AGRARIAN PARTIES.

Agrarian parties emerged in Europe in the late nineteenth century. In the years between the world wars, these parties played a significant political and structural role in all parts of the Continent, including the northern and western countries, but their influence was especially strong in central and eastern Europe. On the eve of World War I, for example, a German agrarian league founded in 1893 succeeded in electing representatives to local government as well as to the Reichstag. Despite the greatly varied forms taken by agrarianism from one country to the next, it always sought to place agriculture and the defense of rural labor at the center of its political, economic, and social programs. The main agrarian issues were prices and tariffs, property relationships, and land reform. Even though supporters of agrarianism were often to be found in many different political and trade union organizations, the invariable goal of agrarian parties proper was to unite rural labor in a single structure with corporatist ambitions and to extend this base to other social strata, at first rural but eventually also urban.

RISE OF AGRARIAN POLITICS

During the interwar years the agrarian parties reached the apogee of their influence against a backdrop of crisis. The Polish Peasant Movement (PSL), founded in Galicia in 1895, emerged after the Armistice of 1918 as one of the country's four main political groupings, but it was undermined by factional fighting at the local level and repeated splits at the national one—notably involving the Galician branch, deemed to have fallen under the control of the clergy and the big landowners. In Romania, the Peasant Party enjoyed great success in the elections of 1919 thanks to an alliance with the nationalists, and its leader, Ion Mihalache, became minister of agriculture. But these gains came to naught. The party managed to reconfigure its ideology, proposing a fresh model of development—based on the thinking of the sociologist Virgil Madgearu—which, though founded on the primacy of agriculture, incorporated industrialization into its economic and social vision; this sharply distinguished the party's views from those of other agrarian groups such as the "poporanists" around Constantin Stere and the journal Romanian Life, who rejected the whole idea of an industrial economy. The Peasant Party nevertheless failed to hang on to power, and was swamped, like other political forces, by the nationalist and authoritarian dynamic that dominated Romania between the wars. Meanwhile a "Green International," headquartered in Prague and led by the Czechoslovakian minister Mecir, sought but failed to combine the agrarian forces of several eastern European countries.

Agrarian parties emerged in almost every European country, even in some, such as France, where none had existed in earlier days. As Pierre Barral has shown, until World War I agrarian sentiments and projects were taken up and channeled in France by politicians (such as the moderate Jules Méline), by broader—governmental, socialist, or trade union—political forces, or even by institutions like the chambers of agriculture. Agrarianism was simply not central to French political and electoral preoccupations in either the city or the country. On the other hand, France differed sharply from Germany inasmuch as no organized anti-agrarian doctrine existed in that country. The situation was transformed, however, in the aftermath of World War I, when a "triple crisis" struck the French peasantry. The first aspect of this crisis was economic in character: as in other European countries, the 1920s ushered in a rapid fall in prices, notably in the price of wheat; second, the rural way of life came under threat from growing urbanization (as of 1931 more than 50 percent of the French population lived in urban areas); and third, the system of political and professional representation itself entered a critical time. The response was the founding in 1928 of the French Agrarian and Peasant Party, whose principal leaders were the teacher Fleurant, nicknamed "Agricola," and the lawyer Henri Noilhan. One agrarian candidate was successful in the legislative elections of 1932, eight in 1936. But the party was divided, and part of it seceded under Noihlan to form the more left-leaning Agrarian and Social Republican Party. It also had to confront the militant Peasant Defense movement, launched in 1928 by the journalist Henri Dorgères (Henri d'Halluin). Dorgères had an acid pen, he was a fearsome orator, and he believed firmly in direct action—a belief that led him, well before the advent of Poujadism (a movement of small business owners founded to protest sales taxes), to organize antitax protests at the grassroots level (notably at Bray-Sur-Somme in 1932) and to promote anti-"Red" actions in 1936–1937 intended to break both agricultural and industrial strikes. He was the best-known figure of French agrarianism. Dorgères's Peasant Defense became part of the Peasant Front at its foundation in 1934; the Front also included the Agrarian and Peasant Party and the National Union of Agricultural Trade Unions (UNSA), led by Jacques Le Roy Ladurie. But Dorgères and Peasant Defense were hobbled by their reputation for extremism and regularly accused of standing for "green fascism." To be fair, however—and appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, for his stage management of public rallies and general tactics certainly resembled the methods of nascent fascism—Dorgères embodied nothing worse than a blend of authoritarian nationalism and traditionalism. The issue of fascism remains central to any discussion of agrarian parties in the interwar years. A balanced analysis, while acknowledging areas of mutual influence between militant agrarians and some forms of fascism, will likely conclude that these should not be mistaken for fusion.

