French Defenders of the Countryside
The French electoral system is notable for many things, the main one being the country’s top-two primary system, in which the top-ranked candidates advance to the second round of voting. Often, the first round of any Presidential election includes at least three or four left-wing to far-left candidates, which can result in oddities like 2002’s center-right (Chirac) vs far-right (Jean-Marie Le Pen) runoff. However, fewer people notice how there’s almost always an agrarian populist representing “La France périphérique”, in the words of political sociologist Christophe Guilluy. Large parts of the country, as in other Western capitalist democracies, have been left behind by globalization, changing technology, and political elites focused on the Metropole. There’s an admirable modern counter-tradition, one that rejects the flattening tendencies of today’s economy in favor of the small producers of rural France.
I don’t seek to provide an extensive history of this trend, but more to notice its persistence. Surely in the past, fringe parties have appealed to the French countryside and to small merchants. In the 1950s, Pierre Poujade appealed to countless shopkeepers and smallholders with his Union de Défense des Commerçants et Artisans, a vehicle for anti-tax, anti-chain-store protest. In the 1950s, this angry movement descended on the polls, winning 12% of the vote and 52 Assembly members (including Jean Marie Le Pen) in 1956. However, Poujadisme leaned into anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories, relegating the movement to the margins of French politics. Eventually, its remnants became the base of the nascent National Front.
But leaving this extremist past behind, more recent candidates for the French Presidency have embodied a unique agrarian appeal — the nominees of Chasse, Pêche, Nature et Traditions (CPNT, now Le Mouvement de la Ruralité, LMR) on the right, the quirky Jean Lassalle in the center, and José Bové on the left. Each fights for the revitalization of rural areas and the protection of what makes France special.
CPNT / LMR (2002, 2007)
CPNT arose in the 1980s as defenders of France’s large hunting community, one of Europe’s most prominent. Andrew Knapp’s From the Barrel of a Gun: Chasse, Pêche, Nature, Traditions is an essential source for this movement’s history. In the 1980s, hunters felt aggrieved by increasing regulation and unfavorable court rulings. Hunting has a storied history in France and serves an essential social function in many rural communities, where it brings people together almost like a ritual. As restrictions continued to rain down from up high throughout the 1980s, the movement politicized and sought elective office. CPNT’s base was among the rural working class, and its leadership also came from that class. At first, support held around 4%, declining somewhat in the late 1990s.
However, the 1999 European Parliament Elections were a breakthrough, as CPNT won around 7%, translating into six seats in Brussels. The party’s numbers were even better with workers (10%) and farmers (15%), and it won 25% in the Somme region. This impressive performance even attracted notice in the Washington Post, which described CPNT as running on “a theme of outrage against meddling European bureaucrats and squabbling mainstream politicians, and in defense of the rural customs and traditions threatened by the encroaching power of cities and urban ways.” These urban ways often included Les Verts (The Greens), whose opposition to hunting made them an “implacable enem[y]” of CPNT. Running on this resentment, the party attracted broad support in rural areas, even winning over former Communists in dispossessed regions. Indeed, it channeled the same sentiment that the PCF once did in rural areas, as a representative of forgotten communities and their traditions. (as an aside, Fabien Roussel seems to be reaching back in time to this PCF legacy, forcefully defending hunters and fending off green activists with a commitment to making sure the French can all enjoy steaks)
CPNT performed respectably again in 2002, winning 4.23% and as much as 12% in Somme and Landes. In 2002, Saint-Josse won over 34% of registered hunters and performed best in areas where hunters felt threatened by the regulation of wetlands, suggesting, according to some academics, that local tensions flared up into a national-level protest vote. By then, its supporters were more clearly conservative. When polled, CPNT’s 2002 voters were generally right-wing on issues like the death penalty and immigration, but they voted based “on a feeling in village France that politics is dominated by city slickers who don’t care about rural decline.” Because of this spirit, the party remains slightly difficult to classify in the left-right divide. CPNT’s historical platforms primarily call for defending artisans, protecting the right to hunt and fish, expanding public services into underserved rural areas, and fighting medical desertification. They also leaned into populist rhetoric, scorning EU technocrats in Brussels and governing elites in Paris. Put simply, despite voter preferences, this was not the vicious culture war of Jean-Marie Le Pen.
However, the party’s downfall soon followed. Frédéric Nihous ran in 2007 but won a paltry 1.15%. In the 2009 European Parliament elections, the party saw a slight uptick, running as one of Libertas’ (transnational soft-Euroskeptic movement advised by American Joe Trippi of all people) French affiliates. In the end, LMR lost its momentum. Then-leader Frédéric Nihous decided to support Nicolas Sarkozy in 2012, and the party did not put forth a candidate in 2017 or 2022 either. The center-right UMP essentially absorbed what was left, although it is somehow still alive and once again independent. Led by Eddie Puyjalon, today LMR speaks out loudly against the Macron government’s anti-hunting moves. Simultaneously, LMR decided against endorsing any 2022 candidate, although Eric Zemmour and Valérie Pécresse, signed onto LMR’s 30 demands for the 2022 election, and although Jean Lassalle is closest to its positions. They are, however, running a Parliamentary slate, evidently endorsed by Lassalle. Despite CPNT/LMR’s decline from the public eye, there’s something admirable in its battle for a France that respects its traditions, that attains food and energy sovereignty, and that invests in a revitalization of the countryside. Fewer and fewer hunters are active in France each year, but LMR continues to be their champion.
