In June 2023, the small village of Montjoi in the department of Tarn-et-Garonne became famous across France after the influencer Papacito broadcast a video on YouTube. In it, the far-right activist flew to the defence of a pig breeder at war with his village mayor over a country path that belongs to the municipality and leads to his farm. Two years earlier, Papacito had already been at the centre of a scandal under his real name Ugo Gil Jimenez, when he set up the execution of a mannequin decked out as an antifascist activist. In this new video, heavily armed men in balaclavas — the protectors of a farmer who was ‘a victim of the free masons’ — chasing a character dressed as a weasel who was supposed to represent the mayor. Once captured, the weasel was symbolically raped, then executed. The video received 500,000 views in a few days. After this, Christian Eurgal, the city councillor, had to be placed under police protection because he was receiving death threats. Yet the pig breeder was not known to be a far-right activist: he was actually the department’s spokesperson for the Confédération Paysanne, an agricultural union classified as being on the left.

‘All I ask is to be able to do my work and, for that, I demand dignified access to my farm,’ says Pierre-Guillaume Mercadal standing in front of the stones blocking the path leading down to his farm. A former security guard, Mercadal converted to organic mangalitza pig farming in 2017. He purchased around 30 hectares of woods in Montjoi and obtained all the permits he needed to carry out his work. Everything would have been fine if the path leading to his farm had not crossed the estate of a rich Englishman who, with the village mayor’s backing, decided to block entry. The municipality offered Mercadal another access route, but — he lamented wearily — ‘this path is dangerous for trucks and agricultural machinery’.

Then began a war of attrition involving threats, complaints and court cases. The breeder was backed by the Confédération Paysanne and France Nature Environnement. Despite efforts at reconciliation, the town hall ultimately chose to privatise the path, benefitting the British owner. Mercadal claims to have tried all legal avenues in vain and to be the victim of a feudal system installed by a friend of the mayor, a powerful local political leader. ‘Appealing to Papacito, whom I had met through Christian networks, was my last hope,’ he conceded.

Through farmers, the RN is more broadly targeting people who live in the countryside by playing on the rift between rural and urban populations, omnipresent in political debate.

‘Pierre-Guillaume Mercadal is no longer the spokesperson of the Confédération Paysanne, though he is still a member,’ said Nils Passedat, a farmer, union activist and the mayor of the village of Lavaurette. ‘I condemn Papacito’s abject video, but I support Mercadal as a farmer. He has a permit to work on the land issued by the authorities. The mayor of Montjoi should have provided him with a secure access route.’ Hélène Massip, the new representative of the union, commented: ‘These are the actions of a desperate man who has nothing left to lose. There’s talk about the rise of the far right in rural areas, but this is the consequence of the power of a crushing and dehumanised bureaucracy, a pure collective creation.’

Influencers with YouTube channels in the so-called ‘virilosphere’, who use the same provocative methods as Papacito, contrast the France of villages and rurality — cast as the bearer of healthy traditions, patriotic values ​​and roots — to that of cities polluted by feminism, anti-racism and multiculturalism. In 2021 Baptiste Marchais, who is a men’s rights activist, former national bench press champion and supporter of Éric Zemmour, invited former Pyrénées-Atlantiques deputy Jean Lassalle on his channel to eat enormous rare ribeyes and sing the praises of the authentic country; the video was viewed 1.4 million times. ‘Since the 1980s, under the influence of Alain de Benoist, theorist of the new right, rurality has been very important within the identitarian movement, for which it represents an eternal France,’ says Stéphane François, a researcher in political science at the University of Mons (Belgium). The rooted farmer is set in opposition to globalisation.’

A far-right fringe that is even more radical than the Rassemblement National (RN) is dreaming of conquering the countryside to develop ‘protected identitarian zones’, to use the terminology of the Génération Identitaire movement (dissolved in 2021). Before that, at the beginning of the 2010s, the La Desouchière community — a reference to ‘ethnic’ (‘de souche’) French people — settled in the commune of Mouron-sur-Yonne in Morvan; and a few years later a group of anti-feminist, identitarian female singers, Les Brigandes, created a community in La Salvetat-sur-Agout in Hérault. ‘Identitarian communities in France attempt to copy the American white supremacist model or that of the völkisch movement of 19th century Germany, which rejected modernity and defended traditional agriculture,’ explains Stéphane François. These activists defend organic and local produce but know nothing about the countryside. They are out of step with the RN, which is established in rural areas, and in favour of intensive agriculture, pesticides and chemical fertilisers and resistant to ecology.’