A telling example here is Claudius Heim, the "peasant general." Heim was the architect of the peasant revolt in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, between January 1928 and October 1930; he was also the central figure in Ernst von Salomon's novel Die Stadt (1932; The city). The reasons for the revolt that began in 1928 were primarily economic, but questions of collective identity also played a part: the demonstrators felt that their professional and political organizations were incapable of defending them in any respect. They resorted to direct action (to prevent the seizure of their livestock) and terrorism in the form of assassinations. A more unusual tactic was their boycott of Neumünster, which lasted for nearly a year (1929–1930) and brought the town to the brink of financial ruin. Incarcerated in September 1929, Heim observed from a prison cell the first major success of the National Socialists, when they obtained 18.6 percent of the votes in the elections of 30 September 1930. Heim was fiercely independent and turned down the Nazis' offer to place him at the head of their electoral list. He had scant regard for Adolf Hitler, and he described Alfred Hugenberg, industrialist and founder of the German Nationalists, as "a faithful servant of international capitalism." The voters of Schleswig-Holstein were of a different mind, however, and in 1930, 27 percent of them gave their ballots to the National Socialists; in rural communes (less than two thousand inhabitants), moreover, the percentage of Nazi votes was 35.1. By July 1932 these two percentages increased to 51 and 63.8 respectively. The fascists were thus able to turn surging agrarian frustration to their advantage and even to envelop it utterly in what Karl Dietrich Bracher calls the National Socialists' "agro-political apparatus" run by Richard Walter Darre, the ideologist of race and the peasantry who in 1934 was made "Reich peasant leader."

AGRARIANISM UNDER AUTHORITARIAN REGIMES AND POSTWAR ECLIPSE

The smothering of agrarian parties by fascist and authoritarian regimes was a widespread occurrence. Italy is a case in point. Immediately after World War I the agrarian movement was largely concentrated in the south of the country. It was not until the creation of the General Agricultural Confederation in April 1920 that the idea of a national agrarian party arose. The notion was buttressed by economic crisis and by land occupations that gave rise to a militarization of farmers under the aegis of the Upper Italian Association of Farmers. In the elections of 6 June 1921 the Agricultural Confederation ran some fifty candidates, of whom twenty-seven were successful. From this effervescence a formally constituted agrarian party emerged, its founding announced in Rome on 8 January 1922 by Angelo Parodi Delfino and Antonio Bartoli. When the Fascists came to power, however, the impetus was lost, and the main Italian agrarian forces found that they were fellow travelers of the regime rather than prime movers in their own right. Much the same pattern is discernible in the relationship between Vichy France and the Peasant Corporation. It is true that Jacques Le Roy Ladurie was appointed minister of agriculture, but Dorgères, for all that he eagerly offered his services, was not even invited to help draft a peasant charter and had to be satisfied with being one of nine general managers of the corporation. Peasant Defense never succeeded in becoming a counterweight to the influential UNSA.

Relative to their intentions, then, it must be concluded that the agrarian parties were a failure. They never succeeded in making their perspective the main axis of political life. Nor were they able to attract sufficient support to become truly representative organizations. It is hardly surprising, then, that the years after World War II saw the definitive eclipse of agrarian parties. In the Communist East they served as figureheads. In western Europe they were unable to regroup and in effect overwhelmed by competition from reinvigorated traditional agricultural trade unions. In France, for instance, it was the National Federation of Small Farmers (Fédération Nationale des Exploitants Agricoles) that marginalized the agrarian forces; this tendency was reinforced by the increasing influence among young agriculturalists of new organizations descended from Catholic Action. Later the emergence of far-reaching demands concerning the ecology or the defense of the land gave rise to new movements. But José Bové's Confédération Paysanne, for example, or the movement called Hunting, Nature, Fishing and Tradition (Chasse, Nature, Pêche et Tradition), which returned two members to the European Parliament in 1999, are a very far cry from the interwar agrarian organizations. On the other hand, there are clearer signs of continuity in central Europe, especially in postcommunist Poland.

See alsoAgriculture; Land Reform.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Dorgères, Henry. Au temps des fourches. Paris, 1975.

Salomon, Ernst von. La ville. Paris, 1933.

Secondary Sources

Barral, Pierre. Les agrariens français de Méline à Pisani. Paris, 1968.

Holmes, Kim R. "The Forsaken Past: Agrarian Conservatism and National Socialism in Germany." Journal of Contemporary History 17, no. 4 (October 1982): 671–688.

Hunt, James C. "The 'Egalitarianism' of the Right: The Agrarian League in Southwest Germany, 1893–1914." Journal of Contemporary History 10 , no. 3 (July 1975): 513–530.

Le Bars, Michèle. "Le 'général paysan' Claudius Heim: Tentative de portrait." In La Révolution conservatrice et les élites intellectuelles, edited by Barbara Koehn, 115–140 . Rennes, France, 2003.

Lewis, Gavin. "The Peasantry, Rural Change and Conservative Agrianism: Lower Austria at the Turn of the Century." Past and Present 81 (November 1978): 119–143.

Paxton, Robert O. Le temps des chemises vertes: Révoltes paysannes et fascisme rural 1929–1939. Paris, 1996.

Rogari, Sandro. "La crisi del ceto politico liberale la formazione del gruppo e del partito agrario." In Partito politico dalla grande guerra al fascismo: Crisi dalla rappresentanza e riforma dello stato nell'età dei sistemi politici di massa: 1918–1925, edited by Fabio Grassi Orsini and Gaetano Quagliariello, 531–550. Bologna, Italy, 1996.

Roger, Antoine. Fascistes, communistes et paysans: Sociologie des mobilisations identitaires roumaines (1921–1989). Brussels, 2002.

Olivier Dard