They 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 of the status of majority in the population, that of minority”, summarizes François Purseigle, sociologist in Cevipof and specialist in the agricultural question. The paintings of survey institutes, whose “farmers” line has been removed for ten years, are one of the multiple symptoms. “The number of farmers interviewed as part of the construction of a representative sample of the French population of 1,000 people has indeed become too low – of the order 10 to 15 individuals on average – so that we can Statistically analyze their answers, explain 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 have been as if striking the map. “A demographic decline which combines a form of geographic isolation, these weighing only in areas located remotely of decision-making centers and the most economically attractive places.
Despite the visibility of the agricultural show, where elected officials and ministers flock each year, for a weekend, the political weight of this profession was also mechanically crumbling. “We are now afraid of truckers or refiners, capable of blocking the country, admits Frédéric Dabi, director general of Ifop. Farmers are a population that is monitored, a bit like hunters, with which Emmanuel Macron is however More present. “The big demonstrations with tractors and dumping of manure before the prefectures, which enamelled the 1990s, became the symbol of the disappearance of the agricultural world, in a country which nevertheless continues to think of itself sovereign in food.
This decline is also found in the training and experience of political staff, less educated in the agricultural cause than in the past. “In the post-war period, politicians, especially those of the republican right, made their classes in the countryside, says François Purseigle. It was necessary to understand what France was. It is less true today . The detour by a rural district 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 point, elected from a District prevailing agricultural. Until Nicolas Sarkozy, “the first to have made his classes in Neuilly”, analyzes the researcher, who wonders: could we still win an election by saying “being an apple eater”, like Jacques Chirac? Or by displaying, like François Mitterrand, in front of a valley stung with a bell tower?
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