IThey were nearly 14 million a century ago, ten times less in 1970, and are less than 400,000 today. In France, farmers have silently disappeared from censuses and statistics. “No other category has passed in such a short time from the status of a majority in the population to that of a minority”, summarizes François Purseigle, sociologist at Cevipof and specialist in agricultural issues. The tables of the polling institutes, whose line “farmers” has been removed for ten years, are one of the many symptoms.
“The number of farmers questioned as part of the construction of a representative sample of the French population of one thousand people has in fact become too low – around ten to fifteen individuals on average – for us to be able to statistically analyze their answersexplain Jérôme Fourquet and Jean-Laurent Cassely in their essay France before our eyes (Threshold, 2021). The symbol is strong: the voice of farmers no longer weighs in today’s France. They were wiped off the map. » A demographic decline which is combined with a form of geographical isolation, these only weighing more in areas located at a distance from decision-making centers and the most economically attractive places.
Despite the visibility of the Salon de l’Agriculture (from February 25 to March 5, 2023), where elected officials and ministers flock each year for a weekend, the political weight of this profession has also mechanically crumbled. “We are now more afraid of truckers or refiners, capable of blocking the countryadmits Frédéric Dabi, managing director of the IFOP. Farmers are a population that is being watched, a bit like hunters, with whom Emmanuel Macron is however more present. » The great demonstrations with tractors and dumping of manure in front of the prefectures, which peppered the 1990s, have become the symbol of the disappearance of the agricultural world, in a country which nevertheless continues to think of itself as sovereign in food matters.
Overrepresentation in town halls
This decline is also reflected in the training and experience of politicians, who are less educated in the agricultural cause than in the past. “In the post-war period, politicians, especially those on the Republican right, learned their skills in the countrysidesays François Purseigle. It was necessary to understand what France was. This is less true today. The detour to a rural constituency is no longer the obligatory passage of a political career. » Georges Pompidou in Cantal, François Mitterrand in Nièvre, Jacques Chirac in Corrèze: all were, at one time, elected from a predominantly agricultural constituency. Until Nicolas Sarkozy, “the first to have studied in Neuilly”analyzes the researcher, who wonders: might we still win an election by asserting “to be an apple eater”, like Jacques Chirac? Or by showing off, like François Mitterrand, in front of a valley studded with a steeple?
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