Contenu du sommaire : Revisiter l'histoire des sociétés rurales

Feeding human societies has always been the most serious challenge, and it became more acute with urban growth. The discussions of this roundtable aim at understanding how societies dealt with this priority. Looking back over the past centuries since the Middle Ages, it seems obvious that bad weather was not the only factor in food shortages. Most important were political choices, and among these, distribution mechanisms were decisive, be it the local market, the world market or the globalisation of trade policies. The second part of the roundtable focuses on the current situation. After 1950, with the population booming, agricultural production succeeded in feeding the population in spite of unprecedented population growth thanks to agricultural policies with economic and social aims, based on agronomic research. But today, intensive farming methods are revealing their limits and are rejected by European societies worried about the quality of their food, environmental protection and climate change.

The 1929 crisis was also an agricultural downturn whose magnitude has not been ignored by historians, but whose link with the depression that overwhelmed all economic sectors remains problematic. Should it be considered as a marginal and separate phenomenon that merely accompanied the broader crisis, or should we think that it had a decisive effect on the emergence of the Great Depression in the 1930s? The debate has not been avoided, especially in the English-language literature, but it has remained unsettled. It came to the fore again with the recent contribution of Joseph Stiglitz who, in a bold parallel with the 2008 crisis, attributed responsibility for the 1929 crisis to agriculture. The ambition of this paper is by no means to close this chapter, but to retrace the thread of this history and refocus this very complex issue on the setbacks suffered by farmers. The aim is to exploit the rich US statistics and to compare them with those found in British, French and Italian archives, in order to analyse the mechanisms whereby the profound malaise affecting farmers in the run-up to 1929 may have degenerated into a general crisis, or whereby which it may have amplified the latter during the 1930s.

This paper investigates the increasing specialisation of fruit and vegetable producers from a labour perspective. It focuses on the case of the Vaucluse region between 1945 and the end of the 1950s. The data from the first farm census are used as a starting point to reassess the contrasting pairs (household/wage, permanent/seasonal, local/foreign) that can traditionally be identified in the organisation of agricultural work. Fruit and vegetable farming is particularly interesting because of its dependence on the capacity to reconcile two requirements. On the one hand, these crops rely on intensive mobilisation of labour for as long over the year as possible. On the other hand, their production requires a flexible system of employment capable of providing a rapid and timely response in order to preserve the quality and profitability of the harvests against the risks connected to markets or bad weather. While the family was confirmed as the primary source of full-time and temporary workers, the archives of the Commission paritaire départementale de travail agricole allow us to examine in greater depth the crucial role of wage labour. The debates on the diversity of statuses and remuneration systems then become an opportunity to explore how gender, age and qualification shaped working conditions. They broaden our understanding of the new tensions caused by the acceleration of the exodus from rural areas and from farming as an occupation.

The adoption in France of the American model of agricultural modernisation has been particularly well studied in terms of agricultural motorisation policies. This paper aims to shed light on the ambivalence of these “lessons from American agriculture” by studying the fears of soil deterioration that coincided with the widespread use of tractors under the French Fourth Republic. By highlighting the circulation of these warnings among rural specialists and the 'agricultural profession' that was then taking shape, we show how, from the Chambers of Agriculture to the Commissariat général au Plan, concern for soil conservation became part of the definition of good farming policy.

Throughout the early modern and modern period, land and territory (and access to the natural resources they opened up) were the subject of negotiation and conflict between different protagonists. This was the case during the two main waves of colonial expansion and decolonising reaction (16th-18th centuries and 19th-20th centuries), and has continued into the 21st century. This paper endeavours to draw attention to colonial usurpation and appropriation of land over the long term, and the response of rural people around the world. Yet it also aims to view the current “landgrabbing” (whereby financial forces have taken over from landowning ones on a global scale, a trend that has been gathering pace since the 2007-2008 crisis) in an historical perspective. This financialisation process is still ongoing, mobilising a variety of social and institutional agents around the world, and has probably put an end to the globalisation of landowning.

As in many other countries, the current landowning dispute in Algeria has its roots in the colonial past. However, its constant renewal suggests massive and repeated infringements of land rights from the 19th to the early 21st century; the need for a significant portion of the population to still defend its rights (either inherited or more recently acquired); and an individual or collective capacity to claim these rights. Yet since the liberal shift of the 1980s-1990s and the recognition of deeds from the colonial period for Algerian citizens only, Algeria's situation is unique in that disputes generally involve situations that arose after independence, while leveraging litigation expertise, individual and collective rights recognised under French domination.

This essay offers an interpretation of the emergence and development of rural land sales in French-speaking West Africa. These transactions do not emerge endogenously within local societies, but are structured by the relationship between autochthonous sellers and migrant (Ivorian or foreign) buyers. They often remain socially embedded: the payment thus does not end the relationship, but instead establishes or perpetuates it. In such a situation, it does not allow a firm, definitive, indisputable sale to be concluded, especially because – apart from very few exceptions – rural land transactions remain informal and outside the legal framework. These land transfers raise the issue of how the parties understand the purpose of the transaction (i.e., is the land being purchased, or merely the right to use it?), and whether or not it is an outright sale. The answer must be empirically assessed in a given place and time. The commodification of access to land in West Africa illustrates situations of normative and institutional pluralism.

This paper examines the way in which rural populations, considered to be rooted in one place, understand the transformation of their village into an industrial suburb during the 19th century; it is based on the case of the town of Ivry, south of Paris, from the end of the 18th century to the 1860s. After noting that social historians of the suburbs have lacked interest in the populations of these rural areas before their transformation into industrial towns, the paper defines the notion of rootedness and the method for measuring it. Then, it examines the social relations of the most “rooted” inhabitants in these areas in terms of sociability practices and forms of investment in the town's community life. The research is based on two main indicators: the choice of wedding witnesses, on the one hand, and inhabitants' membership in local associations (brotherhoods), on the other. It highlights the existence of “social enclave” strategies among individuals from the “old peasant families”, which continued to structure social life within this changing territory, well past the time when Ivry had become a town.

Over the past 25 years, French historiography has changed our vision of 19th century rural societies. Instead of an unchanging world dominated by a narrow, mainly aristocratic elite, a more complex world has been highlighted, in which economic and cultural upheavals and the introduction of universal male suffrage prompted an expansion of rural elites. While the elites at the beginning of the century were defined by their material wealth, their local roots and their social capital, they diversified thanks to the importance given to knowledge and their capacity to join networks of power given their professional skills.

The experiences of Old Order Amish women and men in 1930s Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, demonstrate in sharp relief the characteristics and practices that enabled successful family farming during the Great Depression. Rejecting the notion of mechanised, capital-intensive agriculture in favour of traditional, labour-intensive family farming, the Amish practised a system of labour that necessarily required the crossing of strict gender-role boundaries. Although men primarily identified as farmers and women as homemakers, agricultural success among the Amish necessitated a significant degree of cooperation and mutual labour. Employing data from the US government's Consumer Expenditure Surveys, the author investigates how the gender arrangements of Lancaster County's Amish population enabled them to survive the Great Depression more successfully than many other agrarian communities.