For decades, the agricultural world had felt close to the parliamentary right. The Front National had found it difficult to hold influence outside the cities. Yet in the 2022 presidential election, nearly a third of farmers voted for Marine Le Pen or Eric Zemmour in the first round (1). In the June legislative elections, the RN presented itself as a defender of the ‘forgotten countryside’, coming first in the second round in 9633 municipalities (mostly in rural areas) out of nearly 34,000, thus gaining 89 deputies. It had played on fear of immigration, a feeling of having been left behind, a defence of the suburban middle classes and the stigmatisation of those on benefits.

‘The combative discourse favoured by the far right resonates with the rivalries that divide the rural working classes, in particular over access to employment in the declining, massively deindustrialised countryside,’ the sociologist Benoît Coquard observed. Obviously, the RN did not fail to support protesting farmers last January, echoing some of their complaints, in particular regarding ‘punitive ecology’, the proliferation of red tape and unfair overseas competition. Through farmers, the RN is more broadly targeting people who live in the countryside by playing on the rift between rural and urban populations, omnipresent in political debate.

At the start of February 2023, Fabien Le Coïdic, a breeder in the town of Adainville, Yvelines, received a letter from his neighbours — including the publisher Odile Jacob. They were against his plan to put his cows on the land he had just bought. They point out that they had chosen to live in the area because of the quality of its environment, and said that ‘bringing back cows would be a return to heavy and unpleasant rurality that no longer has its place here. It’s a retrograde and cruel method of breeding.’ When their complaint was rejected by the administrative court of Versailles, the neighbours threatened to resort to other legal avenues. For Timothée Dufour, Le Coïdic’s lawyer, ‘We are witnessing a forced urbanisation of our countryside. The neo-rurals are seeking a protected living environment but they refuse to live alongside farmers and are increasingly prone to conflict.’

To illustrate this, the lawyer, who specialises in defending farmers and is close to the Fédération Nationale des Syndicats d’Exploitants Agricoles (National Federation of Farmers’ Unions, FNSEA, the dominant union, on the right), claims that 600 to 800 legal actions are carried out each year in France regarding neighbourhood disturbances in rural areas, though he admitted that he did not know how many related to farmers. On the website The Conversation (2), André Torre, research director at the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (INRAE), maintains that neighbourhood conflicts in the countryside are mainly the result of infrastructure works, energy-related projects or disputes over land use. When it comes to agriculture, they more often relate to the spreading of phytosanitary products than the crowing of roosters or the smell of cows. Dufour participated in the drafting of a law — spearheaded by Eric Dupond-Moretti, and written in collaboration with the FNSEA — which passed in December 2023, and aims to limit neo-rurals filing complaints against farmers.

Gendarmes against ‘agribashing’

On 13 August 2023 an op-ed in Le Journal du dimanche written by Dufour and the deputy for Les Républicains (LR) Julien Dive called out the Conseil d’État’s decision to suspend the dissolution of the green collective Les Soulèvements de la Terre (Risings of the Earth) ‘to the detriment of those in our rural community whose feeling of unease has been growing over the last ten years’ (3). They also deplored the disappearance of Déméter, a cell in the national gendarmerie created in October 2019 to combat hostility against farmers. Based on an agreement between the FNSEA, its ally the Jeunes Agriculteurs (Young Farmers, JA) and the ministry of the interior, it aimed to ensure the exchange of information about ‘agribashing’ between local observers. Agribashing is a term used since 2018 by the FNSEA to denounce criticism of the intensive mode of production it defends. Déméter was supposed to prevent potential acts of delinquency against farmers, as well as ‘actions of an ideological nature, whether simple actions of disparagement of the agricultural environment or violent actions that have material or physical repercussions’. In February 2021, Paris’s administrative court deemed this surveillance illegal and ordered the interior ministry to stop it.

