France perpetuates the myth of a nation of peasants

Rewritten to respond to winter anger, the government’s agricultural bill arrives in the Assembly chamber on Tuesday.

The agricultural orientation bill is debated by deputies from Tuesday May 14. This is a high-risk meeting for the executive. This text has been postponed several times, and urgently rewritten under pressure from the farmers’ movement at the start of 2024. The government has constantly revised its copy. This was a commitment from candidate Macron and the Head of State followed this entire process very closely, himself receiving the agricultural unions on several occasions. With this bill, the executive hopes to extinguish the embers of peasant anger which had disrupted Gabriel Attal’s first steps in Matignon, and which is just waiting to start again.

The farmers generally won their case. This text first expresses, in a way, the recognition of the nation towards a corporation in difficulty. It elevates agriculture to the rank of “major general interest”, enshrines in law the imperative of food sovereignty, and aims to ensure the renewal of generations. More concretely, the government has reduced certain regulations and simplified numerous environmental standards, in particular by changing the indicator of the Écophyto pesticide reduction plan. At the risk of relegating the ecological imperative to the background. A difference in treatment which illustrates the extent to which agriculture and the environment do not weigh in the same way in public debate.

Ecology remains perceived as restrictive

On the one hand, a very organized peasant corporation which knows how to permeate all the parties, and trigger, if necessary, protest movements which are always very popular, supported by more than 80% of French people. On the other hand, despite real public awareness, the environmental cause is still struggling to find effective and unifying modes of action, and even more so, a credible political outlet. Several parties pride themselves on being ecology, but those who claim this label remain very weak, as shown by Marie Toussaint’s difficult European campaign. Basically, in the collective imagination, each of the two categories is perceived in a very opposite way: farmers as those who feed us, and ecologists as those who constrain us.

Result, while the number of farmers is only marginal, barely 400,000 farms, France perpetuates the myth of a nation of peasants, when it has so much difficulty converting itself into the homeland of ecology.