Farmers' protests in France: a long and sometimes deadly history
The farmers’ protests that brought parts of France to a standstill over the past week are the latest in a long tradition. RFI looks back at some memorable moments in more than a century of agricultural uprisings.
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It began, as many things do, with wine.
The first time in France’s modern history that unhappy farmers forced the rest of the country to take notice was in 1907.
That spring, winegrowers in the southern provinces of Languedoc and Roussillon led what would prove to be one of the biggest uprisings of the century.
Farmers marched into town squares to call for regulation of imports from Algeria and cheap adulterated wines from other parts of France. For weeks they descended on a different city every Sunday, drumming up support along the way.
By June, they drew as many as 800,000 people to Montpellier – roughly ten times the city’s population. Hundreds of mayors and councillors resigned in solidarity, bringing local government to a standstill.
Soon after that, Paris sent in the army. Days of rioting followed and seven people died. Disgusted, a regiment of local soldiers mutinied and set up camp among the protesters.
Parliament passed laws cracking down on adulterated wine, and the growers ended their revolt.
But some six decades later, winegrowers in the same region were protesting again – and this time, with France now in the European common market and agricultural policy decided not in Paris but Brussels, they adopted more radical tactics.
Triggered once more by cheap southern imports, the fight became an impassioned assertion of regional identity and veered into what has been called “wine terrorism”: blockading ports and train lines, setting cargo alight, chopping down telephone poles.
The conflict culminated in a fatal confrontation with riot police in March 1976, when winegrowers brandishing hunting rifles gathered in the village of Montredon-des-Corbières; one farmer and one officer were shot and killed, while 17 people were hospitalised.
No other farmers’ protests have proved so deadly. But the playbook first deployed in 1907 – bringing the countryside to the city and appealing directly to the public against authorities – would be adopted again and again in the century that followed.
Listen to more on farmers' protests past and present on the Spotlight in France podcast:
Brittany’s artichoke wars
Even as French farming began modernising after World War II, with the common market still in its infancy, agriculture was a patchwork of different priorities. National unions existed, but farmers trusted primarily in local leaders to represent their interests.
Regional concerns were at the heart of the so-called “artichoke wars” that gripped Brittany for the best part of a decade.
Starting in 1957, bumper crops left the north-west region with more vegetables than it could sell. Farmers relied on traders to ferry their produce to the big cities, giving the middlemen the power to set prices – which promptly plummeted.
Growers made a show of destroying the surplus, dumping hundreds of tonnes of artichokes and donating truckloads to school canteens. One summer they marched their produce to Paris themselves, to the accompaniment of traditional Breton bagpipes.
Things came to a head in the early 1960s, when more than 2,000 farmers stormed local government buildings, artichokes blocked the streets, and street fights broke out between growers, transporters and police.
The battles eventually ended when, in 1967, the national government decreed that sales had to go through a regional committee.
The balance of power was shifting towards newly-organised farmers’ groups, some of whom decided to go further. Some of the leaders of the artichoke protests founded what would become Brittany Ferries to ship vegetables directly to markets overseas.
The first cargo crossed the Channel on 2 January 1973, one day after the United Kingdom and Ireland joined the common market.
‘L’Ambush’ of foreign meat
European free trade meant French farmers could sell abroad more easily, but access went both ways.
French agriculture faced more competition and new market forces. An epidemic in Dutch pigs or currency fluctuations in West Germany – and above all, the decisions made in Brussels to manage all that – could now determine the price of French pork.
Imports became the target of attacks. In January 1984, amid falling meat prices, farmers in north-west France hijacked three British trucks carrying lamb from Ireland and beef from Uruguay. One load was burned, the other two were seized and the meat handed out for free to local hospitals and religious orders.
Two of the drivers were held for a day and a half, drawing protests from the British government. Typically sensationalist, tabloid newspaper The Sun called on Brits to boycott all French products, dubbing the incident “L’Ambush”.
A few years later, the protests turned uglier. In September 1990, as cheap livestock from Eastern Europe flooded the market, French farmers laid in wait for foreign meat trucks with roadblocks of hay bales and flaming tyres.
Hundreds of British sheep were burned alive when a lorry was set alight. Another truckload were poisoned, others had their throats slit and some were doused with insecticide to render their meat inedible.
At the end of the decade, with the European Union wrangling with the United States over liberalising trade even further, five activist farmers tore down a McDonald’s that was being built in the southern town of Millau in August 1999. They handed out Roquefort cheese at the protest, which they said was to denounce US import restrictions and hormone-treated beef.
The ringleader, José Bové, served 44 days in prison for his actions and became one of France’s most recognisable spokespeople for anti-globalisation.
Anti-globalisation allies
Bové's protest had its roots in an earlier rural movement: the campaign against a military base on the Larzac plateau, the traditional home of the sheep’s milk that goes into Roquefort.
When the government announced plans in 1971 to massively expand an existing base and displace around 100 farmers, it prompted demonstrations that started local and quickly became an international cause célèbre.
Pulling in support from pacifists, environmentalists, anti-nuclear activists and leftists of all stripes – including Bové – the sit-ins drew as many as 100,000 people.
The farmers also marched on Paris several times, bringing tractors and farm animals with them. With a knack for a photo opportunity, they set sheep grazing under the Eiffel Tower – a stunt often copied since.
The government officially abandoned the project in 1981.
Emotional appeal
Few farm protests since have mobilised nearly so many.
In September 1991, as the European Community prepared to overhaul its Common Agricultural Policy for the first time, between 150,000 and 200,000 farmers demonstrated in Paris.
For comparison, the protests last week involved 10,000 to 50,000 farmers across France.
But in 1992 the reform went ahead anyway, slashing what Brussels spent on guaranteeing prices and replacing it with payouts that farmers had to apply for themselves.
Complaints about EU policy lie behind most recent farm protests, including last week’s.
But that alone would not win the popular sympathy they often attract. Instead it goes back to the same thing the winegrowers of Languedoc and the ruralists of Larzac claimed: the sense that France’s farmers are the guardians of something precious – a tradition, an identity, a landscape – that we would all be poorer without.
Listen to more on this story on the Spotlight in France podcast, episode 106.
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