Rather than calling into question an economic model that destroys public services and jobs or an agricultural productivity model that has led to the disappearance of the rural world, many defenders of that world prefer to exalt its supposed values. Hunting, fishing and tradition are major issues for them. In September 2021, a decision by the Conseil d’État prohibiting the use of bird hunting devices triggered demonstrations by tens of thousands of hunters and their supporters in Mont-de-Marsan, Forcalquier, Redon, Amiens etc. On 11 February 2023, 15,000 people protested in the streets of Montpellier to defend the Camargue bull race, known as the ‘bouvine’, following an article in Le Monde by ecologists and members of the Parti Animaliste (Animalist Party) demanding reform of the aspects of the race that cause the animals to suffer. Lauren Jaoul, mayor of Saint-Brès, once close to Les Républicains and organiser of the protest, on that occasion made accusations of ‘punitive ecology’. ‘Our traditions are being attacked by a political movement that is disturbed by our way of life,’ he explained. ‘This is not just a case of bullfighting being called into question. It is also the Tour de France, Christmas trees in public squares… It is nothing short of the deconstruction of a popular culture.’ Jaoul is now a candidate in the June 2024 European elections, alongside Willy Schraem, the president of the National federation of hunters, which is on the Alliance Rurale list created under the influence of people close to Emmanuel Macron in order to weaken the Rassemblement National. ‘The France we love is a France of hunting, of fishing, a France that eats meat, that lights a barbecue,’ says the hunters’ leader. ‘A France whose values are being threatened. The more technocrats meddle in our lives the less happy we are. Rural people just want to be left in peace.’

Rather than calling into question an economic model that destroys public services and jobs or an agricultural productivity model that has led to the disappearance of the rural world, many defenders of that world prefer to exalt its supposed values

For Pierre Cornu, a historian of rural life at the Lumière Lyon 2 university, ‘the glorification of rurality, the land and the peasantry is a feature of political debate that resurfaces regularly. According to whether we are in a phase of expansion or crisis, rural life is instrumentalised. Today we are in a systemic, ecological and economic crisis. The symbolic value of land is reactivated by conservative movements that use rustic imaginary to denounce liberalism, urban modernity, new ways of living and moral freedoms, which are signs of decadence.’

‘Only wolves and peasants know.’ So concluded Serge Bousquet-Cassagne’s 2023 new year wishes to the farmers of the department. Bousquet-Cassagne was the president of the Lot-et-Garonne chamber of agriculture and the leader of the farmer’s union Coordination rurale 47 (CR47). ‘This means that like wolves, farmers understand life, because they raise their animals and also kill them,’ he explains. ‘And like them, they hunt in packs. If I phrase things this way, it’s partly to exclude the rest of the population that I can no longer stand.’ On 28 March 2023, hundreds of people who came to demonstrate in front of the Villeneuve-sur-Lot health centre to protest against the closure of the maternity ward were stunned to see farmers from the CR47 and hunters in uniform a few dozen metres away, blocking the road leading to the city centre.

Bousquet-Cassagne had decided to prevent Marine Tondelier, national secretary of Europe Écologie-Les Verts (EELV), who was then visiting the department, from protesting, in retaliation for her participation in the Sainte-Soline demonstration against mega-basins. ‘You embody the root of the evil from which farmers suffer. Don’t come to visit us — things will go badly!’, threatened the president of the Chamber of Agriculture. Bousquet-Cassagne hates environmentalists and rails against all regulations that limit the use of pesticides or water. He has reigned supreme over the chamber since 2001, the year CR47 dethroned the local chapter of the dominant union, partly as a result of dissidence from the FNSEA. In 2019, he was re-elected president of the consular body with almost 60% of farmers’ votes. His charisma gives him some influence over farmers, even if the programme defended by CR47 does not call into question the model of intensive and competitive agriculture that undermines many small farmers. ‘His determined, sometimes aggressive behaviour appeals to some farmers,’ admitted Bernard Péré, a retired organic farmer and former EELV regional advisor. ‘He will defend any farmer threatened by the authorities. Even though the CR47 is run by large operators, he will work for smaller ones.’