Jean Lassalle 2017/2022
Although the right seems to mesh well with the message of restoring a forgotten France, today’s most prominent current rural French crusader is centrist Jean Lassalle. Lassalle grew up in the Pyrénées, in France’s southwest corner. His family has practiced nomadic shepherding (transhumance) for generations, and Lassalle constantly reminds people of his lineage and unique regional roots — in 2003, he sang the Occitan Anthem in the National Assembly to protest what he saw as a slur against his people, and throughout his tenure, he has worked for more recognition of Occitan and other minority languages. Admirably, his work for localism extends globally, as Lassalle leads the World Mountain People Association, a group dedicated to saving mountain peoples and their vanishing traditions around the world.
Somewhat of a goofball, Lassalle maintains an active campaign TikTok, which features him doing push-ups, carrying logs, and even boxing. His sharp responses and witty sense of humor have earned him meme status online. It’s no wonder his best poll result came when the question was: “Which candidate would you most want to barbecue with?”
Yet Lassalle is also a serious advocate for rural France. Lassalle has been involved in politics for many years, serving as a locally elected Mayor since 1977 and having been a Member of Parliament for the centrist Democratic Movement from 2002 until his 2017 Presidential campaign. In 2017, while he won only 1.21%, Lassalle performed exceptionally in his home region of the Pyrénées-Atlantiques, a traditional centrist stronghold. All this time, he has been a forceful advocate for rural areas.
Unlike other career politicians, Lassalle literally walks the walk when it comes to representing forgotten parts of France. When a paint factory in his district sought to leave his constituency in 2006, Lassalle put his life on the line with a hunger strike, losing 46 pounds and being hospitalized before the multinational corporation relented. In 2013, he walked across France apparently on a whim, finding frustrated French citizens across the backroads of the countryside. Lassalle characterized the walk not as political, but as a sort of act of resistance. Unsurprisingly, he has been willing to join other resistance movements. During the gilets jaunes protests, he donned a yellow vest in the halls of government, defending his actions as a protest against condescension from elected officials.
Lassalle’s ambitious program covers many issues. For example, he proposes a plan to reindustrialize France, implement national service, allow for national referenda, restore the wealth tax, give small businesses priority for government contracts, and decentralize power to a “human scale”, increasing autonomy and funding for municipalities. Regarding agriculture, Lassalle wants to revitalize farming by devoting 3 billion Euros to developing rural areas and abolishing the inheritance tax for farming families. While he stands up for hunting, Lassalle is also concerned about the climate, seeking investment in nuclear energy and other forms of renewable power (except for wind). Perhaps Lassalle could be classified as a neo-distributist, even if he doesn’t call himself one. Many of these ideas would greatly benefit France and its countryside. Controversially, however, he is both EU-skeptic and NATO-skeptic, sometimes coming up with strange statements about foreign policy.
Whether or not one agrees with Lassalle’s policy proposals (I disagree with the aforementioned foreign policy statements), he is the best champion of rural populism in France. Lassalle speaks out against “the soft dictatorship of finance” and fights for the revitalization of struggling rural communities. There’s something heroic, if uphill, about his battle, and there’s certainly something entertaining about the way he fights it. For the upcoming election, Lassalle is polling anywhere from 1–3%, potentially ahead of better-known candidates like Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo. He certainly won’t win the election, but if Lassalle finishes in front of percieved-as-elitist Hidalgo and the moribund Parti Socialiste, it would be a mighty symbolic statement.
José Bové (2007)
Finally, on the left there stands the gruff alter-globalization activist José Bové. While in university, he dropped out to focus on anti-war activism, but soon discovered the struggle unfolding on the Larzac plateau. There, sheep farmers and shepherds were locked in a battle against the government over a military base expansion that would destroy their farms. In 1975, Bové moved to the Larzac and helped coordinate protest actions until the Socialist government relented in 1981. This fusion of anti-war and agricultural activism was to define Bové’s career. In 1987, he founded the Confédération Paysanne, a union of small producers opposed to concentrated industrial agriculture and economic globalization. Confédération Paysanne was a small group at its largest, but commanded majority support among the French population, standing as a powerful bulwark of smallholder agriculture against neoliberal globalization.
