The Dominici Affair

by Martin Kitchen

  Announced in 1947, the first five-year plan had two aims—by 1950 attain the level of production of 1929, which was the highest in the prewar years, and by 1952 surpass it by 25 percent. The plan’s emphasis was on coal, electricity, steel, cement, and tractors. It concentrated on the industrial north, where the most fertile land was amalgamated to increase the production of cereal crops. Sugar beet production was intensified and dairy farming encouraged. Southern France was largely neglected, so small peasant holdings were doomed. It was an imaginative and comprehensive scheme, but it was difficult to see how, given the parlous state of French finances, these ambitious goals could possibly be achieved. Salvation was achieved chiefly by means of the Marshall Plan, through which France received about $2.5 billion. This was enough to plug the dollar gap and to maintain the value of the franc, which had steadily lost value since 1945 due to both an alarming rate of inflation caused by a tripling of nominal wages between 1945 and 1948 and a decline in purchasing power by a third. These problems were further compounded by the successful reorganization of northern agriculture. It led to a bumper wheat harvest in 1948, resulting in overproduction and a sharp decline in agricultural prices as the glut replaced scarcity before bottoming out in 1951.

  The Marshall Plan marked the break with the Communist Party and the real beginning of the Cold War. The times were difficult. As elsewhere in Europe, employees were called upon to work long hours for wretched wages. Thorez and four other communist ministers were expelled from the provisional government. Some of this backfired. The Communist Party posed as champions of French culture, which the party claimed was under attack from sneaking Americanization, thanks to Hollywood and the Marshall Plan. Initially this stance brought the party some additional support, but in the long run the Stalinist toady Thorez, who had endorsed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and who had deserted to Moscow during France’s greatest danger, could hardly pose as the savior of France’s cultural independence. Nor were the communists able to form an independent peasant movement despite all their appeals for an alliance between the peasantry and the working class. Sharp divisions on the land among agricultural entrepreneurs, independent peasants like Gaston Dominici, sharecroppers such as Paul Maillet, and agricultural laborers were compounded by the industrial workers’ innate aversion to the peasantry.

  Yet despite all these problems, France had made significant progress. By 1949 wages were rising faster than prices and rationing was abolished.9 By 1952 the goals of the five-year plan had been largely met. The problem of inflation remained severe, but in 1952 the center-right government of Antoine Pinay began to get the situation under control by drastically cutting back public investment. The government was also helped in that since 1950 the United States paid 80 percent of the cost of its proxy war in Indochina.

  From 1945 to 1973, when the world economy was shattered by the oil crisis, industrial production in France rose 4.5 times, or at an annual rate of 5.9 percent. France had ceased to be essentially an agricultural country, with 40 percent of the population classified as “farmers and peasants,” and was now an industrial society with a mere 8 percent working on the land. Agricultural prices steadily declined relative to those in industry. The drop had begun in the 1870s with the mass influx of grain and meat from the Americas and was further exacerbated until prices were offset by the subsidies of the European Commission’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which was agreed upon in 1960 and came into force two years later. CAP sustained moribund sectors of the agricultural economy at enormous expense and with dubious political and ethical consequences.10 Prime Minister Georges Pompidou made no bones about the role of the CAP in restructuring the French economy. The Treaty of Rome initially only created a common market for industrial goods that left France unable to compete with the overwhelming superiority of German industry. CAP offered compensation, whereby subsidies from other member states provided remunerative outlets for French agriculture. The state was thereby relieved of the burden of supporting the farming sector and could concentrate on lightening the burden weighing on industry.11

  The world of Gaston Dominici was doomed by the forces of modernity. A smallholding such as the Grand’ Terre, which sat between a main road and a railway and would soon be joined by an expressway—all signifiers of the forces that were to destroy it—could not possibly survive. Capital for mechanization and modernization, subsidies, tax relief, and price supports were only lavished on the big sugar beet and grain producers of the north. Peasants such as Gaston Dominici also could not compete with the wine, fruit, and olive oil producers of southern France, where the market was already glutted. Small peasant farmers were thus barely able to struggle on at the subsistence level. Agriculture still exists in the region because the European Union provides subsidies and the French government wants to avoid other violent protests against its proposals to further rationalize agriculture, a program that involves closing down uneconomical farms.

  French society was being rapidly transformed at a time when the country was to face a series of humiliations and defeats. The ignominy of 1940 was hardly offset by the exaggerated contribution of the Resistance, whose 160,000 members—most of whom were very late arrivals—roughly equaled the full-time collaborators. The year of Gaston’s trial, 1954, also saw France’s defeat in Indochina and the beginning of the Algerian revolt, which would lead to a shattering humiliation and leave the country on the brink of civil war. The Suez crisis of 1956 was a further embarrassment but was overshadowed by the Battle of Algiers that began that same year. The lesson that de Gaulle drew from Suez was that France’s future lay not with a close relationship with les Anglo-Saxons in Britain and America but in Europe, where the country could aspire to leadership. Thus, from 1958 he began his quixotic schemes to restore to la grande nation something of its former glory.

