“Culture is like a parachute, when you don’t have one, you crash,” said the French comedian Pierre Desproges. But what culture was he talking about? From that of books or that of Jerusalem artichokes? From that of museums or that of beets? Mozart or organic?
It is no coincidence that, over the centuries, the word culture has come to designate indifferently what is found on our plate and in our library. Many writers will explain to you that there is more than a common etymology between the action of plowing a field and that of writing by filling in lines, which are so many furrows in which we sow words. In these two gestures, there is what we can call the action of transmitting. Transmitting life on one side, that of the spirit on the other. In both cases, this involves a long time, that of maturation, growth and the passage of seasons.
French farmers may number less than 500,000 today, but there is an organic link between them and the French. A country cannot have incubated a “peasant economy” until the 20th century.e century, as Fernand Braudel said, without it leaving any traces. It cannot be defined to this extent by its gastronomy, its landscapes and its art of living without farmers being at the heart of the idea that the French have of France.
This probably explains the incredible support enjoyed by French farmers who, for a week, have undertaken to “go up” to Paris to make their demands heard. We do not know of any other protest movement that can boast the support of 89% of French people. And this, among supporters of the Republicans (97%), the National Rally (95%), the Socialist Party (94%), ecologists (88%), La France insoumise (87%) and even the Macronists (81%)!
We understand better why, last week, the new Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal, left Matignon in a hurry to give a speech behind a haystack. To avoid a new crisis of the Yellow Vests, the government has apparently gone to bed. But no one imagines that the fans of the “ start-up nation » and free trade treaties were converted in 24 hours to beet growing and food sovereignty. Forty years of contempt for farmers seasoned with a bit of punitive ecology have produced, in Paris as in Brussels, this aberrant strategy of degrowth where 600 million euros are offered to Irish breeders to slaughter 200,000 cows.
In France, the discontent had been there for months, but we turned a deaf ear. To alert public opinion, in hundreds of localities, farmers had reversed the village entrance signs. A subtle way of saying that as far as they were concerned, we were walking on our heads. But when it comes to pressure tactics, nothing beats throwing manure.
Because, despite the love of the French for their farmers, the hillbilly, the bumpkin, the boor, the crunchy, the inhabitant, the dirtbag, the redneck, has he not become the man to be slaughtered? our right-thinking elites? Is he not this hated character of our time because he represents our history? The story of people from somewhere, as the British David Goodhart wrote (“ people from somewhere “), and not from anywhere like our globalized elites (” people from anywhere “).
In a testimony that speaks volumes, the head of the list of French socialists in the European elections, Raphaël Glucksmann, recently admitted that, when he goes to New York or Berlin, he feels more at home culturally than in Picardy. Hadn’t her environmentalist colleague Sandrine Rousseau designated the barbecue as a “symbol of virility” to be destroyed? Now, what have these incorrigible meat-eaters that the peasants have been doing for a week, if not feasting around a barbecue on a highway ramp under the envious gazes of popular France – and even the police officers who poorly hide their sympathy in the face of demonstrators who, for once, do not attack them?
Marianne’s homeland is this country which prides itself on having kept from the aristocracy a certain number of customs, morals and manners which beautify life and make the charm of its civilization. Why shouldn’t it have the right to refuse a clean agricultural slate and cherish its farmers, even if Brussels, in the name of ecology, has planned their disappearance? This already has a name: the cultural exception!
By chance, in the same week, two young environmental activists sprayed The Mona Lisa of pumpkin soup. History does not say whether this pumpkin was French or Ukrainian. This emblematic gesture combines contempt for art and agriculture. We don’t know what Desproges would have said about it, but there is no doubt that his joke also applies to the cultivation of pumpkins.