Progress and Nostalgia

In the 1970s, autobiographies and life stories by French peasants became bestsellers. Appearances on television turned some of these authors into celebrities. Their popularity reflected a passionate interest in peasant life and peasant society among the general reading public and scholars alike. Peasant memoirists recounted the old ways, but they also bridged the rift between France’s rural past and its modern technological present by addressing contemporary issues that the social and political activism of May 1968 had put on the agenda: environmentalism, feminism, regionalism (including movements seeking Breton and Occitan autonomy), and an interest in the local as a place for utopian experiment and renewal. This chapter focuses on some of the best-known peasant memoirists: Émilie Carles, Pierre Jakez Hélias, Ephraïm Grenadou, and Antoine Sylvère. It also describes the fame of “La mère Denis,” a country washerwoman who starred in washing machine advertisements.

Second Homes

In the rural exodus of the 1950s and 1960s, peasants abandoning the countryside left behind boarded-up farmhouses and derelict barns. Members of the urban middle class began scouring rural backwaters looking to purchase a vacation homes. A new real estate market opened up in peasant houses as secondary residences. In the 1970s fascination with the peasant house became a paradoxical hallmark of the radical modernization of French society. During the postwar economic boom, the French had welcomed the fruits of consumer society. But rapid progress also sparked a nostalgic embrace of tangible vestiges of traditional peasant society. Renovating a dilapidated farmhouse as a rural retreat in the French countryside became an internationally shared fantasy and practice. This chapter links the popularity of rural secondary homes to the developing environmental movement, as organizations concerned with rural preservation found common cause with peasants and environmentalists in supporting the protest movement in the Larzac region of central France.

The Peasantry is Dead, Long Live the Peasantry!

The trente glorieuses, “thirty glorious years” of rapid postwar modernization, transformed France into an efficient agricultural powerhouse between 1950 and 1980. Deep structural changes benefitted those able to become modern farmers and precipitated the economic collapse of small peasant farms. Poor, remote regions emptied as young people left for jobs and a higher standard of living in cities. The modernization of agriculture was part of a state-led program of targeted regional development and planning carried out under the auspices of the DATAR, France’s national agency for “territorial balancing.” Ultimately urban development, the decentralization of industry, and the building of a modern infrastructure for communication, transportation, and energy production took precedence over the needs of agriculture. New demands placed on rural space for residential use, tourism and recreation, and protected natural sites created a multiuse landscape. Not only were farmers no longer peasants, the countryside was no longer just farmland.

Conclusion

The postwar history of rural France has often been experienced and analyzed as one of perpetual decline measured by rural outmigration and the death of the peasantry as a social class. While this book has underlined and explored these dislocations and ruptures, it has also pushed back against a declensionist narrative by showing ways in which the French countryside was renewed and changed in the decades of the 1960s ad 1970s by social practices and culture representations that attached symbolic and material value to rural life. Rural society did not die when the peasantry disappeared. Rather, it continued to be reinvented.

Introduction

In post World War II France, the postwar drive to modernize and explosive economic growth caused the collapse of the peasantry as a social class. Peasants left the countryside en masse, villages emptied out, and fields that had been cultivated for centuries were left fallow. And yet, this book argues, rural France did not vanish in the sweeping transformations of the 1950s and 1960s. Paradoxically, postwar modernization made the French yearn for imaginative and tangible connections to the life that peasants had once lived. This, in turn, became an engine of change in its own right. Rural Inventions explores this paradox. Nostalgia for the rural is a thread that runs through the chapters of this study. Yet Rural Inventions also shows that in the postagrarian society initiated by the postwar economic boom, the rural could become a harbinger of future possibilities. Participants in France’s peasant moment of the 1960s to early 1980s reinscribed dwelling in the countryside as an essential component of contemporary modern life.

Disrupted Landscapes

This chapter examines a photographic essay created by the renowned photojournalist and filmmaker Raymond Depardon about the farm on which he grew up. In 1963, the government expropriated part of the Depardon family’s farm in order to build a superhighway. Twenty years later Depardon photographed what remained as part of a landmark public photographic enterprise commissioned in 1983 by the DATAR, the government agency that oversaw the large-scale postwar regional development projects. This chapter explores Depardon’s photography within the larger project of the Mission photographique de la DATAR. It illuminates the role of photographs in shaping perceptions of the postwar upending of rural life and landscapes.

Back to the Land

In the wake of May 1968, thousands of young people, mostly from urban areas, turned to regions blighted by the rural exodus in order to implement revolutionary change in their own lives. They planned to survive by undertaking subsistence farming of the kind that had sustained peasants in the past. Their utopian aim was to build a self-sufficient existence for the future, outside and beyond bourgeois conventions, capitalist society, and the state. This wave of urban migration to the countryside came to be commonly referred to as le retour à la terre (“the return to the land”). The first wave of countercultural youth created rural communes, most of which did not last more than a few years. Some stayed on to farm and were joined by others who shared their aim of making a living in agriculture. Former commune members and other newcomers who settled for the long term became known as néo-ruraux.