  The modernization of French society bore a high price tag. The average citizen was better off and enjoyed the benefits of a consumer society, but the gap between rich and poor grew ever wider. The movement from the countryside to urban centers caused overcrowding and a severe pressure on essential services. With the Algerian war ending in a crushing defeat, France was faced with the integration of the Harkis, or those Algerians who remained loyal to France, as well as the colonial French Pieds-Noirs (French citizens of Algeria). Immigration from North Africa and the former French colonies created further problems that the government addressed inadequately. Violence and racism spiraled. Mounting social tensions placed an intolerable pressure on the generous French model of the welfare state, while entrenched interests made any fundamental reform an intractable problem.

  In such an atmosphere, it is hardly surprising that there was a widespread hankering after the good old days when it appeared that life was simpler, values more secure, and people more honest and authentic. The search began for a mythical France profonde (Deep France), otherwise known as la douce France (sweet France), la bonne vielle France (good old France), or la France éternelle (eternal France). “Peasantism” and “agrarianism,” two widely used if inelegant neologisms, are deeply engrained in France, a country where people are exceptionally proud of their peasant ancestry; and that sensibility served to make their adjustment to the industrial age all the more difficult. As Nobel Laureate François Mauriac put it, France is a country where “Cybele has more disciples than Christ.” There was a lingering feeling that there was something in the physiocrat François Quesnay’s dictum that “the earth is the sole source of wealth” and that the peasantry was the only truly productive class.12 Once this transformation became irreversible a sentimental attachment to the rustic, both on the left and on the right, began to express itself in terms of a search for “authenticity,” the “natural,” and “community.” In time of uncertainty and change, the appeal of a sentimentalized version of a rural past is hard to resist. It can be found in Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village” (1770), Matthew Arnold’s “Scholar Gypsy” (1853), Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After
” (1886), and Jacques Brel’s “C’est comme ça” (1954) to name but a random few.

  This romanticized vision of French rural life was far removed from the brutal depictions of the peasantry by Balzac and Zola. Even the peasant world as presented in the popular works of Émile Guillaumin—a man who had five years of schooling, farmed 3 hectares (7.4 acres), and won the Prix Goncourt in 1904—was fearful, superstitious, and wretchedly subjected to harsh treatment by the more fortunate. Gradually the vanished world of the clog maker, the charcoal burner, the hedger and ditch digger, the itinerant worker, and the tinker was seen as embodying inestimable human values, and its loss was the cause of much that was wrong with the modern world. This distorted vision was reinforced by the myth that the French Revolution had led to a radical redistribution of landed property that, in turn, made the peasants the heirs of the republic, the embodiment of the essence of France.

  Nouville: Un Village Français, the first of many books that awoke a renewed interest in a way of life that was rapidly disappearing, was written by two outstanding ethnologists Lucien Bernot and René Blanchard in 1952. The next year saw the publication of a collection of papers on rural and urban life edited by the sociologist Georges Friedmann. Laurence Wylie’s study of a village in the Vaucluse, published in 1957, soon became an established classic and was widely read in France.13 The 1960s witnessed a growing interest in social history, cultural studies, and popular culture. In 1967 Henri Mendras published his study of the demise of the French peasant.14 This interest led in the following decade to the astonishing international success of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou; the publication of Georges Duby and Armand Wallon’s multivolume history of rural France, whose last volume of is titled La Fin de la France paysanne (The end of peasant France); as well as Michel Foucault’s analysis of medical, legal, and national discourses on language, rurality, and state power as illustrated by the parricide case of Pierre Rivière. Foucault’s work was greatly influenced by Jean Giono’s meditations on the Dominici trial and by Roland Barthes’s semiological approach to the case.15 There was much talk in such intellectual circles of violence as a dialectical response to the imperialism of language and as the sole means by which the voice of the dispossessed could gain a hearing. Was Gaston Dominici’s violent character the means by which a barely literate person, unable to express himself in intelligible and unambiguous French, an expression of revolt against a capitalist economy that was gradually strangling him? Was not his position analogous to that of the developing world’s peasantry, whose violent struggle against imperialist exploitation was fervently endorsed by the intellectual left?

  The sentimental attachment to rural France—encouraged by environmentalists, local politicians on the lookout for juicy subsidies, peasants struggling to make ends meet, and the wealthy concerned about the bucolic surroundings of their holiday homes—has had some strange results. Most noticeable is the extraordinary tolerance displayed in the face of violent manifestations of rural discontent. Roads are blocked with burning tires, streets are barricaded with surplus fruit, tractors bring traffic to a standstill, and the easily aroused Frenchman shrugs the whole business off with a tolerant reference to the hard lot of les paysans.16

  The most astonishing example of such forbearance was the popularity of José Bové, a California-bred draft dodger, former hippie, and prankster, who bears a striking physical resemblance to the comic book character Astérix. He led colorful campaigns to smuggle Roquefort cheese into the United States, to outlaw genetically manipulated crops, to legalize marijuana, and to protest globalization and agribusiness. He achieved international fame in 1999 when he led a group of protestors who demolished a McDonald’s restaurant at Millau, an act that he compared to the storming of the Bastille. He received a very modest sentence for this action.

