which finds itself, crisscrossed by deep divisions, in search of a future possible.
Attested since the 12the century, the word ” peasant “ is derived from Latin paganesis, “from the village, from the canton”. It’s from the 19the century that it took on political importance in France, when monarchists and republicans tried to rally public opinion to their regime. “These battles intensified from the establishment of universal male suffrage in 1848underlines the political scientist Edouard Morena, who traced its history in his thesis. Republicans and reactionary forces celebrate the peasant by presenting him as the soul of the nation to capture the rural electorate. The construction of republican identity integrates strong dimensions of this peasantry associated with a historical order which goes beyond political camps. » The IIIe République even chose the figure of the sower as a republican symbol on its postal stamps.
The disappearance of a “thousand-year-old peasant civilization”
The years following the Second World War would shake up this historical order. Modernization laws open the way to motorization, the widespread use of fertilizers and industrial seeds, and land consolidation. When, in 1967, the sociologist Henri Mendras (1927-2003) published The End of the Peasants, his observation has the effect of a thunderbolt. The sociologist does not limit himself to anticipating the sudden decrease in the number of land workers, he announces the disappearance of a “ thousand-year-old peasant civilization ».
In a few years occurs ” A social, cultural, economic and landscape upheaval”explains sociologist Bertrand Hervieu, co-author ofAgriculture without farmers (with François Purseigle, Presses de Sciences Po, 2022). Until now considered a heritage, the land becomes a working tool, the farm an operation designed to supply the agri-food industry. The word “peasant” itself is outdated in favor of the profession of farmer.
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