What changes have occurred in French rural areas since 1945 and what policies have been introduced to manage the whole process ?

Authors Avatar

James Thomas (Student No. 0816502)

  1. What changes have occurred in French rural areas since 1945 and what policies have been introduced to manage the whole process ? 

At the start of the Third Republic, the peasantry were viewed as an integral part of French society, as the stable base that held everything together. They were commonly viewed almost as a single entity, with identical needs, interests and preoccupations, yet this did not detract from their perceived worth. Influential Frenchmen in High society, especially politicians, would frequently extol the virtues of ordinary farmers; in 1934 Edouard Herriot invited an audience to salute “the peasant, whose silence does not signify absence of thought, who ranks as the greatest of French philosophers, who might be described as our silent master.” Such declarations would have also been spoken to please the peasantry themselves, whose voting power had been increased by the Third Republic’s electoral reforms. However, the peasantry played no significant part in the installation or management of the republic, and it was not until the Great Depression of the 1930s that they began to become involved in politics at a local level (Wright 1965, pp.13-18). By the end of World War II, the ball of rural change was well and truly rolling, faster than ever before.

By far the most drastic and immediate change was post-war mechanisation of the agriculture industry. In 1946-53,  the First National Plan was put into place, which put farm machinery as top priority, for example the number of tractors increased from 35,000 to 230,000 by 1956 (Ardagh, 1988, pp. 202 ). In a very short space of time, the great rural exodus had begun, with the percentage of the active population employed in agriculture reducing from 35 per cent in 1939 to 8 per cent in 1987 (Ardagh, 1988, p. 200); the unneeded workforce migrated to the cities in search of jobs in industry. Furthermore, by 1970 the number of farms had fallen to 1.5 million (Hanley et al, 1979), from 2.5 million in 1945 (Wright, 1964, p. 115).

Join now!

However, a reduction in the number of farms did not mean a reduction in agricultural output per head; the exodus of one farmer allowed another to increase the size of his farm. By the 1960s, the size of the average farm was more than triple compared to in 1882 (Ardagh, 1977, p. 123). This increase was helped by changes in land ownership laws. In 1945, a statute of rural leases (Wright, 1964, p. 110) was created, which standardised the rental period to nine years, placed the power to renew in the hands of the tenant, gave buying priority to current ...

This is a preview of the whole essay