Contested rural activities: Class,politics and shooting in the French countryside

Abstract

This article illustrates the impact of environmental protection measures on social attitudes and political behaviour in rural France through the prism of hunting. Fieldwork was conducted in France’s second largest wetland, La Brière Regional Natural Park. Locals mobilize a claimed tradition of hostility toward a vaguely defined ‘them’ in order to protect their rural and collective rights. The European Union and the European ruling class have become another face of the threat against the rural way of life of the local working class. As this population felt growing pressure from industrial economic impoverishment and a rural sociability crisis, support for the pro-countryside political party ‘Hunting, Fishing, Nature and Traditions’ rose. This article depicts hunters’ growing concern over EU directives for the conservation of wild migratory birds, and then examines the mobilization and discourse of locals against some aspects of the policy of nature conservation.

Keywords

rural protest working-class politics European Union hunting leisure nature conservation class relations euroscepticism political parties

European Union (EU) policies may be received with general indifference by most Europeans, but they have provoked outright hostility in some groups. The result of the May 2005 French referendum on the ‘Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe’ was a strong indicator of euroscepticism in France, the ‘No’ campaign carrying the victory with 55 percent of voters rejecting the treaty. Tracing further back, quantitative surveys have shown that both social and geographical divisions are relevant to understanding attitudes towards the EU since the 1980s. In the first place, EU supporters are more likely to be university graduates and financially better off, while people critical of the EU are more likely to have lower social status and education levels (Belot, 2002). Second, anti-EU attitudes are most often found in rural areas, while voters in large cities are more moderate (Bussi et al., 2009). What may be defined as ‘rural working classes’ (i.e. lower-skilled workers who live in rural or semi-rural areas and who are employed in the industrial, service or agricultural sectors) are faster to criticize the EU. They have an impression of having been sidelined by the EU (and by urban elites in general), which is rooted in long-term social changes. This feeling is reinforced by the implementation of environmental protection policies, often seen as a threat to traditional rural activities (farming, fishing, hunting). Research among French hunters from working-class backgrounds helps us to understand the rejection of European institutions by people in lower social classes at large, as well as the rise of new conflicts in the countryside.

This article documents the formation of a specific interest group to preserve what are often described as traditional country pursuits. Such mobilizations are not specific to France, as similar developments have happened elsewhere in Europe. The controversy over fox hunting in the UK led to the creation of The Countryside Alliance (Woods, 2005), while protests against the limitation of bird hunting seasons are found across southern Europe. The former is more upper-class, the latter mainly working-class, but both of these mobilizations are reactions to urban middle-class environmental and animal rights activism. Class culture and politics are at the core of conflicts over hunting, which may express a rural working-class ‘cultural resistance’ as seen in the dispute over wolf protection in Norway (Krange and Skogen, 2011).

These struggles to maintain rural ways of life take place in a context of increasing concern about the hunting of animals for sport. Environmental and animal rights considerations lead to the appearance of pressure groups in many countries which aim to limit hunting, if not to prohibit it entirely. Waterfowl hunting, most relevant to this article, is a core issue for environmentalists in particular. In Europe, environmental defence groups used EU legislation to achieve their goals: shortening hunting seasons, prohibiting the hunting of certain waterfowl species, establishing hunting-free areas. In general, environmental activists live in cities and have higher occupational levels than waterfowl hunters, who come mostly from lower social classes, so this conflict over conservation and hunting issues appears to be between two specific yet class-based interest groups, against a backdrop of perceived threats to a ‘traditional’ rural way of life. The struggle between hunters and environmental activists plays out through EU legislation, and the hard-fought battle over the shortening of the hunting season illustrates the growing importance of European policy in contemporary French politics.

Through the issue of hunting, we see that the EU has had an impact on political and social attitudes at the local level. Yet the contentious nature of European policy in a given territory, as illustrated in this article, is an understudied subject. Studies of the EU tend to focus on the elite involved in the European policy-making process. Focusing on the issue of ‘European governance’, they analyse interactions around Europe’s central political process through approaches based on intra-institutional and elite networks (Kohler-Koch and Eising, 1999). Looking at European institutions from an ethnographic perspective is rare (Bellier and Wilson, 2000; Shore, 2000). Little attention is paid to ordinary people, with the exception of survey-based work on attitudes towards Europe (Duchesne and Frognier, 2002). But these quantitative surveys based on opinion polls leave aside the actual social practices which trigger the gathered responses. Studies of Europe are characterized by a general lack of attention to grassroots collective action.

Anthropologists working on Europeanization have privileged the study of institutional discourses and the political culture produced by the European elite over closer investigations of how the EU is perceived in the hinterlands. Ethnographic studies conducted at a local level unveil how Europeanization prompts the rearrangement of local territories and identities (Donnan and Wilson, 2006), impacts workers’ lives (Dunn, 2004), and marginalizes rural groups by excluding small-scale farmers (Mincyte, 2011). Conducting fieldwork outside of the centres of European power allows us to understand what the EU means to people, well beyond superficial opinion polls and Eurobarometer surveys. In addition, ethnographic research is particularly appropriate when studying working-class cultures (Foley, 1989; Willis, 1977). Research on working-class culture is in decline today, but I argue that it is still relevant, not just in the classic settings of workplace and school but in leisure activities as well (Dunk, 1991). It is especially relevant when the use and control of space is at stake, as this article will show. The conflict over hunting is a conflict over a regime for nature conservation that exposes the relationships different class groups may have with nature which are manifest in a struggle for the control of a rural territory. Environmental protection can be seen as a form of disciplinary appropriation of collective space which leads, as I will show, to ‘everyday forms of resistance’ (Scott, 1985).

