Even today, it is difficult for sociology to classify farmers in a social category. (© Terre-net Media)

Some stereotypes die hard because the social images associated with them have renewed functions. Even though agriculture has been revolutionized so many times since the 19th century, literature, painting, TV shows, fiction and today documentaries continue to take up the figure of the eternal peasant, from Zola to Sorry. But it should be differentiated chronologically.

Raymond Depardon talks about his book “Rural” published in 2020 (Fondation Cartier, 2020).

Unclassifiable farmers

The peasants have long been understood as separate, unclassifiable on the axis separating capital and labour. Neither bourgeois nor proletarian, holder of his means of production but ultimately only exploiting himself and/or his family, the farmer resists the social polarization of capitalism. As a result, sociology has long failed to classify farmers.

We can extend the difficulty beyond the position in the relations of production since the farmers would also be, as Pierre Bourdieu wrote, a "population totally foreign to the legitimate culture and even, essentially, to the average culture ".

Population dispossessed of itself in the production of its social image, farmers bend in this perspective to an image defined by the dominant on themselves. The very word peasant can then function as an insult, signifying at the same time clumsiness, lack of culture, heavy body and finally maladjustment to urban society. This is the whole point of the "object class" of Pierre Bourdieu, for whom "folklorization, which puts the peasantry in the museum and which converts the last peasants into guardians of a nature transformed into a landscape for city dwellers, is the accompaniment necessary for dispossession and expulsion".

In this sense, museographic ethnology is only the instrument for the construction of a peasant image to the taste of the bourgeoisie, confirming the dominated position of the farmers.

“Peasant”, a requalified word

With the very disappearance of the peasant condition, this state of affairs of the 1960s and 1970s was reinvented in the light of economic and political interests, reversing the meaning of the word peasant.

The peasant or winegrower universe is now widely used in the luxury food industry, from raw milk cheese to fine wines, showcasing the regional, the authentic, the simple, as a guarantee of goodness in a opposition system built from cultural regionalism and regional gastronomy against sophisticated and artificial products.

Similarly, the sociologist Jean-Claude Chamboredon had early pointed out, particularly in the case of Provence, the link between deindustrialization, empaissannement of populations, wild landscapes and development of the tourist industry.

Or again, alternative agricultural trade unionism today requalifies the word peasant, reversing the stigma, precisely to make it the guarantor of production on a human scale, against globalization and dependence on food capitalism.

Thus, a large part of the peasant universe is today the object of positive marketing, both commercial and political, and which, from the winemaker's wine to the return of good bread to the organic producer in Amap, likes to put forward the opposition to industry, exploitation and capitalism, making the peasant a new modern actor of productive reinvention, an almost natural aesthetic.

Saint-Nazaire and organic market gardening (Saint-Nazaire and Agglomeration/Youtube, 2019)

The social critique of productivism

This plural peasant stereotype is however far from exhausting the common representations of the agricultural worlds, marked by institutions with various stakes. This is particularly true on the side of public policies which have changed everything from their injunctions in a few decades.

Even though it was a question, from the 1960s to the beginning of the 2000s, of hastening the abandonment of small farms for land concentration and productivist development armed with science and techniques – transforming peasants into modern farmers at the cost of of a drastic reduction in their number, in 1962 the share of farmer-operators in employment was 16%, in 2019 it is only 1.5% -, it is now necessary to borrow a completely different way, to transform farmers into so many guardians of the planet through agroecology.

A sum of representations has therefore come to be grafted onto these issues, ranging from social criticism of the productivist model and the most concentrated capitalist agriculture - an industrial agriculture of excess and polluting, generating disease for human beings and destruction of biodiversity – up to the criticism of the assistantship for these entrepreneurs whose markets are insufficient to support their activity without the help of the public authorities.

This contemporary media image of polluting and assisted entrepreneurs has replaced that of the modernized peasants of the 1970s and functions as a wound of pride for these unfinished capitalists, these fallen champions of productivism, still dependent on public policies, forced into entrepreneurial diversification.

Union miserabilism

This diffraction of the social image of farmers is also the product of union strategies. We can even speak of “trade union misery” as a communication strategy, as the discourse on poverty, agribashing, low incomes or the over-suicide of farmers is deliberately reproduced to support demands.

Thus, paradoxically, the most positive discourses on agriculture and farmers are constructed by new entrants who try to reinvent the world in the countryside. Welcoming the people of sweet dreamers is not new to agriculture. Beginning in the 1970s, neo-rurals attempted an alternative reinvention of social life in which the nurturing function of agriculture was one of the pivots to this anti-institutional autonomy.

The agricultural project as a reversal of the social order

Today, the development of alternative projects in agriculture continues to gain ground: to settle, as the children of the urban bourgeoisie do within the AMAPs, and thus maintain their social dispositions by becoming agricultural producers of this same bourgeoisie.

Or even to become agricultural employees, like those highly qualified shepherds who see in a profession in the heart of the mountain pastures a reversal of the social order, a great job in contrast to the parasitic professions that are the bullshit jobs of finance.

As surprising as it may seem for the sociologist particularly keen on social hierarchies, certain doctors in social sciences today would rather settle down as a farmer than become a researcher.

Agriculture, by its materiality, by the myth of independence, by the relationship with nature, continues to give concrete meaning to the activity, and in this, retains a strong power of attraction and social hope. .

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