History info: our peasant anger

The news put into perspective every Saturday, thanks to the historian Fabrice d’Almeida. Saturday January 27: when the farmers revolt.

In France, peasant anger has been manifest for centuries, if not millennia. It’s a tradition in our country: when farmers are unhappy, they show it in a grandiose way.

Already in the Middle Ages, there were these peasant revolts called jacqueries. A Jacques was an everyman: the most given first name. A person who worked the land and who, not having enough to live on, rebelled. The jacqueries enjoyed a great consensus. They were as popular as the great uprisings of the modern era: the revolts of the crunchers, the barefoot, the “red caps” which left traces in our history.

Make no mistake: in these revolts, there was an alliance with local power, with the small lords who, like the peasants, suffered from price variations. The common enemy was the central state, the one that wanted to levy new taxes.

These major revolts gradually disappeared and in the 20th century, farmers entered into another logic, that of democratic demonstrations, forms of protest recognized by the Republic. Since the Second World War, demonstrations have become more regular, almost routine. The French have become accustomed to these practices, such as blocking roads, which we are still confronted with. Newsreel reports from the 1950s describe almost the same situations we experience today.

The turning point of the 70s

Blocking methods are used for price issues, for European negotiations, milk or wine production quotas or even taxes. It has almost become a ritual at certain times of the year when depending on the calendar of the union organizations: we block! In the 1970s, exasperation was so great with the young Minister of Agriculture, Jacques Chirac, that several demonstrations ended in deaths: in 1971 against the European common agricultural policy (CAP), and especially in 1976 in Montredon . There, wine growers and the gendarmerie exchange gunfire. Results: two dead, a peasant and a gendarmerie officer.

This constituted a turning point: from then on, no more wanting to carry out armed demonstrations. It was necessary to remain in peaceful action, even to bring the country to a standstill. Accidents and tragedies like the one that occurred this year in Pamiers have been rare. This is undoubtedly what explains the sympathy enjoyed, even today, by these vast movements of demands for a weakened population.