It was in the 1920s that the family structure of French farming was firmly established. At the same time external pressures from consumers fearful of rising prices, and from politicians more concerned for the peace and harmony of the industrial workforce, the consumer of agricultural products, than for their producers, the peasantry, meant that the defence of the profession, through the agricultural syndicate, and the improvement of farm production and marketing, through cooperatives and mutuals, was to become ever more important.

It was in this decade that the syndical movement built on the mutualist and cooperative basis laid in the political and religious turmoil of the pre-war years, to establish a widespread, thriving and influential set of institutions. Not, it should be added, that the period was unmarked by struggle between rival movements: as Augé-Laribé was to remark in referring to the syndical history of this period, ‘the war having ended, Frenchmen could now get on with the serious business of arguing with each other’. But, more positively, the period saw the consolidation of a deep-rooted network of local and, more especially, regional unions together with the expansion of the mutualist and cooperative framework of these associations. Government intervention through the creation of the chambers of agriculture and the consolidation of the Crédit agricole were further important developments in this period.

From conflict to unity? – the CNAA and the agrarian right

One of the paradoxes of pre-war agricultural associations had been the extent to which political influences were important in their development; this at a time when protagonists of both left and right sought to keep their associations distant from politics.