Venus Bivar. Organic Resistance

In this original book, Organic Resistance: The Struggle over Industrial Farming in Postwar France, Venus Bivar describes the remarkable transformation of French agriculture after World War II. Using a language of modernization characteristic of both the postwar French Ministry of Agriculture and Eugen Weber’s classic Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (1976), Bivar recounts how “backward” French farmers “still mired in the nineteenth century” definitely “lagged behind” American, Danish, and Dutch counterparts in both production and distribution in 1945. Yet in a mere generation, France “managed to close the gap and catch up,” becoming the world’s second-most important agricultural exporter after the United States (1–2). The influence of the state was breathtaking, as technocrats in the Ministry of Agriculture engineered a complete overhaul of French farming. Central planners were convinced that France needed to compete with other European countries and the U.S., even if that competition meant the veritable dispossession of many small farmers. There were several legal means, the most influential of which was the forced consolidation of plots (remembrement). Despite some limited enclosure of open fields in the eighteenth century, the partible inheritance enshrined in the Napoleonic Code encouraged the further fragmentation of agricultural holdings in the nineteenth. As a result, in 1946 “there were 2.5 million farms in France, with an average surface area of 14.57 hectares. The average farmer held 42 discrete parcels and the average parcel was just 35 ares” or 3,500 square meters (24). But even these numbers are misleading, Bivar argues, because they included everything from the already large farms of the northeast (a consolidation made possible by the destruction of World War I) to the tiny ones in the south. A law in 1918 facilitating remembrement required the consent of all parties and had limited effect in the interwar years (31). After World War II, however, French authorities wielded a revised version of the law enacted under Vichy; in this case, anyone in a given commune (translated as “county” throughout the book, a usage that did not work for me) could instigate the process, and the prefect made the final decision. Each plot in every department was assessed a monetary value given soil and climatic conditions, and farmers lost some lands in return for others or for monetary compensation. On the newly consolidated larger holdings, big farmers received support to use tractors, artificial fertilizer, hybrid seeds, and pesticides, mimicking large-scale U.S. farmers.

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