The buried history of land consolidation | France Inter

In May 1978, Gildas Le Coënt, imprisoned for nine months in a psychiatric hospital, was released. This affair marks a new episode in the Breton battle against land consolidation. It reflects a reality experienced by thousands of farmers across France during the decades of agricultural modernization. Inès Léraud is a journalist, and whistleblower in 2019 regarding the silence of green algae. She published today “ Battlefields, the buried history of land consolidation », his second comic strip, an investigation with Pierre van Hove, published by La Revue Dessinée and Éditions Delcourt.

Wounds still alive in the collective memory

The testimonies collected reveal deep trauma. As Jacqueline Goff born in 1953 reports: “I see again the appearance of the bulldozers, this rampage which destroyed everything, the trees, the embankments. It was not a consolidation, a dismemberment, it was chaos.” on France Culture. This painful memory is still transmitted in the villages, where some families have no longer spoken to each other since that time.

An imposed modernization that divided the countryside

The consolidation, launched after the Second World War, aimed to adapt French agriculture to the challenges of productivity and international competition. “It was a peasant society which was not in a logic of money” explains Inès Léraud, “it was a matter of grouping the plots together, uprooting the trees, the embankments, to have fields that could easily be cultivated by machines.” This policy then creates lasting tensions, opposing the “winners”, called “profiteers” and the “wronged” of land consolidation.

What strikes Inès Léraud and Léandre Mandard while working on the subject of land consolidation is the extent of the resistance and conflicts linked to this issue. A protest movement that would have been difficult to imagine given the little attention given to it by rural sociologists and historians until then. “However, in the departmental archives, the boxes of complaints, appeals, letters, discontent. They were everywhere, in all the departmental archives where I went on French territory. The land consolidation bulldozers had to be accompanied law enforcement to intervene” explains Inès Léraud.

A major environmental impact that persists

The consequences of this radical transformation of landscapes are still felt today. “There are 23,000 kilometers of hedges that disappear each year, there are 3,000 that are replanted, so we lose 20,000 kilometers of hedges each year,” underlines Inès Léraud. This massive destruction of the bocage, associated with the drastic reduction in the number of farmers (from 7 million in 1946 to 400,000 today), illustrates the extent of the changes made. “Some researchers even speak of ethnocide, we lost 90% of the peasants.” explains Inès Léraud.

The rest is to listen…

With :

Inès Léraud and Léandre Mandard, history associate and doctoral student at the Sciences-Po History Center (CHSP). After studying the Gallo activist movement in the 20th century, he became interested in the social, cultural and environmental history of agricultural modernization in Brittany.
His thesis, which he will defend in 2025, under the supervision of Alain Chatriot, is entitled “Revolution in the bocage. Genesis, execution and protests of rural consolidation in Brittany (1941-2007)”. He worked with Inès Léraud as a “historical advisor”. He had also collaborated on the work “Algues Vertes, l’histoire forbidden” by proposing a version in Gallo, titled “Limouézeries, l’istouère defendue” Inès Léraud, and Léandre Mandard are both members of “Splann! » (“clear”, in Breton), an independent online media dedicated to investigation in Brittany (Inès Léraud is co-founder).