The study was carried out in a heavily working-class region of western France, in several small marshland villages predominantly populated by labourers employed in the neighbouring industrial city of St-Nazaire. Fieldwork took place between 2003 and 2007, and consisted of observations of public meetings, recorded interviews with 14 hunters (often multiple interviews with each) and consultation of public and private archives. This set of techniques allowed me to grasp the extent to which European policy has become a sensitive issue in a local setting, and to see how it has contributed to changing social and political attitudes in the area. Doing fieldwork on this topic may seem unusual, since anti-European protest is commonly studied through the computerized analysis of online international press agency dispatches (Imig and Tarrow, 2001). Unlike most scholars working on European contention, my focus is not on the ‘Europeanization’ of a conflict (e.g. the move towards transnational forms of mobilization; Tarrow, 1995) but on how ‘Europe’ has become a local-level issue for a territorially situated social group.

By focusing on the issue of hunting, I attempt to illustrate the impact of European and environmental policies on social attitudes and political behaviour in rural areas. Under certain circumstances, the Europeanizing process may prompt dissent and contribute to the rise of new social mobilizations and political attitudes amongst the working classes. Through the protest it fosters, the EU prompts the re-mobilization of social groups like industrial workers living in rural areas who had previously withdrawn from the political arena. This article depicts growing concern over Europe in a particular area, then examines the mobilization and discourse of hunters against the EU before exploring the rise of a pro-countryside party in the context of a rural crisis.

A working-class pastime

To speak of hunting in France is in fact to speak of two different, socially divided activities. There is a fundamental difference, both cultural and economic, between the hunting practices of the French upper classes and those of the working classes, the practice of deer hunting versus the duck-hunting practices studied here. Waterfowl hunters are predominantly working-class or lower middle-class. The practice of hunting ducks, geese or other waterfowl for food and sport is a working-class masculine activity taking place in the wetlands of semi-rural areas near cities or remote places. Wildfowl hunting generally occurs on lakes, marshes, swamps or rivers where ducks and geese land during their migration. There are about 250,000 French duck-hunters, most of them located along the coast of the English Channel and the Atlantic in northern and western France. As I’ve indicated, waterfowl hunting is highly regulated, and French and EU wetland conservation measures threaten its continuation.

This challenge to hunting practices takes place in the context of a more general shake-up in French rural populations’ ways of life due to the decline in the number of farmers, the rise of unemployment among factory workers, the arrival of new populations from urban areas, and the development of tourism. Given this fragilization of the rural working class, the rise of a pro-countryside party and rural euroscepticism is understandable. The new hunting restrictions are one of many elements changing French rural life which feed a widespread sense of rural crisis and an inclination to blame the EU. In waterfowl hunting regions, environmental policies have changed social practices of hunting into acts of political mobilization.

This is what happened in the area where I conducted my research. The fieldwork was conducted in the second largest wetland in France, the Regional Natural Park known as ‘La Brière’, just north of the Loire estuary. There is a network of canals, but few main roads run through the area. The whole park covers some 40,000 hectares, with 7000 hectares of marshland at its heart. Most inhabitants of the Brière are factory labourers who work in the nearby city of St-Nazaire in the shipbuilding or aeronautic industries. Despite the city’s industrialization from the end of the 19th century, the Brière has retained its rural features. The locals work in urban industrial settings but live in a rural environment, where life remains very much village-centred, focused on the marsh and its resources. Most households maintain a vegetable garden and raise poultry, and they enjoy direct, easy access to the marsh, which they navigate in flat-bottomed boats propelled by poles. They have maintained important ties with the marsh through activities such as fishing and hunting. Various social practices, such as the exchange of wildfowl or vegetables, help to maintain a kinship-based way of life. Collective rural practices like cutting reeds and peat, fishing, and hunting have fostered a strong sense of community. In addition to these practices, the inhabitants are the collective owners of 7000 hectares in the centre of the marsh, another vector of solidarity. The oldest declaration mentioning these rights is the ordinance of Duke François II of 8 August 1461, which confirmed already well-established rights. Modifications start to appear at the time of the French Revolution but the collective quality of the central part of the marsh was retained by the 1836 creation of an inter-village organization responsible for its management. The members of this Village Representatives’ Committee are elected officials from local village councils.

This strong feeling of solidarity is rooted in a long history of social protest. The inhabitants have frequently fought to maintain their collective rights, especially since the French revolution when individualist ideology was in some aspects in opposition to rural communitarianism.¹ Locals rose up in protest regularly against the bourgeoisie during the 19th century. Urban classes were seen as a threat because they fixed the price of peat and because they wanted to drain the marsh and divide it into individual plots for agricultural purposes. It is also worth stressing that since the introduction of local elections in the late 19th century, village councillors have usually come from the lower social classes. It is thus difficult to define the distinctive characteristics of the political elite, since they had nearly the same social background as other inhabitants. Most of these elected representatives were small-scale farmers and carpenters in the 19th century, and factory workers and employees in the 20th century. Yet if social cohesion is important in this milieu, it would be erroneous to assume that the area was peopled exclusively by autochthones: different populations moved to the area in response to the needs of local industry. Young workers integrated themselves into local life throughout the 20th century, even more easily if they married ‘local girls’ and if they were from other rural areas, as was often the case.

