80

This article analyzes the relatively unknown existence of a generation of young farmers who participated in the burgeoning spirit of protest of 1968 and in the following years. It was mainly after May 1968, and through union engagement, that these post-’68 farmers maintained these discourses and practices breaking with the status quo. But what is more, as the children of farmers themselves in many cases, they profoundly challenged established forms of domination and behavioral norms in their social and professional milieu. This story is at the root of movements that would contribute to the 1987 creation of the Confédération Paysanne (CP), a leftist farmers’ union that would hold a key position in the anti-globalization movement in the first decade of the 2000s. The author first emphasizes the generational dimension of these engagements and provides an account of the social and political experiences that constituted a collective appropriation of the “1968 moment.” It began with struggles within the dominant union organizations—the Fédération Nationale des Syndicats d’Exploitants Agricoles (FNSEA, National Federation of Farmers’ Unions) and the Centre National des Jeunes Agriculteurs (CNJA, National Young Farmers’ Center)—that came with a collection of stances demarcating them from the unions’ positions and ways of operating. Criticism of the relationship between farmers’ union leadership and political and economic authorities led to the spread of a Marxist-inspired analysis of relations of domination in agriculture, and the implementation of actions targeting the economic structures of the profession. These transgressions spilled out of the strictly union setting and regularly appeared in subversive activities in the local area, such as writing songs and plays illustrating class struggle or hosting troubled teenagers from large cities at the farm. Regardless, the groups that formed in the late 1960s and early 1970s were not entirely homogeneous, and the conflicts that emerged throughout the 1970s would have a lasting influence on the history of groups of the farming left. The author takes the example of the Paysans-Travailleurs (Peasant-Workers) group in the Orne (Normandy), which split in the mid-1970s, as some members were engaged with revolutionary causes while others preferred to keep a distance from Far-Left political parties. By reconstructing the processes that led to the formation of this group following May 1968 and its gradual disintegration several years later, the author insists on the interdependence of activist careers, subscriptions to ideas, and ways of participating in the political debates of the 1970s, which cannot be dissociated from the spaces where they interacted, which give them meaning. The analysis also demonstrates the importance of “small” dispositional differences between activists and their consequences on how these left-leaning farmers built their subjective belonging in the agricultural world.