Bertrand Hervieu et François Purseigle. 2022. Une agriculture sans agriculteurs ; la révolution indicible. Paris : Presses de Sciences Po.
1There are books that come at the right time to help decipher current events and grasp the issues at stake. The French agricultural crisis and the accompanying protests make this book, published in 2022, particularly relevant.
2From the leading observation positions that he occupied over the years - such as advisor to the French Ministers of Agriculture, Louis Le Pensec (1997-1998) and Jean Glavany (1998-1999), to the general inspector for agriculture, Secretary General of the International Centre for Advanced Mediterranean Agronomic Studies and president of the French Academy of Agriculture, and finally (although not in chronological order), the president of the French National Institute of Agronomic Research (INRA from 1999 to 2003) - the sociologist Bertrand Hervieu, director of research for the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research), has scrutinized the transformations of the agricultural world. Given this background, he has become the essential expert. This exemplary career, which combines leading political and academic responsibilities, was punctuated by the publication of landmark books, such as Le Retour à la nature: Au fond de la forêt… l'État (Hervieu-Leger and Hervieu 1979) or L’Archipel Paysan, la fin de la république agricole (Hervieu and Viard 2001).
3For this book, he joined forces with another sociologist, with whom he had already published Sociologie des mondes agricoles (Sociology of Agricultural Worlds), François Purseigle, a professor at the National Polytechnic Institute of Toulouse, where he directs the Department of Economic, Social and Social Sciences. He is also a member of the UMR 1248 INRAE/INPT AGIR and an associated researcher at the Centre for Political Research at Sciences Po Paris.
4This new book Une agriculture sans agriculteurs (Agriculture without farmers) describes in a very documented manner the structural transformations at work in the French agricultural world. These result in the rise of corporate agriculture, which gradually replaces family farms and which coexists with collective organizations. These changes are accompanied by what some describe as “social breakdown” (Legros 2024) and economic and environmental issues, the extent of which the contemporary crisis is only beginning to take stocks of, both within and outside the agricultural world.
5This book echoes, fifty years later, the bombshell dropped in 1967 by Henri Mendras’ La fin des Paysans, translated a few years later into English, with the title The Vanishing Peasants. Innovation and Change in French Agriculture. With this title, the authors left the agricultural world of the time in a state of astonishment and disbelief (Mendras 1970). In his memoirs, a book he wrote at the end of his career, Mendras says that the “peasants” will never forgive him and that, although he had worked a large part of his career on agricultural issues, he was never invited to a conference organized by the professional organizations in that sector (Mendras et al. 1995). His formulation had shocked a professional world which was precisely experiencing the transition from the figure of the “peasant” to that of “farm operator”. The first one marked by the so-called phenomenon of “transmission/ assignment”: the transmission of capital (possession of land and equipment) and assignment (professional succession experienced as an obvious obligation rather than choice) and the second one open to new forms of organization. This professional universe, which at the time still largely identified with the values of peasantry, felt humiliated by his statement.
6Hervieu and Purseigle have taken stock of this prediction made almost 60 years ago. The reflection is organized in three parts. The first part draws a portrait of the agricultural population; the second one is interested in the transformations of the forms of agricultural operations; and the last part deploys sociological and anthropological analysis by situating these developments in the more global context of changes in French rural areas.
7Let us note the slow erasure of the agricultural population, from a majority position at the end of the 18th century where half of the French population worked in agriculture, to the contemporary situation where agricultural workers represent 1.5%; and if we add farm-related employees, reach a little less than 3% of the active population. How to cope with being a minority when you were a majority?
8Even though the general population has retained forms of solidarity with this world as we know it from more or less direct ancestors, solidarity has become more and more abstract as the social fabric on which it depended (the presence of farmers in the family such as a parent, an uncle, a grandfather…), has been torn apart. Paradoxically, there have never been so few people involved in production and we have never produced so much. A change with anthropological consequences as it has transformed the conditions of food socialization and relationships with livestock, and more broadly with the living world (Poulain 2007; Poulain 2017).
9Behind the demographic decline observed in today’s agricultural sector, Hervieu and Purseigle identify a structural transformation i.e. the erasure of the “figure of the agricultural operator” which they define by the “status of non-employee” and as “head” of the farm exercising an independent profession and holding the family capital”. They associate this transformation with several usual factors such as physical arduousness, atypical work hours, etc. but, above all, to the end of “conjugal agriculture” which led one of the members of the couple, often the wife, to seek paid employment to ensure regular income for the household in order to palliate poor (in certain sectors) and irregular income.
10First of all, it is appropriate to point out the heterogeneity of situations depending on the type of production and geographical area. There is nevertheless a general movement emerging: farms are becoming more and more specialized, with increasingly larger surfaces and forms of organization that could be described as increasingly complex and “abstract”. This results in fewer and fewer direct actors in agriculture and a multiplication of corporate forms which considerably transform the model of organization of work and capital. Certain new forms call on project management, delegation of work, subcontracting... in short, methods of organization known in the industrial world or in that of construction or public works. The changes create losers and winners. Not all farmers are suffering, but some are experiencing very difficult, even dramatic situations. Suicides by farmers bear witness to this. But they cannot be reduced to their economic dimension. An author shows that part of the causes of suicides are very strong tensions between the cultures and lifestyles of parents on the one hand, and those to which couples and wives aspire, on the other (Deffontaines 2019). The peasant civilizational matrix has disappeared. The agricultural method is at odds with the dominant culture.
11The authors also invite us to take stock of the changes in land uses in the rural world. Since the 1990s, the population of neo-rural farmers has continued to increase. But these new residents arrive with urban lifestyles. They think and experience the countryside in the same way they would a residential place. This results in tensions between land considered as family heritage, as a work tool, as a productive space, and land considered as a natural space, collective heritage under the rise of greening.
12Conflicts relating to zones close to homes where chemical treatment is prohibited are examples of how exacerbated these contradictions are. Furthermore, the development of rural areas for tourism, whether in the hands of neo-ruralists or in those of the farmers themselves, which more or less explicitly confers on the latter the role of landscape maintenance, has reinforced these tensions. But “to assert that the countryside is also a landscape [...] is to consider that working the land or owning it does not confer the legitimacy to disrupt these spaces” (p. 153). How can these conceptions of land coexist? This is one of the objectives of “agroecology”. Thinking together and bringing together in the same space the logics of production and those of the reproduction of the natural resources of the soil and subsoil, the management of water resources... in short, “sustainable management”.
13By describing these changes, which until now have remained unspoken of or left in the shadow of denial, the authors outline the prospects for an agriculture of the future capable, in their view, of preserving the environment, public health, competitiveness and the agricultural workforce.
14Although backed by numerous statistical data on the state of the French agricultural world and its developments, the text remains entirely accessible both to readers familiar with the subject and to the general public. In conclusion, let’s give the floor to Hervieu and Purseigle: “A new chapter in agriculture has opened. To be able to think and write it, we will need to precisely name agricultural producers in their diversity and consider their plural capacities to take part in this history.”