The social struggles of the past remain alive in memory, and inhabitants frequently evoke this history of contention. Locals’ frequent citation of actual and imagined accounts convey a strong image of ‘us’ against ‘them’. Working-class locals claim to maintain a tradition of hostility toward ‘them’ in order to protect their rural and collective rights – the identity of the postulated ‘them’ varying according to social and historical contexts. Nowadays, the division takes place between different in-groups (workers, hunters, fishermen, long-time inhabitants) and out-groups (the members of middle classes, tourists, newcomers), and in recent years Europe and the European ruling class have become another face of ‘them’ due to the impact of their environmental policy on traditional activities and thus way of life.

Through hunting, locals enact and renew their involvement in long-established village relationships. The role of hunting as ‘social glue’ is important: the giving and receiving of migratory fowl serves as a means of enhancing social relationships. Guns are also symbols of violence, calling forth a turbulent past of struggles to defend the autonomy of the marshes. The possession and public display of one or more rifles, even if not actually used, thus serves a symbolic function within the community’s historical memory. Hunters are often passionate about what they see as a traditional and time-honoured sport. Today hunting functions more as a leisure activity than as a means of providing subsistence, but, along with the cultivation of vegetable gardens and raising animals, it still helps to lower food costs. Hunting is a popular activity (there are about 1500 hunters in the marsh, 800 of which hunt game birds) and clearly gendered, almost exclusively male. Most of the hunters represent the general population, working as skilled and unskilled workers in St-Nazaire’s shipbuilding and aeronautics factories.

Let’s take the case of Yvon, one of the first hunters I met. He was born in 1950 in the main village in the marsh, where his parents were also born. His grandfathers were manual labourers, his father was a solderer in the aeronautics industry, and he himself was a boilermaker in the same business until he had to stop working due to a professionally related illness (asbestos exposure). ‘Hunting, I started at 16, the usual age. Well … actually, it began when I was 12–13, with my father.’ Hunting is a family affair and the business of men: Yvon passed this passion on to his son, born in 1974, who has no school diploma and who was unemployed at the time we met. Together they speak at length about hunting activities, where strength and physical endurance are in play. This practice, which takes place away from home and factory, is a way of preserving an in-group masculine sociability. It provides a setting for expressing the virility of labourers which is increasingly challenged elsewhere, especially at work (due to unemployment and the transformation of work practices) but also at school, which devalues the quality of virility.

Working-class hunting in France expresses above all social relations and oppositions (Bozon and Chamboredon, 1980). Research on social distinctions and cultural domination by Bourdieu (1986) and Skeggs (2004) helps us understand the place and role of hunting in contemporary French society. As a male working-class pastime, bird hunting is stigmatized: the dominant culture, notably through the media, depicts working-class hunters as ‘backward’, ‘irresponsible’ and ‘unmodern’ (Traïni, 2003). This French middle-class rejection of hunting associates the stigmatization of the working classes in general with a disregard for rural people; rural inhabitants and manual workers are at the bottom of current socio-cultural hierarchies. Contrary to some of Pierre Bourdieu’s work, which tends to view working classes as exclusively dominated and espousing the ‘tastes of necessity’ (1986), I will show how hunting and its stigmatization can constitute a vector of collective mobilization, where working-class culture may serve as a positive resource.

Contesting rural recreation

With the development of European environmental prerogatives, rural practices like hunting are bound by new constraints. These new rules have had a momentous impact on the Brière because the wetland is an effective wildlife reserve, particularly for migratory birds. Two EU directive deal with the conservation of wildlife, focusing on the protection of sites as well as species: Council directive 79/409/EEC of 2 April 1979 on the Conservation of Wild Birds acknowledges that birds are a valuable part of a shared European natural heritage, and Council directive 92/43/EEC of 21 May 1992 on the Conservation of Natural Habitats and Wild Flora and Fauna aims to protect wildlife species and their habitats. Along with these directives, the designation of Special Protection Areas preserves these sites from potentially damaging development. In addition, since the late 1990s, all nature reserves have been included in the Natura 2000 network. The cornerstone of EU nature protection policy, Natura 2000 protects certain bird species during periods of particular vulnerability, such as during return migration to nesting areas, reproduction periods and the raising of chicks.

The species targeted by European environmental policy are predominantly wetland dwellers, meaning that these new rules have an impact on hunting management in the Brière, customarily the responsibility of the Village Representatives’ Committee. But it is less the European directives themselves than how they were used by environmental groups that led to the shortened hunting season and consequently incited hunters’ new social mobilization. The fuss over the directives, especially around the issue of breeding season, fed conflicting interpretations of the situation which created a ‘window of opportunity’ that allowed environmental groups to attain their goal of limiting hunting at the European level when it had been impossible at the national level (Rootes, 2003). Environmental groups are weak in terms of active memberships, but they compensate with carefully targeted actions, notably litigation in European courts. Relying on scientific knowledge and institutional actors, they may successfully argue for conservation status for particular zones (Ollitraut, 2008; Tovey, 2009).

One of the main French environmental organizations to use the new European rules is the League for Bird Protection (Ligue Pour La Protection des Oiseaux (LPO); see Berny, 2009). The LPO has campaigned for years to shorten the hunting season, to protect endangered species, and to obtain national legislation in line with the Wild Birds Directive. They have regularly used EU Directives to bring suit against the Minister of the Environment and the Prefects who set the hunting season annually. In 1998–2000, the LPO campaigned against a new French law that contravened the Wild Birds Directive. The ‘BirdLife campaign’ succeeded, and the law was revised in 2000 to be more in line with the Directive.

