Revolt on the Farm

Most Frenchmen would be delighted to have Brigitte Bardot as a neighbor, but dour fellow farmers in Orne, west of Paris, remain faithful to the stern old cult that holds: "Grazing and tilling are the two breasts of France." They call BB a cumulard, or land-grabber, and bewail the fact that in recent years the actress and 37 other wealthy city slickers -among them Movie ActorJean Gabin -have all staked out exurbanite estates in Orne. This has inflated land values (current price: up to $900 an acre) and displaced tenant farmers, who complain that they can no longer find farms to rent in the region.

Fortnight ago, 700 local peasants advertised their ire by descending before dawn on Bonnefoi, the 400-acre farm owned by Tough Guy Gabin, 58, who recently bought up two other nearby holdings totaling 250 acres. The posse cut the phone lines and otherwise vandalized his property while their spokesmen argued with Gabin, who refused to rent his land to tenants, announced angrily and in haste that he would sell his two new farms -in all probability, to other cumulards, since they are worth nearly $200,000. Last week public indignation at the farmers' lawless tactics, raising memories of the 14th century Jacquerie* prompted Premier Georges Pompidou to declare that his government "will not tolerate" such "unacceptable acts of violence."

In fact, though illegal raids and destructive boycotts by farmers have become increasingly common over the past few years, no French government has dared take action. Last week, armed with an ambitious new agricultural reform law, Agriculture Minister Edgar Pisani set out instead to reorganize a chaotic farm structure that, as one French farm leader cracked, "makes the United States problem of overproduction seem simple by contrast."

Army of Middlemen. The main trouble with French farms is smallness: 79% are of fewer than 50 acres, while 17% are smaller than five acres. Napoleonic inheritance laws, by which a farmer's land is divided equally among his male heirs, only accelerate this process, which the French call morcellement (literally, morselization). Though such small-scale farming is basically uneconomic, more than 20% of France's population clings to the land, while earning less than 10% of the national income.

In recent years, Brittany's artichoke and potato growers have been dumping their produce in the streets in dramatic protest over their lot. They complain that they get less than one-third of what the customer pays for their produce, with the rest going to an army of rapacious middlemen. The farmer also suffers from an antiquated distribution system by which 55% of all produce consumed throughout France has first to be trucked in and out of Paris' ancient Les Halles market, which makes Les Halles a great tourist sight but otherwise makes no sense.

New Skills. The new farm legislation creates a "collectivization" agency -as traditionalists scoffingly call it -with power to buy and resell at reasonable prices all land that comes on the market, plus most of some 11 million idle acres whose ownership is in dispute* the agency will have authority to designate maximum and minimum sizes for new farms, thus protecting peasants simultaneously against cumulards and morcellement. To help farmers get higher prices, the new law allows them to set up cooperatives, regional wholesale centers and local marketing boards. And to weed out marginal farms, the government offers farmers better and earlier pensions (at 65), will also pay to retrain them in other skills.

France, which already has half of all the arable land area in Europe's Common Market, aims thus to raise productivity and sell its big annual farm surplus (notably wheat, sugar beet, meat) to Western Europe's two biggest food importers: West Germany and Britain (if and when it joins the Common Market). The knottiest problem facing Agriculture Minister Pisani is still the French farmer -who would rather depend on high price supports than high productivity, and may stubbornly resist the new legislation. As Pisani knows, no government in history has ever successfully defied the French peasant.

* In which the peasants revolted against high taxes and oppression, pillaged and massacred until the insurrection was crushed by Charles the Bad.

* The new body is known as SAFER (Societe d'Etablisscments Foncieres et d'Economie Rurale).

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