German and Vichy Origins of Post-1945 French Agricultural Modernization

By mobilizing new sources, notably German archives of the Occupation, we question the vision, that is still standard today, of an “agricultural modernization” that was supposedly absent under a traditionalist Vichy and would have begun after the war following the American model. This is an opportunity to decompartmentalize rural and agricultural history of occupied France and to bring it into line with the historiographical advances that have renewed the understanding of French economic modernization in the second third of the 20th century. The first part describes the imperial project of the Third Reich, which entails its vision of a French agriculture to be intensified, organized and modernized, as well as the important German apparatus to supervise French agriculture: in Paris within the Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich (Military Commander in France), in the Feldkommandanturen of the occupied departments, as well as through the direct exploitation of 170,000 ha of French arable land by the Ostland agricultural company. The second part explores the variety and importance of the “modernizing” initiatives of collaborationist circles and the Vichy authorities. The last part examines three cases in greater detail: land reorganization and the acceleration of land consolidation under the leadership of the Génie rural, the central steering of agricultural progress through varietal and seed management, and the control of “agricultural pests”. We thus document the continuities from Vichy to the post-war period, which were structuring in terms of “agricultural modernization”, a vague notion for which we propose a more rigorous analytical definition here.