Script: Pierre-Marie Terral, history and geography teacher, agrégé and PhD in contemporary history from Paul-Valéry University, Montpellier III. Illustrations: Sébastien Verdier, illustrator and bibliographer.
October 28, 1971 – The Guiraud family’s dinner takes a bitter turn when the French Minister of Defence, Michel Debré, announces on national television the expansion of the Larzac military camp. The camp, whose creation had already led to the eviction of numerous farmers, is to grow from 3,000 to 17,000 hectares. About a hundred farmers, including the Guirauds, realize that their farms are now targeted for expropriation. In response, they form the Association for the Protection of the Larzac, organize a major protest in Millau, and in February light distress fires across the Larzac plateau, visible from the city below.
Larzac, histoire d’une résistance paysanne[i] recounts—through a well-documented graphic novel—one of the most iconic land conflicts of France’s Fifth Republic.
A Struggle for Land—and Against Territorial Oblivion
The graphic novel opens with a confrontation between two radically different conceptions of territory. On one side stands the central state, for which the Larzac plateau appears as a marginal, underproductive, and weakly integrated space. This technocratic viewpoint, shaped by quantitative and strategic criteria, clashes with the lived reality of the local actors: a pastoral agricultural landscape deeply rooted in tradition and culture. This territorial devaluation is based on a skewed perception of the plateau as a “desert of stones”, ignoring its ecological and social resources. It exemplifies a well-documented dynamic in territorial sociology: the tension between centralized decision-making and the autonomy of local spaces. As Claude Raffestin (1980) stated, “territory is not a given of nature but a social production,” mediated through actors, representations, and resource control.
From Farmers Versus Soldiers to Public Space as a Battleground
Initially tempted to defend their land by force, the Larzac farmers soon shift to a strategy of nonviolent resistance, inspired by the hunger strike of Lanza del Vasto, founder of the pacifist Ark community. Within days, 103 out of the 107 farmers affected by the military expansion take a solemn vow never to sell their land. Gradually, they bring their struggle into the public sphere. As theorized by Jürgen Habermas, the public sphere is both the social arena where public opinion is formed through communication among citizens and the space where citizens constitute themselves as a political force capable of influencing state power. As early as 1972, Larzac support committees emerge across France, helping the movement gain visibility and momentum. Over the next ten years, the struggle is marked by spectacular public actions—from farmers driving tractors to Paris to sheep grazing beneath the Eiffel Tower with “Gardarem Lo Larzac” (We Will Keep the Larzac) tattooed on their flanks. The Larzac case thus teaches the power of dual occupation: first of land, then of public discourse.
A Heterogeneous Local Resistance
Far from a unified front, the Larzac resistance brings together a broad spectrum of actors with diverse ideologies and practices: conservative Catholic farmers, trade unionists (especially from the Paysans Travailleurs movement), conscientious objectors, environmentalists, anarchists, and spiritual communities rooted in active nonviolence. The graphic novel offers a nuanced and often humorous depiction of these unlikely alliances: as one priest quips, “the habit doesn’t make the monk—but the lack of one is still surprising.”
The Larzac as an Ecological and Social Laboratory
The movement gives rise to a genuine laboratory for social experimentation, rooted in the daily practice of long-term resistance. In the southern part of the plateau, the Cun Farm becomes a hub for nonviolence research, led by activist Hervé Ott. There, the idea of constructive action is developed: “If we demand something, let’s start building it ourselves.” This approach transforms resistance into social innovation, broadening the activist toolkit.
The movement also lays the groundwork for cooperative land management and a new form of agrarian organization. In 1973, a Groupement Foncier Agricole (GFA – Land Ownership Cooperative) is established to collectively purchase strategic plots, blocking the military’s land acquisitions. By mobilizing thousands of small shareholders, the farmers not only strengthen their financial base but also complicate expropriation procedures and weave a network of supporters with tangible ties to the land. In 1985, following the official cancellation of the military project by President François Mitterrand, the Société Civile des Terres du Larzac is founded. This self-managed structure expands the GFA’s mission: the land is now to be preserved as a commons, leased to farmers within a framework of spatial justice and food sovereignty. This unique model has supported the development of organic farming, short supply chains, crop diversification, and young farmers’ settlement since the 1980s.
Lessons for Present and Future Struggles
The Larzac experience remains a valuable repertoire for environmental and social movements around the world. At the 1972 Stockholm Conference, agronomist René Dubos famously coined the phrase: “Think globally, act locally.” This duality—between global issues (militarization, land grabbing, agricultural liberalization) and local rootedness—is central to the Larzac legacy. The author closes the book by quoting sociologist Manuel Cervera-Marzal, who, speaking of today’s climate generation, emphasizes the need for intergenerational knowledge transmission: “These young people are not the first; they need the transfer of skills and experience.” The Larzac stands as a foundational moment, proving that a marginalized territory can become a crucible for durable political and social innovation, even in the face of injustice.
What is the Price of the Larzac?
Larzac, A Story of Peasant Resistance highlights a major blind spot in environmental economics: its failure to adequately consider the social, historical, and territorial dimensions of ecological struggles. In this story, land is not valued solely through economic metrics—productivity, utility, market price—but through symbolic, identity-based, and political attachments to place. As Claude Raffestin (1980) observed, territory is a social construct shaped by mediation among actors, representations, and resources. Yet mainstream environmental economics, particularly in its neoclassical form, often reduces territory to a neutral spatial variable—something to be optimized, compensated, or planned according to efficiency logics.
This reductionism has been sharply criticized by scholars like Joan Martinez-Alier (2002), in The Environmentalism of the Poor, who documents how rural populations, often devalued by development policies, defend land not for its exchange value but for its use value, cultural significance, and historical depth. The Larzac conflict exemplifies this: the farmers’ resistance is not grounded in a cost-benefit analysis, but in a right to land, a rooted peasant history, and a subsistence logic.
Reading Larzac, A Story of Peasant Resistance at a time when a new controversial highway project—widely criticized by the scientific community—is planned in Occitan lands, brings a breath of optimism.
Marin Guinard – PhD candidate, CEC
[i] Terral, P-M. (author), Verdier, S. (illustrator), Larzac, histoire d’une résistance paysanne, Ed. DARGAUD, Mars 2024, pp. 176.