Agricultural History Review, Volume 68 Part 1 (2020), p. 139

‘The story of postwar French agriculture,’ argues Venus Bivar in this readable and well-researched book, ‘is really two stories that must be told in parallel: the story of a brutal state-mandated industrialization and the story of those who resisted it with alternative methods and markets’ (p. 181). That, in a nutshell, is the shape and content of the story told here. Five substantive chapters cover the years between 1944 and 1980, oscillating between the extraordinary growth of export-focused industrial farming, and the early development of an organic movement that would eventually inform the turn to quality, and the environmental concerns, of more recent years.

If not a frontal assault on the idea that France is a ‘bastion of gastronomic quality’ (p. 49), the book nonetheless sets out to correct the too rose-tinted, too myopic vision of the country’s recent rural past, inasmuch as the latter is transmitted to us through pervasive stories of tradition, appellations d’origine and terroir. Following the Second World War, Bivar argues that the land and the agricultural practices of France changed profoundly, as the national government sought to rationalize a patchwork landscape, modernize farming methods, promote the service economy, and improve the country’s balance of payments by exporting basic foodstuffs to the European common market. These changes are illustrated both with analysis of policy, media coverage, and economic figures, and with telling individual stories. Some of the economic figures are – if not surprising to some rural historians – at least remarkable: French exports to Europe increased by a factor of eight in the 1960s; total agricultural exports grew by 390 per cent between 1963 and 1974; and by that time, France stood as the second largest exporter of agricultural goods in the world.

One of the key arguments of the book is to be found in chapter 3, where Bivar explains that the idea of prosperity for all, so often used to justify post-war modernization efforts, was in reality limited to big players on the agricultural stage. As the size of viable farms increased, as farmers became increasingly indebted, as the number of farmers fell away, and as the state used its planning apparatus to help large farms consolidate their position, so disenchantment amongst small farmers spread. In the search for alternatives, Bivar charts the gradual rise of the organic movement, and hooks her analysis on key figures such as Raoul Lemaire and André Louis. We are shown a variety of motivations among the farmers and interested onlookers who join their ranks, and the community is built ‘one letter at a time’ (pp. 64–5), including collaboration across the border with farmers and scientists in Germany, and overseas. The organic products they helped to create in the 1950s and 1960s resonated first with popular ideas of health, vitality and purity, and later with growing anxieties about pesticides and environmental degradation. Though in the decades that followed, the organic movement split into different factions, its influence continued to grow, and in chapter 5 the author considers how its nationwide adoption by (generally small) farmers fed into an emerging policy agenda around environmental services, rural tourism, and the promotion of quality food and drink. In keeping with the book’s overall perspective, however, the author reminds us that whilst organic agriculture gained credibility in the 1970s, conventional agriculture was still going ‘at breakneck speed’ (p. 143).

Analysing the rural share of the trente glorieuses period of French history, Bivar convincingly argues that ‘the industrialization of French farming was one of the more stunningly thorough and brutally aggressive cases of agricultural transformation of the modern era’ (p. 176), and gives a nod to those scholars who have described the activity of the period as a revolution. She synthesizes a good deal of literature, much of it in French, and the book will provide substantial insight for those interested in that part of history but who can’t easily access it for language or other practical reasons. Bivar uses many of the farmers’ own words, harvested from personal correspondence and the media, and diligent archival work allows her, for instance, to adduce evidence for a concerted campaign by identifying the same content on two different union letterheads (p. 109).

Anyone coming at this book’s large subject in 200 pages is liable to receive criticism regarding omissions, particular foci, interpretation, and so on, notwithstanding the work’s merits. One very minor issue which might chafe rural historian readers is the use of the term ‘county’ in the French context in chapter 1. Because they had no official status in the period under study, talking of counties as opposed to départements, cantons or regions is more distracting than helpful, and given the departmental map provided at the front of the book, unnecessary. Slightly more than semantically, the coverage of ‘terroir’, including the brief assertion that it had been a term ‘largely dormant since the 1940s’ (p. 5), could be improved. Where the author points to the significance of the public being educated on France’s diverse produits de terroir in press coverage and government-sponsored guides in the 1980s, I would argue this formed part of a longer cultural tradition of associating place with product, one rehearsed through gastronomic and viticultural maps from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Indeed, it would have been instructive to mention the annual Salon Internationale de l’Agriculture, held in Paris every year since 1964, amidst the great transformations of modernization so well documented in Bivar’s book. That event offers a prospectus of agricultural goods from around the country and puts into motion what I have elsewhere called France’s geographical culture (‘Staging a nation’s culinary geography at the Salon de l’Agriculture’, Cultural Geographies, 2018, (25), pp. 643–9). Whilst we might disagree on the impact of that cultural sense, the author and I would probably agree on the propensity of many French products to rehearse a fantasy of rural France and its food production which diverts attention from its largely industrial character. Any scholar interested in that interface would be well advised to read this book.