It was these legal actions following the Wild Birds Directive that prompted the pro-hunting social movement and the formation of new rural pressure groups. Hunters did not protest when the European Directive was ratified in 1979, but they began to take action in the 1990s when environmental activism began to bear fruit and the impact of the directive began to be felt locally. Pro-hunting campaigners have since tried to weaken the Wild Birds Directive to allow longer hunting seasons and prevent the creation of no-hunting zones in places designated as having European importance.

New rules strictly limiting bird hunting are seen by most of the inhabitants of the Brière as a threat to their traditional ties with the marsh. Their implementation has exacerbated the widespread feeling of weakness and alienation of working-class residents, happening at the same time as an economic downturn which reduced industrial employment. Jobs became insecure at the same time that some practices of rural working-class life became endangered. In addition, the development of tourism and the settling of members of the urban middle classes in the area also weakened the community’s way of life. There is a growing opposition between the rural sociability of the local working classes in decline on the one hand, and the leisure-time activities of – or upper-class urbanites on the other. Urban middle-class newcomers don’t hunt, and have another, more contemplative relationship with the countryside, imagining it free of human activities other than walking and bird watching. In this context of a splintering local community, the EU is seen as a powerful tool in the hands of the urban elites against whom the locals have fought over generations.

Hunters’ fears express a rejection of new arrivals in a territory they consider as belonging to them, but also manifest a reaction to the transformation of their environment for the benefit of urbanites and tourism. This is made clear by Patrick, a quarry worker from a family of labourers from La Navale (his father and his two brothers work there). He is revolted by what he feels is an action of distancing:

All that for what? To make tree-huggers happy. Though we never see them in the Brière. Me, when it’s −2°, −3°, I don’t see any environmentalists with cameras. Got to make them pathways, got to make them cabins to watch the sparrows [. . .] For the tree-huggers, for their filthy sparrows – and for the tourist. And there, they’re capable of kicking us right out. [. . .] It’s only tourists who are allowed to do anything, and for the guy who’s a regular user, who’s already there, they don’t give a shit!

He presents his engagement defending hunting as an unlikely political apprenticeship that has become necessary: ‘Otherwise, the marsh is going to slip away from us’. Political engagement is taken on in the name of the growing influence of environmentalists and their supposed investment in places of power, particularly at the European level:

The other heavyweights there, they have money, they are well placed, and they have power. Well, they sure didn’t skip over us! [. . .] It’s up there, got to go there. That’s why now you’ve got to be totally, totally, totally political.

The rise of a social movement against the EU

Waterfowl hunters are the most affected by the new European rules, and are therefore at the forefront of rural anti-EU contestation. Every village has a village hunting association (Société communale de chasse) charged with monitoring game in the area. With EU threats to hunting, they have tended to engage in new kinds of rebellious and more political actions. These associations have become increasingly political, assuring not only the neutral management of game but coordinating various forms of activism like distributing leaflets and organizing political meetings. In the 1990s, hunting groups took another step, forming new pressure groups devoted to the anti-European struggle: village hunting defence committees flourished, eventually combining into a single marsh-wide hunting defence committee (Comité de defense des chasseurs). Its main demands were the repeal of the Birds Directive and the preservation of the traditional mid-July start of the hunting season. It is worth noting that this local mobilization against the EU was also directed against the regional and national hunting federations (Fédérations de la chasse), institutions for hunting management often dominated by the well-off (landowners, affluent farmers, professionals), which were seen as too passive. Thus the rise of local and working-class pressure groups in the Brière marshes (and elsewhere – especially in the Southwest and in the Somme Bay) challenged the hunting establishment.

At this juncture, a sociological sketch of hunter mobilization might be useful. First of all, compared with levels of trade union membership and more general working-class associative engagement in France, membership in hunters’ anti-EU pressure groups is relatively high. In 2001, 250 of the 1500 registered hunters in the Brière were members of the main activist group,² and important meetings topped 100 attendees. Membership in these groups is a political act. While membership in a village hunting association is necessary to obtain a hunting licence, joining a pressure group in addition is a political engagement. This high membership is particularly significant because scholars have repeatedly drawn attention to the decline and weakness of working-class political mobilization since the late 1970s. Most of the members of the pressure groups are male, between 30 and 50 years old, from the working or lower middle classes.

What is most striking is that the leadership of this movement is barely socially distinguishable from its membership. Sociological research on working-class politics shows that the process of representation is usually socially biased. Most often, political representatives of the working class don’t come from this class themselves, and when they do they’re from its upper edge. But in the case of pro-hunting protestors, the social status of the leaders is almost identical to that of rank and file activists – this is a working-class grassroots protest, with working-class leaders. This contrasts starkly with the social profile of environmental pressure groups. Local environmental activism depends not on grassroots mobilization but on a few leaders, generally from middle-class backgrounds, with substantial economic resources and above all a vast reserve of cultural capital. Teachers and managers are heavily represented in these groups. These patterns mirror the differential support according to social status for EU and anti-EU activisms. Two competing ways of mobilizing public opinion over the EU face off, expressing two contrasting social modes for appropriating the countryside.

The reaction of some hunters to increased restrictions was to form a group whose tactics were more direct-action than attempting to lobby legislators. While middle-class environmental activists sought legal injunctions, working-class hunting supporters resorted to less conventional or accepted methods of protest. Their dissent wasn’t shown in big European cities, but in local and regional arenas. First of all, they took part in mass demonstrations in major cities of western France (e.g. Rennes, Nantes and Bordeaux) and more locally in St-Nazaire. These street demonstrations generally occurred at the beginning and end of the hunting season. The slogans found on the picket signs brandished at these demonstrations and stuck in the marsh clearly underscore the protest’s goal: defending the inherited common use of the marsh, which is thought to be threatened by the development of tourism and European regulations:

‘Briérons³ thrown out of his marsh on weekends.’