  Bové’s half-baked ideology—a potent mixture of undifferentiated anti-Americanism, French chauvinism, and protectionism disguised as antiglobalization and anticapitalism—ensured him widespread popularity that was symptomatic of a fundamental change in attitudes toward the countryside and the peasantry since the 1950s.17 When Gaston Dominici repeatedly said during his trial, “Je suis franc z’loyal. Je suis un bon Français,” he was reacting to the stereotype of the French peasant as sly, sneaky, secretive, and unpatriotic.18 With the critiques of the capitalist state, anti-imperialism, Third World liberation, ecology, subsidiarity, regionalism, and the discovery of the countryside as an oppositional space, the typical peasant was increasingly seen as a frank, loyal, and good French person. The “wild boar of Lurs” became the victim of the colonization of the countryside, a hapless being living in a world saturated by signification but with no access to meaning and trapped at the intersection of disparate discourses.

  In the interwar years, successive French governments faced the intractable problem of how to address the issue of the peasantry. Should the system be preserved in the interests of social stability or drastically modified to increase productivity, lower costs, and ensure increased exports? The problem was essentially one of the distribution of land. In 1929 there were one million dwarf farms of less than 1 hectare (2.5 acres) and three million farms of less than 10 hectares (25 acres), into which category the Grand’ Terre would have fallen. Another statistic showed that 10 percent of farmers owned half the agricultural land, and the remaining 90 percent of farmers tended the other half. Even as late as 1975, 62 percent of French farms were still less than 20 hectares (49 acres).19 Eighty-eight percent of peasants owned the land on which they worked.

  Farmers, great and small, did well during the war and the immediate postwar years due to food shortages, rationing, and a thriving black market. But agricultural prices collapsed in 1948. Production barely increased compared with 1938, whereas industry had grown by 40 percent. Only 5 percent of public investment was earmarked for agriculture, most of which went to large estates. The country faced a “scissors crisis,” where industrial prices rose ever higher than those in agriculture, resulting in widespread discontent on the land.

  The peasantry was renowned for its hostility toward the authorities in Paris, an attitude known as incivisme (lack of civic-mindedness). Many lived a wretched life of heavily indebted penury and were never able for lack of capital to rise above the subsistence level. They were resentful of bureaucratic regulations and others’ apparent lack of concern with their plight. It was a situation that the Communist Party skillfully exploited. Once the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the party had adopted the slogan of “Democracy, peace, and France” and posed as champions of the antifascist struggle. With the onset of the Cold War and the expulsion of the communists from the government, the party placed renewed emphasis on the class struggle. A quote from Stalin was unearthed that provided highest sanction for a bid to win support among the peasantry within a new political situation. As the Soviet dictator prepared to send millions of peasants to their deaths in his collectivization program, he had cynically announced that the aim of his policy was “to transform the peasantry from the reserve of the bourgeoisie into a reserve and ally of the working class.” This sounded well and good in theory, but there was little chance of it ever working in France. It was highly unlikely that a fétishisme paysanne (peasant fetishism) would soon match the party’s fétichisme ouvrière (factory worker fetishism). Industrial workers regarded peasants, even the most wretched among them, as “egoists,” “rich men,” and culturally backward. In turn, peasants thought of industrial workers as having a “soft life” as a result of “coddling” by indulgent governments eager to win their support.20

  A grand alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry was thus never in the cards, as rural society was characterized more by internal conflicts than by cooperation. But the communists pointed to the gross inequalities in the distribution of land and fanned resentment against agribusiness and government inaction in the face of a mounting crisis. Slogans such as “There is land to distribute” and “The land belongs to those who
cultivate it” found widespread resonance. The peasantry had no desire for a Soviet France or for being herded into collective farms, but the people saw the communists as useful allies against a government that showed little concern with their plight. They agreed that the Marshall Plan had done nothing to help agriculture, they saw the Council of Europe’s agricultural plan as a direct threat in that it removed protective barriers between member states, and many felt a strong affective attachment to a Communist Party that seemed to be upholding the traditions of peasant radicalism. The peasantry had deep feelings and resentments that were not carefully analyzed, but the Communist Party was able to articulate them clearly and without ideological obfuscation. Party cells in rural areas provided a sense of community, cooperation, and purpose that was otherwise lacking, and the rigid Stalinist party hierarchy ensured that they were not troubled with ideological or political decision-making. Peasant communism was thus affective rather than intellectual. It provided a means of expressing their wounded pride, their jealousy, their mistrust, and their ambitions. Some French intellectuals dreamed that an alliance between the peasantry and the industrial working class could be forged, one that would lead to a new society, but the divisions between the two factions and among themselves, compounded by the profound individualism of the peasants, rendered such a dream utopian.21