Bousquet-Cassagne had a priest bless all 920,000 cubic metres of Lake Caussade, a project supported and financed, completely illegally, by the Chamber of Agriculture. He also did not hesitate to have an Our Father sung in the presence of state officials during a ceremony in memory of the peasants who died in the first world war. But while Bousquet-Cassagne has faith, he is lawless. In January 2024, a report from the Cour des Comptes severely criticised the management of the Lot-et-Garonne Chamber of Agriculture: it found the chamber lacked ethics, clear criteria for granting subsidies and had no internal controls, refused to implement the aims set by the law on animal welfare or on the use of phytosanitary products, to control the use of water by irrigators or to pay its debts to the supervisory chambers of agriculture. The report also highlights Bousquet-Cassagne’s willingness to confuse his responsibilities at the consular chamber with his interests as union leader. A self-proclaimed ‘pack leader’, he has always used the balance of power to impose his will on the department’s elected officials — for example in 2014 during the occupation of the town of Agen by hundreds of union farmers opposing the imposition of a water quality preservation program. The cost of the damage was estimated at more than €200,000. Asked why voting for Le Pen was so important to the farmers of Lot-et-Garonne, he showed off a poster from the Rural Coordination plastered in his office: ‘Give us a break! Let us do our jobs!’

When, in 2014, CR47 activists in Sivens in the neighbouring department of Tarn attacked opponents of the dam, they called themselves Green Shirts after the peasant defence committees created in 1934 by the far-right leader Henri Dorgères. At the helm of the Front Paysan, Dorgères organised major demonstrations against the republic, then against the Popular Front, making reference to an agrarian ideology that defended a peasant body bearing the values ​​of hard work, family and homeland in contrast to corrupt, modern and progressive cities. In his aggressive indictments, Dorgères attacked civil servants and parliamentarians, supposedly the sworn enemies of the peasant masses. The leader of the Green Shirts and the leaders of the Front Paysan would go on to collaborate with the Vichy regime.

Is the CR agrarian? It was not when it was created in 1991, at the time of the reform of the EU’s common agricultural policy (CAP), which had been dedicated to European food self-sufficiency, but then opened European agricultural markets to global competition imposed by the World Trade Organisation (WTO). In order to oppose the reform backed by the FNSEA and defend national production, a coalition was created in the South-West made up of activists from the Peasant Confederation, the Mouvement de Défense des Exploitants Familiaux (Movement for the Defence of Family Farmers, Modef, close to the communist party), dissidents from the FNSEA and non-unionised peasants. In June 1992, this movement organised the blockade of Paris and intercepted heavy goods vehicles from Spain, loaded with fruits and vegetables competing with local producers. Soon, the right wing of the movement ousted its left and founded the Coordination Rurale. During the 2019 elections to the chambers of agriculture, the FNSEA-JA duo won 55.55% of the vote, ahead of the CR (21.54%), the Peasant Confederation (20%) and Modef (1.89% ), with a 53.48% abstention rate.

Soliciting votes

Agrarianism also influenced the FNSEA. ‘When after the second world war the FNSEA was created by the agrarian movements that had collaborated with the Vichy regime, it adopted their model of social construction based on corporatism,’ says historian David Bensoussan. ‘To launch its productivist model, the agricultural world had to come together and transcend social divisions. Corporatism allowed certain actors such as big grain or beet farmers to ensure they controlled the union, regardless of the profound inequalities in income, status and practices of farmers. It is because it claims to represent all farmers that the FNSEA has been able to engage in the modernisation of agriculture with the backing of the state.’

The federation is often led by agro-industry bosses, such as Xavier Beulin (from 2010 to 2017), then chairman of the board of directors of the Avril group, a leader in vegetable oils and proteins (Lesieur, Puget etc), biodiesel and animal nutrition; or like Arnaud Rousseau, since April 2023 Beulin’s successor at head of the board of directors of Avril, who has seen his revenues skyrocket with inflation in recent years. Since 1966, the dominant agricultural union, closely linked to the interests of agro-industry, has administered (with the JA) the Conseil de l’Agriculture Française (French Agricultural Council, CAF), which jointly manages French agricultural policy with the State. Recognition of the pluralism of agricultural unions in 1981 has not led to other unions being represented within the CAF.