‘Losing your traditions is losing your identity.’

‘Hunter, fisherman thrown out of his marsh summers and weekends. Who is the Brière for?’

‘Tradition to the museum. Natura 2000 to the stake. Brièron master of his home.’

Alongside rather classic street demonstrations, there was also a special form of local protest in the marsh: hundreds went hunting in July and August, out of hunting season. It is important to stress that this was a real political act of protest and not simply poaching. Participants intended their illegal behaviour to be understood as politically meaningful. There were meetings before and after the hunts, sometimes with demonstrations, the distribution of tracts, and petitions to be signed. The birds killed were donated to hospitals or homes for the elderly. In an action akin to one often taken by trade unions, collective funds were raised to pay the fines they risked from game wardens. These collective hunts before the official opening date are called ‘wild openings’ or ‘traditionals’. They stage the appropriation of the space by hunters, which was also manifest by an action controlling access to the marsh. In 2001 and 2002 some hunters occupied the marsh, much like striking workers occupy a factory. The so-called ‘occupation’ aimed to deny access to bird conservationists who come to monitor migrating birds, take photos and organize boat trips. There were physical threats against game wardens and environmental activists, and one environmentalist who lived and worked in the marsh as a tour guide even left the area after his boat and car were destroyed by hunters.

The use of violence, symbolic and real, is important. Threats of falling back on violence may be made by anonymous tracts distributed in the marsh, signed ‘Angry Hunters’ or ‘The Brière Resistance’. Insults may be written on buildings at night, as when death threats were written on the walls of a town hall and the home of an elected official in the summer of 2001. Threats may also be directly produced verbally at public meetings, and the village representatives’ committee meetings are a prime venue for the expression of threats aimed at elected officials. As with unsigned tracts, these are not threats made as an individual but threats made in the name of a collective, in the name of angry hunters. They express and make manifest the pressure of a group, contestatory hunters, which stages its collective force from the back of the room. Often standing, behind the last row of chairs, they don’t use the microphones but offer boos and insults without always waiting their turn to speak: ‘The Brière has always belonged to Briérons!’, ‘You’re confusing the Brière and tourism – Us, tourists, we don’t want them!’

Symbols representing the hunting ban were attacked. In August 2000 the Regional Natural Park’s ornithological observatory and administrative centre were destroyed by a fire, massacring protected birds housed within. The case remains unresolved despite the interrogation of over 300 people and the establishment of an investigative team of 10 national police officers which led to the wire-tapping of certain hunters. The presumed perpetrators are widely known, but the charges are insufficient due to inadequate testimonies. Alongside these spectacular fires, other, more routine actions may also be cited: pot-shots taken at signs, the burning of a backhoe used for dredging canals, the cutting of trees at the site of a touristic event, and so on.

These actions may be seen as reactions to mechanisms of spatial control (Foucault, 1977), the people’s resistance to the institutional control of lived-in spaces as took place here with the establishment of parks for natural spaces also occupied by human populations. The hunters’ protest was thus marked by working-class forms of mobilization: postures of physicality and violence, support in great numbers, and activity in a geographically limited area. In contrast, the more limited number of environmentalist proponents of EU directives are of higher social and economic statuses, and use media and legal pressure to defend their cause within the entire European arena.

Class consciousness and anti-urban rhetoric

The hunters present their social movement against the EU as a defence of French revolutionary ideals, an activation of the French revolutionary tradition against the European political order. They fight to maintain July 14th as the start of hunting season, a heavily symbolic date commemorating the storming of the Bastille which sparked the French Revolution in 1789. For the protestors, defending hunting against the EU means defending an activity won for the common people thanks to the Revolution and its repeal of aristocratic privileges. In the 1980s and 1990s, members of the French Communist Party played an important role in highlighting this revolutionary heritage. Local communist activists took part in the hunters’ protests and supported bird hunting as a ‘right gained during the French Revolution’. Their local councillors made numerous declarations defending ‘the hunting of 1789’ as an ‘activity of the people’ rooted in ‘French tradition’. Communists rejected European restrictions which they asserted would lead to the transformation of hunting into a ‘tourist activity’ enjoyed only by a handful of privileged people in private areas; such a hunting ban would be a restoration of the Ancien Régime, when only the richest could hunt on their own lands. Pro-hunting campaigners call for a struggle against a socially selective version of hunting reserved for just a ‘small group of privileged wealthy people’. Since working-class hunting in Europe is more usual in Latin countries, the struggle is also perceived as a conflict between the ‘French hunting tradition’ on one side and what is depicted as ‘Anglo-Saxon’ rules on the other.

To this revolutionary discourse, the anti-EU protest adds class rhetoric. Hunting defenders experience the conflict as the people’s struggle against a European elite, claiming to defend a working-class pastime that is threatened by new rules favouring the upper classes. Hunting is a leisure activity for working-class households that can’t afford to go on holiday. Most pro-hunting activists link their struggle to past industrial conflicts in which local workers were involved, especially the struggle for paid holiday time in the 1930s which allowed their fathers and grandfathers to shoot in August. An industrial worker (pipefitter) expresses the sentiment:

We are left-wing, we are proletarians, we are workers. My grandfather worked in industry all his life; my father did the same. And that’s what I’m going to do. Working people like us are useful. We are proud of being like that. We are happy that way. What’s depressing now is that we are screwed up! In the past, they had a long working day of 10 hours. They even had to work on Saturdays. But they could go fishing when they came home from work, and go hunting on Sundays. They weren’t hassled. Now, ok, we work a little bit less. [. . .] We can have holidays like everybody, because there are paid holidays. We were very happy to get paid holidays. But now we can’t do what we want during the summer season. When the hunting season starts, I won’t be able to go hunting, it’s like I won’t be on holiday anymore. And all the ducks will be gone. And that’s it.