This, of course, involved a good deal of protest. In his most famous protest action, José Bové sent ripples around the world. In 1999, Bové and fellow activists ransacked a McDonald’s being built in a small town near his hometown, mounting a symbolic protest against the flattening of the world food landscape. Secondarily, the destruction protested an American tariff on French specialties Roquefort cheese and foie gras. It was truly a remarkable protest; the demonstrators were not urban college activists but shaggy-haired French smallholders, and Bové became a minor national celebrity. As the Guardian reported, he “turned his trial into a huge anti-globalisation party, featuring concerts by French rock bands, a feast to promote traditional French food[,] and more than a dozen public debates led by intellectuals and activists.” In front of the never-built shell of a McDonald's, the irascible farmer and his allies set up a stand selling French cheese, wine, and an anti-globalization sticker. His movement is not just another leftist anti-corporate front. It is instead something much deeper, an attempt to resist the threat to French culinary and cultural identity posed by neoliberal globalization.
In this vein, Bové advocates for groups all around the world, through the international peasant organization Via Campesina and otherwise. He made an appearence at the Seattle anti-WTO protests, with a large block of Roquefort cheese in hand. In this sense, like Jean Lassalle‘s work on behalf of global mountain peoples, Bové’s advocacy melds localism (advocacy for the particular agricultural and culinary heritage of France) with a global outlook (helping others do the same). In this sense, it’s a sort of “glocalization” of decentralist rural populism.
More recently, Bové has also protested GMOs by destroying GMO corn in 2008 and mounting a hunger strike to force government oversight on these plants. Like Lassalle, he proved willing to risk his own health for his cause. This sense of purpose is admirable, no matter what one’s stance is on GMO food. Additionally, fracking has drawn his ire, helping push France to halt the practice.
Like the other two, Bové entered electoral politics, running for President in 2007. His platform centered on a “new coherence” opposing the “dangerous coherence” at the heart of contemporary capitalism. It sought to redistribute wealth, combat climate change by moving away from industrial agriculture, “end … the omnipotence of agri-food companies and large retailers”, shield cultural diversity from the market, and work towards new forms of global solidarity around peace and justice. His 2007 Presidential campaign ended with his winning just 1,32% of the vote, with a notably stronger showing in the farming regions where his involvement began. In 2009, he was elected on the Europe Écologie ticket for European Parliament and was re-elected in 2014. In Brussels, he continued to fight on the same issues that made him famous — taking on any and all who might undermine local producers.
Politically, Bové is more out of the political mainstream than the other two movements/leaders I write about; he describes himself as an anarcho-syndicalist inspired by Bakunin, the Spanish CNT of 1936, and Henry David Thoreau. Nonetheless, his radicalism has an essentially conservative element to it. Uniting Bové with the CPNT/LMR and Lassalle, he bemoans those policies “allowing a few industrial producers to get richer while small producers disappear.” This has other analogues in French politics, especially with the “souverainiste” left represented by Jean-Pierre Chevènement, Arnaud Montebourg, and even 2022 candidate (who didn’t drop out like Montebourg did) Fabien Roussel. France also has their own sort of left-wing “Crunchy Con” movement, headlined by the journal Limite, where integral ecology meets distributism meets French Catholicism. Bové, therefore, slots into a unique post-liberal left trend in France.
Conclusions
Fundamentally, the CPNT/LMR, Jean Lassalle, and José Bové are vociferous advocates for the forgotten France and its small producers. In their own ways, each sought/seek to revitalize places washed over by the tides of global finance capitalism. While they sometimes stake out misguided or uninformed stances on issues like foreign policy (namely Lassalle and Bové), their focus is more on domestic issues, especially French sovereignty. Even here, their records are open to scrutiny and perhaps their crusades are romantic paens to a France that can no longer exist. Yet there remains something captivating about each of these movements, something missing from modern politics this side of the Atlantic.
For the most part, America hasn’t had such movements in modern history. There was, of course, the Populist Party of the late 1800s and William Jennings Bryan’s influence on the Democratic Party, as well as the Southern Agrarians, but no political force dedicated to rural America ever quite caught on. There are no celebrities like José Bové. At the same time, such agitation has existed; in the 1970s and 1980s, the American Agricultural Movement (AAM) organized struggling farmers to protest for price parity and accurate country-of-origin labels. Over 50,000 farmers demanded justice from Congress in 1978, and the next year, farmers traveled for weeks in a massive ‘tractorcade’, descending on Washington DC. Today, organizations like the National Farmers Union and Farm Aid keep this going, along with countless smaller groups on the local level. However, Americans generally lack political options like the French agrarians; while AAM member Wayne Cryts ran for Congress twice in Missouri and lost, these voices have been notably absent from government. Perhaps this is due to our two-party system and our relative lack of small producers compared to France, although that would merit a more extensive analysis. After all, CPNT/LMR and Bové represented France at the European Parliament and Jean Lassalle has been an MP for a long time, suggesting the influence they hold. Whether or not their struggles prove successful, these defenders of the countryside are worth learning about.