Comités de défense paysanne

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The Comités de Défense Paysanne or Peasant Defense Committees were radical agrarian groups France founded in 1929.

It was originally founded by an agricultural editor in Brittany Henry Dorgères in January 1929^[1] to oppose changes in assurance sociales, French social security, that would have been expensive to many small farms.^[2] Dorgères' credibility came from a popular service his newspaper offered to farmers which checked avertissements (land tax notices) for errors in the cadastral land surveys they were based on to reduce the taxes.^[3]

The historian Robert Paxton said there were three elements to the rise of militant right wing Peasant action in interwar France; an agricultural recession triggered by low farm prices, the Third Republic's cultural contempt for rural life and a lack of conventional political leadership for small farmers which meant that public policy was committed to cheap food for urban voters.^[4]

It had a youth section, the Jeunesses Paysannes, more commonly known as the Greenshirts^[5] which was how his general movement was often known. The first President of the Jeunesses Paysannes was Modeste Legouez,^[6] a future Senator for Eure^[7] who opposed the socialist leader Pierre Mendes France in the 1936 French legislative election.^[8]

A book written by Dorgeres during that time "Haut les fourches" ("Raise the Pitchforks") laid out an anti-Republican and anti-Parliamentary back to the land program.^[9]

The Peasant Defense Committees were seen as differing from the more established and conservative Syndicats agricoles through a willingness to embrace direct action (including tax strikes^[10] and opposing foreclosure sales^[11]), a more egalitarian organisational structure that did not rely on aristocratic rural social hierarchies and the use of more militaristic attributes such as oaths and uniforms.^[12] Dorgères himself was regarded as a very skillful market day orator, in a rural culture where up until that point oratory had been overlooked.^[13]

In 1934 it would join up with the larger and more conservative Union nationale des syndicats agricoles and the French Agrarian and Peasant Party to form the Front paysan. This meant that the official stance of the Comités turned from calling for state support for agriculture to a more Corporatist stance where farmers would control the production and marketing of their produce.^[14] However the front fell apart in 1936 due to differences in political strategy.^[15]

Although it was not listed among the far right leagues that the Popular Front government dissolved in 1936, the Minister of the Interior Roger Salengro did order prefects to keep close watch on the comités.^[16] During the previous election local activists had disrupted election meetings.^[17]

The Committees were far more widespread and popular in the North of France compared to the South of France, although there was some success among market gardeners in Vaucluse and Var^[18] but no success in places such as the wine growing areas of the Midi.^[19] It kept out of other areas such as Alsace due to the presence of local groups such as the Elsässischer Bauernbund.^[20]

Its expansion stopped at the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. Dorgeres supported the National Revolution of Petain and was named the general delegate for organization and propaganda for the Peasant Corporation, a Vichy government organization that tried to embody the agrarian corporatism that the Comités and their allies embodied. He supported Petain but was suspicious of the Germans due to his internment in the First World War.^[21]

Dorgeres was imprisoned for a short time for his work with the Peasant Corporation, although he was released for his work with the resistance. The Comités did not revive after the war, although a lot of their more libertarian strains were embodied in Poujadism, for which Dorgeres was a deputy.

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