Indeed, hunting season begins in September, when the summer vacation period is over and most of the ducks have left the zone after the water level has lowered. It is worth pointing out, too, that hunting still fills an important economic function in the context of the current economic crisis, because local households are particularly vulnerable to unemployment and access to waterfowl lowers food expenditures.

The conjunction of working-class concerns and claims on countryside usage rights is not a new phenomenon in Europe. In the United Kingdom, British rural studies highlight a long history of social movements aiming for wider access to rural spaces, up to the present day. Social scientists most frequently refer to the 19th and early 20th centuries when looking at conflicts about urban workers’ access to rural areas, but between the world wars, working-class struggles for the ‘right to roam’ became more political, with the formation of socialist rambling organizations. The Liverpool, Sheffield and Manchester federations took mass illegal actions for access to unfarmed land, moors and uplands (Bunce, 1994; Darby, 2002).

The situation in present-day France is different, since there is a sizeable rural working class which can fight to maintain its rural predominance against urban and middle-class claims. The hunters’ mobilization takes place within the well-established framework of a rural struggle against the urban elite. Since the French Revolution, inhabitants of the Brière marsh have tried to protect their collective rights. They are presently afraid of being forced out of this beautiful region to the poorer suburbs of St-Nazaire. After land issues and the threat to drain the marshes in the 19th century, their way of life is under financial pressure from the development of tourism and the arrival of wealthier newcomers. With this new middle-class population in the area, the cost of property has risen and it is increasingly difficult for the younger generation of working-class people to stay in the marsh. Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that pro-hunting activists often express anti-urban feelings. For many of them, tourists represent the new urban danger. They see tourists as urban people whose social use of the countryside is threatening their local pastime. A factory worker who is leader of the main pro-hunting association expresses this hostility to ‘them’:

These people need to get some fresh air, I understand. But these people came to our countryside. [. . .] Some of them arrived in the countryside like it was a conquered territory. They arrived here saying ‘All these paths are ours!’ But we also have our outdoor activities. The LPO [Ligue Pour La Protection des Oiseaux] are not the only ones who can talk about outdoor activities, about nature. We also had our nature activities. But these people rejected what we were doing. They saw a gun and then automatically. . . . For them a gun means ‘killer’.

In this rural-versus-urban rhetoric, class opposition is no longer central. Here ‘these people’ means ‘urban people’, whatever their social class. The pro-hunting protest relies on what can be defined as an agrarianist ideology, according to which a rural or semi-rural lifestyle leads to a better way of life for both individuals and society as a whole.

In the context of a general weakening of working-class culture, the EU hunting restrictions are seen as yet another urban threat against a rural way of life. Hunters demonstrate for the preservation of local distinctiveness and rural tradition against a European homogenization, represented by an urban middle class. Activists themselves place the anti-EU social movement in a tradition of popular opposition to an urban elite which wants to control the marsh and stop the local tradition of self-management. They don’t understand why their collective rights are threatened when they have managed the marsh for so long and contributed to its continued existence. They have used it for hunting, fishing and farming, and have prevented its disappearance, unlike most other French wetlands. Thanks to the village representatives’ committee’s management of the marsh on the behalf of the inhabitants, Brière locals have significantly contributed to slowing the loss of wetlands.

French rural working-class people perceive the impact of environmental policies as threatening, as also seen in countries like Portugal, Greece and Italy where rural working-class people are numerous and active in bird hunting. In contrast to Krange and Skogen’s findings for wolf hunting in Norway (2011), we see here not simply cultural resistance but also political mobilization against institutionalized power, because the hunting protest in southern Europe can build upon a history of industrial conflicts and rural working-class mobilization.

Political parties and pro-hunting protest

This anti-EU protest has important political implications. Initially hunters’ dissent was channelled through the French Communist Party (PCF), which is a traditional defender of working-class hunting. The party’s influence rose in marsh villages in the 1970s and 1980s thanks to its opposition to the European directives. Communist activists reminded local inhabitants that communist members of the European parliament were the only ones to vote against the Wild Birds Directive in 1979. Often hunters themselves, communist activists were involved in the protest and participated in the creation of local hunting defence committees. But the PCF’s decline in the area, starting in the late 1990s, is also due to European and hunting issues. Local communist activists lost their influence when the PCF allied with other left-wing parties in a 1997 national electoral agreement which brought it into alliance with the Greens (the pro-environment party). In July 2000, most PCF members of French Parliament abstained during the vote for a new hunting bill which enacted the European requirements and reduced the hunting season. The PCF’s loss of influence with the hunters was to the advantage of a new pro-countryside party called ‘Hunting, Fishing, Nature and Traditions’ (Chasse Pêche Nature et Traditions; CPNT), comparable in some respects to the British Countryside Alliance, formed in 1997 in response to threats to hunting with hounds.

In the Brière marsh, some workers with left-leaning tendencies withdrew themselves from the mobilization. The conversion to the CPNT was difficult for many, especially when they were unionized and caught up in family networks which were politicized toward the left. This chemical industry worker and union representative thus refused to follow his colleagues and hunter friends in their support of the CPNT:

People’s simplicity. . . I mean, ‘we got screwed as much by the left as by the right’. What I tell them, the priority, it’s also to defend the interests we might have alongside, as much for the future of our children as in work. While hunting, it’s just for pleasure, it’s not everything.

