2024-04-25 16:35:47
The anger of farmers has stirred up political news several times since the start of the year. The government is trying to respond but by making trade-offs that are debated. The agricultural bill presented on April 3 in the Council of Ministers thus attracts wrath of several environmental non-governmental organizations. They believe that this project tends to insert agriculture into an essentially productivist dynamic, to the detriment of respect for biodiversity.
The objective of making agriculture ever more productive is almost two hundred years old, a movement that the law has always accompanied and made concrete.
A new lesson: the launching pad
In the 19th centurye century, agriculture connotes slowness. In his famous 1984 work The end of the peasantsthe sociologist Henri Mendras writes:
“In the last century, compared to the progress of industry, agriculture could give the impression of reassuring stability and age-old balance. »
This balance then begins to be undermined by the law, the civil code of 1804, in particular setting itself up against this stability specific to rurality. The historian Michel Augé-Laribé shows in his work in 1950, through the example of inheritance law, that many peasants remained attached to traditions that civil law simply intends to eliminate. Indeed, while the civil code establishes an equal sharing of property between each child upon the death of their father, peasants remain faithful to the right of primogeniture, which consists of favoring the oldest child in inheritance. This new legal practice is misunderstood by farmers, because it shifts their daily lives into a new dynamic which disrupts the stability specific to rural life.
A change must take place within peasant mentalities. The teaching of a new agriculture plays, in this respect, a primordial role.
French
Certain initiatives, which tend to disseminate the advantages of modern and mechanized agriculture among the rural population, are emerging. THE Journal of Practical Agriculture was, for example, published in 1837 and described in a concrete manner various industrial activities specific to rural areas: sugar industry, machines useful for harvesting, etc. Along the same lines, agricultural educational establishments were created. The first was created in Grignon (Savoie) in 1826. These establishments sought to train farmers in agricultural science and technique through diversified lessons : physics, chemistry, mechanics, or even the study of law applicable to agriculture.
It is about pushing farmers to overcome their old habits, and inserting their agricultural practices into a productive system. Balance and stability have given way to a race against time. On this subject, the sociologist Georges Friedmann écrit that from 1880:
“Time, as a factor in the adaptation of individuals to society, is disappearing. »
Furthermore, this era saw the family farm replaced by the agricultural enterprise, operating on the industrial model and aiming for much greater productivity. Now that productivist ideas have permeated the rural world, they still need to be made concrete and legitimate. It is at this stage that the law intervenes.
The law: concretization
The XXe century is marked by a succession of laws which fully participate in the industrialization of the agricultural sector. In 1901, the jurist Joseph Hitier notes :
“Man has reduced the distance that separates agricultural production from industrial production. »
Thus, the law of March 19, 1910 does it provide for the allocation of a considerable sum of money (8,000 francs), specially loaned to farmers for a long period (15 years) in order to encourage them to transform their small agricultural holding into a productive rural enterprise. The law explicitly advocates a transformation of the agricultural model by the farmers themselves. She wants to make them actors in this modernization.
The conservatism of the Vichy regime during the Second World War did not stand in opposition to this movement. According to historian Richard Kuisel:
“The authors of the Vichy plan did not defend the status quo in the countryside: they advocated a rural equipment program which would raise agricultural productivity. »
THE lois which came into force at that time actually tend to boost agricultural productivity. That of February 19, 1942 encourages the recultivation of agricultural land left fallow for at least two years. This involves avoiding at all costs the abandonment of land likely to be of real economic interest. In the same vein, the law of March 12, 1943 provides for the possibility of intervening on land unsuitable for cultivation using technical methods relating to agricultural science (drying of marshes, irrigation of arid lands, etc.).
All the economic and scientific progress that occurred in the agricultural sector in the 19the century are thus consecrated by law to the following century. Agricultural productivity is then fully legitimized.
At the end of the Second World War, the modernization of agriculture takes a new turn. Machines are gradually invading rural areas. The tractor tends to replace the horse. As for the law, it reaches a new level by placing agriculture in a competitive model. As evidenced by the agricultural orientation law of August 5, 1960, whose productivist scope is beyond doubt. Article 1 of the law associates the fact of increasing the contribution of agriculture to the progress of the French economy and invites us to consider agriculture like any other economic activity. Article 4 mentions the need to determine production objectives and the techniques to achieve them.
This agriculture based on productivity is further reinforced by the policy of Edgar Pisani, statesman at the origin of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), minister holding this portfolio from 1961 to 1966. This goes as far as has affirm in 1961:
“If tomorrow milk must be red to be sold and apples square, the National Institute of Agricultural Research will have to devote itself to this task. »
The idea of agriculture rooted in slowness is now history.
“Isn’t the future of agriculture in the rise of machinery? », asks Roland Maspétiol in his famous work of 1946 The eternal order of the fields. The affirmative seems indisputable: agriculture has indeed taken the path to productivity. To achieve this objective, the development of agricultural machinery was the first means. However, this objective would not have been fulfilled without the intervention of the law, which is likely to play the role of a “weapon” according to the formula of the sociologist of law Liora Israel. The machine, armed with law, seems to have indeed conquered agriculture. While waiting for the vote of a law which would extend this movement into 2024?
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