Ines Lero. “Witnesses of land consolidation talk about the war, trying to explain what they experienced”

after Green algae, forbidden historya comedic investigation adapted into a 2023 documentary by Pierre Jolivet about the devastation caused by the notorious green algae on the Brittany coast; men – journalist Ines Leroux and designer Pierre Van Hove publish an absolutely fascinating investigative graphic novel.Supported by a range of testimonies and archives, combining history and sociology, Battlefields, a buried history of land consolidation (1) recounts with as much pedagogy as intelligence how the French state, by forcefully grouping land to increase agricultural yields, caused a chain of human and ecological disasters. How did we get here and can we get out of it? That’s the whole question.Interview with French Erin Brockovich.

Madame Figaro. is there a connection between Green algae And Battlefields Ines Lero. I moved to Brittany in 2015 to study agro-industry, intensive farming and green algae. And I had heard about land enlargement in a way that I had never heard before. I thought they were technical land use planning activities. There I discovered that the people there felt it very harshly, because it was a reorganization of the agricultural land imposed by the administrative body, by people who had reworked the plans in the offices without considering the reality. on the ground. Land consolidation is the historical moment when intensive agriculture was promoted and established, leading to the emergence of green algae. In 2020, I met Leandre Mandar, who is currently completing a thesis on land consolidation at the Sciences-Po History Center. He became the comic’s historical consultant, and we both immersed ourselves in this story.

What is the history of land consolidation?
It was born out of a law forged under the Vichy regime in 1941. The latter is associated with land restitution and traditionalist imagination, but historians like Christophe Bonneau have made me discover that period played a key role in the modernization of agriculture . It only takes a few people in a commune to ask for land consolidation, and it will be imposed on everyone, after action by the prefecture, without the majority of farmers having a say. Consolidation in France began with the Liberation and the Marshall Plan, which forced analogues such as the importation of American overproduction into Europe, because The United States, highly modernized, had mechanized agriculture as well as vast agricultural areas, not too hilly, small fence, and are already in the stage of overproduction. In France, overproduction began in 1949. France was very quickly tractorized.

Then comes the CAP, the Common Agricultural Policy?
Yes, we are specializing the territories and see France as the largest producer of food, which will therefore receive most of the CAP aid, but aid that will support the productive model are a new phase of free trade of goods that competes on a global scale, when in fact agriculture is a very special production because it is completely linked to landscapes and land; We cannot put into competition what is produced on American soil, with its vast territories, and what is produced in an area like France, where there are mountainous regions, bocage areas, etc. France can never be competitive enough.

Your comic sheds light on a little-known aspect of land consolidation.
It is often overlooked that the villagers rebelled against land expansion. Most agreed in principle; they wanted better roads and paths, grouped lands, nothing happened as they thought. They would like to discuss a plan, each knowing the value of their plots. But the administration decided from above without consulting them . Title: Battlefields stems from the fact that the witnesses of land consolidation often resort to the verbal field of war, trying to explain what they experienced. Then the popular struggle was huge. In some places, for example in Fegreak, where our investigation begins, but also later in Trebrivan in the 1970s, land consolidation bulldozers were accompanied by police, CRS, mobile gendarmes, who sprayed villagers with tear gas. And sometimes the authorities even forcibly transferred some of the opponents of land enlargement to a psychiatric ward.

Thus the Gildas Le Coënt case, named after the retired farmer’s son.
In order to get as many farmers off the land as possible, they were offered IVD, a departure allowance for life, or much better, retirement if they didn’t pass their farm to their children and sell it to expand to another farm.Gildas’ father, Joseph, had accepted, but kept one square land, because farmers, even pensioners, had the right to keep a garden and a garden. Except when a land consolidation takes place, the land in question is set aside for an intensive piggery on a neighboring pig farm. Bulldozers tear up the roots of the apple trees, and Gildas, who is on vacation there, tries to oppose them. The mayor comes with the doctor, and Gildas is forced into internment with the consent of the prefecture. The story is tragic. he will stay in a psychiatric hospital for nine months and will never recover, and at the same time, it creates an unexpected convergence of struggles, bringing together ecologists, as well as young Maoists, who hold large marches in the world. Villages to meet the world of labor and agriculture they will conduct, demonstrate, hire a lawyer, as a result of which Gildas will be released from the hospital. Such convergences of struggle sometimes also slow down land consolidation operations, as in Finisterre in the 1970s.

Consolidation has also wreaked ecological havoc…
Bocage was born in livestock regions, it was designed to contain animals or to protect agriculture from animals when the latter were left free, as in the Middle Ages. When it was rebuilt, it collapsed, and in 1964 the first alarms sounded. The archives of INRA, the National Institute for Agronomic Research, show that bocage allowed the temperature of the plot to be regulated, that it prevented excessive fluctuations, and that it also retained water in the soil. It protected crops and animals from bad weather and protected a whole host of predatory fauna from rodents or destructive insects, as well as pollinating fauna, which are fundamental to crops. Ultimately, it prevented soil erosion. Now humus, the most fertile part, every time it rains, there is a landslide, it falls into the river. Added to all this, the consolidation also “fixed” the magnificent meandering rivers into straight streams to get arable land on each side. Now these areas were great for absorbing water in the winter and releasing it when drought came in the summer, which especially made it possible to have summer pastures for animals. Thus, today a lot of government money is spent on river replanting as well as replanting projects.

Do you feel things are moving in the right direction?
It will now be possible to implement public policies in favor of placing young farmers in small farms, with less debt, working more with trees and hedges, and therefore more climate-resilient farms and a more virtuous relationship with ecosystems. And unfortunately, we see that with the agreement with the Mercosur countries, we continue to push more modernization, competitiveness and debt, while this is incompatible with the environmental problems that have become imperative… This, while the agricultural world is returning to the small scale, working more in the agroforestry sector, in this respect, they become a real lever.

(1) BattlefieldsInès Léraud and Pierre Van Hove, ed. Delcourt/La Revue Dessinée, 192 p., €23.75.