Nevertheless, most hunters think that the hunting issue is important enough that they should support the CPNT anyway, especially in European-level elections. The protest movement continues, but leadership is changing to the benefit of hunters who seek support from the right and within hunting management institutions. Hunters’ shift toward the CPNT is in line with the current trend in workers’ politicization, less and less likely to be to the left: union influence declining in large businesses, workers increasingly employed in smaller businesses without union traditions, fewer and fewer PCF activists are workers or hunters, and so on.

Since its founding in 1989, the CPNT has progressively become the best-organized outlet for hunters’ electoral expression in the studied area. It had a regional councillor elected in 1992 and a Member of European Parliament in 1999. In 2001 there were approximately 100 CPNT members in the administrative department that is home to the Brière. The CPNT is directly connected with the hunting federation, which local hunting defence committees previously opposed. The CPNT is an agrarianist single-issue party which tries to ‘defend the traditional values of rural France’. Party leaders claim they are neither right nor left, but represent all rural people in their diversity, although the CPNT is widely considered to be to the right of the French political field and this orientation has been reinforced over recent years.

It is important to emphasize that the CPNT inherited the social conflict, it didn’t prompt it. In the Brière as elsewhere, at first the Communist Party tried to exploit the conflict over the politics of leisure between the rural working classes and urban middle classes. With the emergence of the pro-countryside party, the newer organization has to manage a social movement that it did not help create. Yet as I will illustrate below, the CPNT defends hunting in a different social dynamic; its leaders come from the higher-status social groups which customarily headed up the hunting federations, although party followers are mostly people of lower social status who opposed this better-off group earlier in the movement.

The movement’s shift from the PCF to the CPNT included a change in the forms of mobilization, which have become more conventional and law-abiding. With the CPNT, political and legal channels are the leading pathways for mobilization and the use of violence and mass demonstrations is less common. This pacification and institutionalization also means the increased electoralization and Europeanization of the protest movement, because the shift towards the CPNT included a reorientation of strategy in seeking new channels of influence and redefining key target groups. With the growing weight of EU institutions and the ineffectiveness of local protest politics, the aim is now to directly influence EU policy-making by lobbying in Strasbourg, Luxembourg and Brussels. In contrast to the strategy of the PCF and local hunting defence committees, the CPNT operates at the European level with a Brussels-based lobbying group, the European Landowners’ Organization. Back in the Brière, CPNT leaders discourage mass demonstrations and promote confidence in peaceful and legal actions. This change in the form of mobilization is in reaction to the success of environmental activism, which seems more effective due to its use of legal and media arenas.

In line with trends in other European countries since the 1990s, the rise of the CPNT in France illustrates how EU regulations may foment a nationalist, defensive and ultimately right-wing turn. The founding and rise of the Hunting, Fishing, Nature and Traditions Party are directly connected with the issue of Europe. Its emergence is a manifestation of the impact of the EU on French national politics, and it is a response to the potency of legal action via European institutions employed by environmental activism. The CPNT’s best European election results were in 1999, with six members in Parliament and 6.8 percent of the votes. Its electoral support is geographically concentrated: the CPNT’s share of the vote may reach 30 percent in its strongholds in the Northwest and Southwest.

CPNT propaganda depicts itself defending regional and national diversity against ‘European standardization’ by defending the countryside and its traditional activities. The party refuses to accept the idea that more territory should be entirely protected and its control alienated from its inhabitants, so it opposes bans on particular human activities in rural areas. Some village mayors and landowners back the party because they are afraid of losing the right to manage their own territory, especially because of their well-founded fear of being excluded from the preparation of management plans in accordance with Natura 2000. Unsurprisingly, the map of the CPNT’s success corresponds in many ways to that of new national nature reserves, primarily located in Atlantic coast wetland habitats. It also includes areas where traditional hunting methods are banned, like so-called ‘non-selective’ hunting (traps, netting fish, etc.). The lack of effective European Union communication and consultation seems to be an important factor in its success. Ordinary citizens want access to information about the EU, especially when EU policy affects them, and the CPNT brings its message to the local level. It often seems to be the sole party which attaches importance to European issues outside of European election campaigns (and eurosceptic parties generally raise more European issues than pro-European ones).

Distress and social opposition in the countryside

On the national political scale, we are nonetheless talking about a rather marginal political phenomenon. The CPNT has never exceeded 7 percent of French votes, even if the percentage was higher in a few concentrated areas. However, as an ethnographic researcher I believe this particular case deserves attention because it reveals the overall sociological importance of the current rural crisis. I argue that the rise of the CPNT and its euroscepticism are linked to a feeling of collective weakness. Increasing diversity in values due to the arrival of new kinds of newcomers has eroded rural communities from within, leading to the CPNT’s success. This diversity is due in part to more diverse geographical and occupational trajectories, the decline of agriculture, the erosion of working-class identities, the rise of men’s unemployment and women’s employment, improved communications which reduce the community’s isolation and incline youth to look outwards rather than inwards. Villages with the highest backing for the CPNT are characterized by real or perceived domination, more fragmented villages, and loosened social ties: the erosion of traditional collective norms in the rural working classes provides the breeding ground for the party. The rise of hunters’ protest since the late 1970s parallels the decline of hunting: hunters have become politically organized as their numbers have fallen. France had some 1.4 million hunters in 2002, but annually the number has dropped by about 40,000. The hunters backing the CPNT are from the group having seen the greatest decline (waterfowl hunters), and among them there are a great many manual workers. Defending hunting, a masculine pastime, is an expression of the struggle against the crisis of male working-class identities in the workplace and at home.

