Iwas then in my first years of secondary school, outside Paris, but of course I was affected by what was going on—the May events, the discussions, the whole atmosphere. I didn’t do much, apart from an occupation of the school football pitch. It was in the last years at school that I started going on demonstrations. When I was 17 I got involved in the struggle against military service—for the rights of conscientious objectors and deserters. There was a network of groups throughout France. We used to attend the military tribunals every week to offer support for the boys doing military service—and for the regular soldiers, put on trial for stealing or getting into conflict with an officer. We collected all the statistics and publicized what was really going on inside the army. In 1970, 71, I moved to Bordeaux with my parents, just after the baccalauréat. I had been born there, but my parents—agricultural researchers, who worked on the diseases of fruit trees—moved round quite a lot. We spent a few years in Berkeley when I was a child.

I could have gone to university in Bordeaux, but I wanted to work full-time with the conscientious objectors. It was then, in the early 70s, that the peasants of the Larzac plateau got in touch with us. The Army had decided to expand the military base there—from 3,000 hectares to 17,000. The local farmers asked for our support in setting up resistance groups. We built up a network of over 200 Larzac committees in France; there were some in Germany and Britain, too. All new construction on the plateau had been forbidden so, in 1973, we started building a sheep barn there, right in the middle of the zone that the Army had earmarked. Hundreds, even thousands came to help—we called it a manifestation en dur: a concrete demonstration. We built it completely in stone, in the traditional way. It took nearly two years. At the same time, our network was in touch with a mountain farmers’ group in the Pyrenees. We used to take military-service objectors to work up there, on land that’s too steep and mountainous for machinery—everything has to be done by hand. That was where I had my first experience of dairy farming and cheese-making. Then, in the winter of 75–76, the Larzac farmers decided we should squat the empty farms that the Army had bought up around the base. I moved into Montredon, as a sheep farmer—with many close contacts in the region.

There were two strands. One was the libertarian thinking of the time—anarcho-syndicalist ideas, in particular: Bakunin, Kropotkin, Proudhon, the anarchists of the Spanish Civil War. There were still a lot of Civil War veterans living in Bordeaux, and we used to have discussions with them. The other was the example of people involved in non-violent action strategies: Luther King and the civil rights movement in the States; César Chávez, the Mexican farm-worker who organized the Latino grape-pickers in California. There was a strong Gandhian influence, too: the idea that you can’t change the world without making changes in your own life; the attempt to integrate powerful symbolic actions into forms of mass struggle.

The seventies were years of powerful militancy in France, coinciding with a political situation in which there was a possibility of the Left parties taking office for the first time. There was a lot of hope in 1981, when Mitterrand was elected. The ebb came in the eighties. Some people argued, ‘We mustn’t do anything that would damage the Socialists’. Others were disillusioned and quit politics, saying: ‘We thought this would change things, but nothing has changed’. They were the years of commercialization, of individual solutions, when cash was all-important. We weren’t affected by that so much in the peasants’ movement. On the Larzac plateau, after our victory against the army in 81, we started organizing for self-management of the land, bringing in young people to farm, taking up the question of Roquefort and intensive farming, fighting for the rights of small producers, building up the trade-union networks that eventually came together in the Confédération Paysanne. So for us, the eighties were very rich years. There was no feeling of a downturn.

As for the young generation: it’s true that many of the campaigns of the nineties were a bit drab. They made their point, but they did not draw many people in. It was the emergence of another set of issues—the housing struggles of the homeless, the campaigns of the sans-papiers—that began to create new forms of political activity, crystallizing in the anti-globalization movement of the last few years. At the trial over dismantling the McDonald’s in Millau in June 2000, we had over 100,000 supporters, lots of them young people. Since then, in Nice, Prague, Genoa, there has been a real sense of a different sort of consciousness. It comes from a more global way of thinking about the world, where the old forms of struggle—in the workplace or against the state—no longer carry the same weight. With the movement against a monolithic world-economic system, people can once again see the enemy more clearly. That had been a problem in the West. It’s been difficult for people to grasp concretely what the new forms of alienation involve, in an economy that has become completely autonomous from the political sphere. But at the same time—and this may be more specific to France—the anti-globalization movement here has never cut itself off from other social forces. We’ve always seen the struggle for the rights of immigrants and the excluded, the sans-papiers, the unemployed, the homeless, as part of the struggle against neoliberalism. We couldn’t conceive of an anti-globalization movement that didn’t fight for these rights at home.

Firstly, it’s a defence of the interests of peasants as workers. We’re exploited, too—by the banks, by the companies who buy our produce, by the firms who sell us equipment, fertilizers, seeds and animal feed. Secondly, it’s a struggle against the whole intensive-farming system. The goals of the multinationals who run it are minimum employment and maximum, export-oriented production—with no regard for the environment or food quality. Take the calf-rearing system. First the young calf is separated from its mother. Then it’s fed on milk that’s been machine-extracted, transported to a factory, pasteurized, de-creamed, dried, reconstituted, packaged and then, finally, re-transported to the farms—with huge subsidies from the EU to ensure that the processed milk actually works out cheaper than the stuff the calves could have suckled for themselves. It’s this sort of economic and ecological madness, together with the health risks that intensive farming involves, that have given the impetus to an alternative approach.

The Right has always tried to control and exploit the farmers’ movement in Europe, in accordance with its own conservative, religious aims. The agricultural policy of the traditional Left was catastrophic, completely opposed to the world of the peasants in whose name it spoke. We wanted to outline a farming strategy—autonomous of the political parties—that expressed the farmers’ own demands rather than instrumentalizing them for other ends. We’re committed to developing forms of sustainable agriculture, which respect the need for environmental protection, for healthy food, for labour rights. Any farmer can join the Confédération Paysanne. It’s not limited to those using organic methods or working a certain acreage. You just have to adhere to the basic project. There are around 40,000 members now. In the Chambres d’Agriculture elections this year we won 28 per cent of the vote overall—and much more in some départements. It was 44 per cent in Aveyron, and 46 per cent in La Manche.