For Gilles Luneau, author of La Forteresse agricole. Une histoire de la FNSEA (The Agricultural Fortress. A history of the FNSEA, Fayard, Paris, 2004), ‘the myth of peasant unity allowed the FNSEA to build the agro-industrial system with which it now dictates its own law to those in power. Compared to 1950, today there are a sixth of the farmers and a tenth of the agricultural workers. Farmers have become subcontractors of the industry, performers of specialised technical actions. The FNSEA refuses to hear any criticism of this system. If its leaders, and those of the CR, still speak in the language of agrarianism, it is to justify a counter-revolution against ecological and climate issues. They are incapable of admitting that their models are limited or of thinking about how to escape these limits.’

The RN’s strategy is the same as that of European far-right parties riding on the back of farmers’ protests in the Netherlands, Spain, Romania and the United Kingdom

The RN also adopted an agrarian ideology to win the votes of farmers and residents of rural areas. All while exploiting the supposed divide between French people and immigrants, today the party is also exploiting the rift between rural and urban worlds again. Its sights are set on ‘punitive ecology’: in its opinion, civil servants and technocrats in Paris and Brussels who impose environmental standards are the root of all farmers’ misfortunes. The RN’s strategy is the same as that of European far-right parties riding on the back of farmers’ protests in the Netherlands, Spain, Romania and the United Kingdom. However Le Pen’s party has no plan to break with common agricultural policy, and in November 2021 its MEPs voted unanimously for the new CAP 2023-2027, which reinforces a model that is productivist, increasingly technological and based on competitive performance in international markets. The CAP also perpetuates an unfair distribution of subsidies, benefitting large farms. For this reason, in the European Union, 81% of direct aid is received by 20% of farmers. ‘As premiums are paid per hectare, the CAP contributes to the concentration of land by large companies and therefore to the disappearance of small farms,’ says Véronique Marchesseau, the general secretary of the Confédération Paysanne. The RN’s opposition to free trade treaties also has its limits: if, in November 2023, its MEPs voted against a deal with New Zealand, the other members of the Identity and Democracy group to which they belong voted for it. During the January 2024 vote in the European Parliament on a free trade agreement with Chile, the only RN deputy present abstained.

Tractors blessed by a priest

To cast its net wide, in 2020 the party launched the Les Localistes movement. Its manifesto calls on French people to ‘take back control of [their] territories, make their own laws and give life to [their] little homelands that make France greater’. Andréa Kotarac, the new leader of the movement who was also elected as a member of the RN to the regional council of Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, claims that ‘localism stands in opposition to globalism, which destroys our territories, our landscapes, products and industries. Reindustrialing and protecting our agriculture is also fighting climate change, which is essentially due to our imports and their transportation.’ Not too fussy about contradictions, Kotarac did not draw attention to the carbon emitted when exporting French produce, or interrogate French farming’s ability to function without the yearly import of 3.6 million tons of soy from Brazil and Argentina, which issue in large part from deforestation. If his party increasingly wields concepts like ‘localism’, ‘de-urbanisation’ and ‘the agricultural exception’, it is all the better to conceal that it lacks a programme that might call the whole system into question.

During the mobilisation of January 2024, CR47 became notable for the violence of its demonstrations: in Agen, tens of thousands of litres of liquid manure were poured in front of administrative buildings, the station and some businesses; a McDonalds was ransacked when the employees refused to serve the vice president of the union a free coffee. Members of CR47 also hung and disemboweled a boar in front of the work inspectorate to protest controls targeting conditions for agricultural workers. (In 2004 the union had backed a farmer hiring seasonal migrants who had shot at two inspectors.) The town hall estimates the damage in Agen will amount to more than €400,000. At the end of January, in a bid to ‘gather all of deep France around us’, Bousquet-Cassagne called for the Rungis market to be ‘taken’, and had CR47 tractors blessed by a priest and set them on the road to Paris; their fuel was financed by the chamber of agriculture. ‘Come lead our last fight, otherwise our race will disappear and, with it, our civilisation’, he told farmers. Shortly before, he had said he was prepared to become a candidate for the RN.