The rise of the CPNT, like its companion surge of euroscepticism, cannot simply be reduced to ideology. Its success rests on a social factor: it expresses the defence of social groups which are continually reduced and marginalized. Most grassroots CPNT activists come from the lower social groups and become involved in politics for the first time through the party. In the Brière, its members claimed they didn’t want to play politics. They regret the politicization of their activity and constantly complain that they would much rather go hunting than attend political meetings. The rise of the CPNT reveals the social and political pressures bearing down on parts of rural France, rooted in the changing social practices and symbolic representations of people making use of the countryside. Under new environmental pressures and the influx of members of the urban middle classes, rural social relations have changed at the expense of working-class people. Those who back the CPNT dismiss environmentalists’ critiques of their activities and reject the stigmatization of hunting: voting for a ‘hunter’s party’ is a rejection of the shaming imposed by others and a refusal of the negative media-driven image. Analysis of in-depth interviews shows that pro-countryside activism is a way of regaining a self-esteem weakened by media and environmental discourses.

In some ways, the late 20th century rise of the CPNT has historical continuity, especially in how the EU is seen as a threat by many people in rural areas. Euroscepticism has been present in rural France before its appearance in other contexts because agriculture came under the jurisdiction of the Common Market very shortly after its inception. Farmers, especially those with farms considered too small to be maintained for the next generation, have long blamed ‘Europe’ for the pressure they felt, long before the European entity had any perceptible meaning in most other people’s lives. As with the rise of ‘rural committees’ against the Common Agricultural Policy in the 1980s, the hunting movement illustrates the rural distress resulting from European policy. The hunting crisis takes place in a broader social context of migration from urban areas, economic recession, and the rise of rural tourism (Rogers, 2002). Amongst lower social classes in the countryside, the EU is seen as a new political order benefiting urban and wealthy groups, which can take advantage of this new institutional level.

The conflict over duck hunting reflects issues of social division in the countryside, which makes it a useful lens for illuminating the political involvement of the working classes today. Working-class politics in present-day France is generally viewed as weak and fragmented. Since the late 1970s, signs of a working-class political disengagement have been numerous: the decline of mass party membership, the decline of the French Communist Party, the weakening of unions, and low turnout among working-class voters, to mention just a few. These political trends are rooted in long-term economic and social changes that include the demise of large-scale industrial manufacturing, isolation of manual workers in the service sector, broader social diversity of some neighbourhoods, and spatial segregation within others (Beaud and Pialoux, 1999).

The core hypothesis of my research is that working-class politics has not disappeared; its patterns have undergone a mutation. It is arguably more difficult to distinguish working-class political attitudes in the contemporary period: the widespread focus on middle-class types of new social movements (anti-globalization, animal rights, feminist, ecological and peace movements) contributes to the perceived absence of working-class politics. Nevertheless, with an ethnographic approach, we find specific attitudes towards politics are still present in working-class areas. To understand contemporary changes in working-class politics, we need to move from focusing exclusivity on institutional politics to investigating social activities, including leisure pursuits. An ethnographic approach draws our attention to new forms of political involvement among the working classes, which, I stress, do exist. The restructuring of working-class politics revolves around social, cultural, economic, political and environmental concerns. The new European political order is one of these issues, which may arouse hostility via Directives that win middle-class support.

The Europeanization process has thus served to re-mobilize working classes, no longer through classic class issues but by bringing them into political and legal arenas from which its members had been excluded and by giving rise to new repertoires of contentious politics. This social mobilization, orbiting around social class and territorial rootedness, contradicts theoretical postulates of a post-modern post-class period marked by high individualization (Bauman, 1998; Giddens, 1991), and joins other research underlining the continuing importance of class and locality (Jamieson, 2000; Skeggs, 1997).

Rural, but not out of touch

This research identifies certain repertoires of class discourse and action mobilized by French waterfowl hunters during their struggle against the shortening of the hunting season. The case study presented here is representative of working-class zones in rural settings near industrial cities, as also found at the mouth of the Somme river. Both areas were strongholds of the PCF and then the CPNT, a party which flourishes in a context of industrial economic impoverishment coupled with a crisis of rural sociability. Approaching euroscepticism from below is a way of accounting for everyday people’s representations of EU policies and the social practices they provoke. Against an ideological interpretation of euroscepticism as a form of populism innate to some groups, an ethnographic approach reveals a changing social context and the reaction of people with limited resources to these changes. From this perspective we could likewise consider certain French farmers, Spanish fishermen and Italian dairy farmers. Working-class hunters are not anti-EU because they are backward or rural, but because their way of life is challenged by new European waterfowl hunting regulations. From a sociological perspective, anti-European feeling is explained by resistance to the undermining of a social identity rooted in long-term processes. Working-class resistance to a European identity is rooted in social practices which are threatened by this new political order. Study of the Brière suggests that euroscepticism in rural working-class communities cannot be simply reduced to a cultural parochialism or national identity. It is first of all a political attitude based on a changing rural sociability.

Footnotes

Notes

*This article has been translated from French by Juliette Rogers.

Julian Mischi is a sociologist and a senior research fellow at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (social science department). His research has focused on working-class politics in a socio-historical perspective. He is the author of Servir la classe ouvrière. Sociabilités militantes au PCF (2010).

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