What’s in a picture? This sketch of two men with weather-beaten expressions can help us understand a form of embodied grassroots internationalism that crossed oceans and continents. Both men were active in what might initially seem to be very different political causes, both staunch defenders of the right to live and work the land.
The figure at the top of the sketch, Jean-Marie Tjibaou, was born in Hienghène in the north of New Caledonia, a French Overseas Territory in the Pacific Ocean. He grew to prominence as a leader of the autonomist movement representing the indigenous Kanak population of the islands. Sadly, he was assassinated only 4 years after this sketch was made. The flat cap wearing man below, Auguste Guiraud, was a father of seven with deep roots in the Larzac plateau over 10,000 miles away from New Caledonia in southern France. The artist responsible for the sketch, François Montès, ran a creperie in a nearby village with his wife Josette, and was a long-term supporter of the campaign against the expansion of an army base on the Larzac which would have moved these farmers off their land. The rugged faces Montès captured in the sketch speak to shared experiences and go some way to helping illustrate the mutual recognition with which both these men greeted each other, and some of the bases for forging interpersonal solidarity.
They were sketched during Tjibaou’s visit to a sheepfold at Guiraud’s La Blaquière farm on the Larzac plateau, where the ewes that produce the milk for Roquefort cheese graze. By 1985, when this sketch was made, the struggle for which that rugged landscape had become synonymous was over. The ‘103 committee’ formed of 103 farms on the plateau had worked together throughout the 1970s to non-violently resist the French state. They swore the ‘Oath of the 103’ on a bible, committing that no farmer would lose their land against their will. Their movement attracted a global wave of popular support and faced down the French military. When President Mitterrand was elected in 1981, he cancelled the base expansion plan and granted victory to the peasants. In short, this was an inspiring success story for a local campaign about land rights.
Yet, as Tjibaou’s presence indicates, the campaign was both wider-ranging and longer-lasting than a discussion of agricultural land tenure would suggest. I show a map in my book, Make cheese not war, which details the personal encounters of the Larzac peasants across 6 continents (Antarctica not included). From undertaking drought relief work in Burkina Faso, to planting a tree at Hiroshima, peasants from the Larzac plateau travelled to support causes far beyond their own. On the plateau, they played host to Native Americans, Irish Republicans, Kanak autonomists and a whole host of movements with whom they found the opportunity to make common cause. Their campaign was built on an ongoing process of individual encounter and mutual recognition in which interpersonal links between movements forged grassroots internationalism.
During my interview with Christiane Burguière, a central activist during the struggle, I naïvely asked if she’d met Jean-Marie Tjibaou when he had visited the plateau. She responded enthusiastically: ‘of course, he sat right there where you are!’ Tjibaou had first met the Larzac peasants at a demonstration in 1984. The historian Eric Waddell tells us that when Tjibaou was asked by friends what he made of them, he replied simply: ‘Did you see their hands?’ By this he meant that their rough hands showed them to be peasants, not politicians or intellectuals, and therefore people he could trust. Looking at the sketch of these two men, we can appreciate that commonality. The idea of bodies marked by their relationship to the land, whether rough hands or a weathered face, helped forge connections which bridged spatial, economic, and cultural divides.
In tracing this type of embodied internationalism struck up between working people, methods developed in the study of wartime resistance, specifically by the much-missed Rod Kedward, can be particularly useful. Emphasising moments of individual encounter and mutual recognition, we can reconstruct the networks that crossed political and national boundaries allowing a local struggle to become a global force. A collective biography of the Larzac struggle might perhaps gravitate towards the central committee of 103 farms, or to the political organisations who attached themselves to the cause. Yet, if we draw our boundaries more flexibly, we can be more imaginative, using the phrase Kedward borrowed from Stuart Hall: roots and routes.
We can study the roots of resistance (its formative influences, its cultural specificities deriving from distinct groups and landscapes) and also the globe-trotting routes it travelled (looking at how the creation of networks relied on individual encounters which shaped the object of study along the way). As such, following the life stories of some who crossed over with the Larzac struggle gives a different perspective on this land struggle: a Breton pastor who sailed on a protest voyage into Pacific nuclear testing sites, an American peace activist who handed out Roquefort on Fifth Avenue in New York, an English Quaker who donned a sheep mask as he marched to Westminster, a Native American group who performed alongside a Krautrock jam band on their way to the plateau. This prosopography is a little more kaleidoscopic, relying as it does on a form of resistance I have tried to dub rough-handed solidarity in which individual encounters sparked the moments of mutual recognition which made grassroots internationalism tangible.
Over Pentecost 1973, in a ceremony with the air of a village fête, the local community gathered at La Blaquière farm on the Larzac plateau to lay the first stone for a new sheepfold. This was the land of the Guiraud and Jonquet families, both signatories of the Oath of the 103, and that foundation stone held sealed within it a copy of that declaration. The army base expansion order that threatened their land legally forbid them from building anything. Yet, on this farm bordering the army base, the people of the plateau chose to create a place for raising lambs, rather than preserving land marked for target practice. Funded by supporters withholding 3% of their tax (the equivalent of the contribution spent on national defence), this illegal sheepfold was constructed by a diverse cast of volunteer workers from organisations like War Resisters International, and young activists from all over the world mucked in alongside the peasants in an act of constructive defiance.
In April 1985, when Tjibaou and Guiraud were sketched by Montès, they raised a banner in front of that same sheepfold at La Blaquière which read ‘Larzac Kanaky same struggle’. Tjibaou drew common cause with a campaign in which he felt he could recognise himself and his values. Of the Larzac, he said:
We have in common the struggle for freedom linked to the land; we are, like them, peasants, and we fully understand their struggle, linked to the occupation of the land first as a means of surviving, of living.
To mark those connections, the peasants of the Larzac gifted a piece of land to the Kanak people in June 1988. At an emotional handover ceremony, again with the happy air of a village fête, Tjibaou quipped ‘I am taking possession of France’. A year later, following Tjibaou’s assassination, his widow Marie-Claude returned to the plateau and laid the first stone of a shepherd’s hut on that gifted land. This was a traditional building with a radical significance as a physical embodiment of the connections forged by grassroots internationalism.
As I sat in the kitchen of Christiane Burguière, in the same seat as Jean-Marie Tjibaou had nearly 40 years earlier, she told me how she understood the importance of their movement, and I quote:
The Larzac struggle was rich in connections and rich in meaning, above all else it was rich in meaning.
For many years, commentators have framed the significance of the Larzac struggle as a page in the history of a nascent anti-globalisation movement, after the Larzac activist José Bové went on to become world famous by dismantling a McDonalds, marching alongside Zapatistas, running for President, then spending a decade in the European Parliament. Yet, folding the Larzac into this narrative, especially after the anti-globalisation movement lost its coherence in the 2010s, can elide the embodied internationalism and interpersonal solidarity forged on the plateau. Bové was certainly an icon of the anti-globalisation movement, though he has remained committed to grassroots internationalism as a great friend to the Kanak cause who remains active in expressing solidarity and supporting visits to the Kanak shepherd’s hut.
When I interviewed Bové during the course of my research, he emphasised that the struggle against the Larzac army base expansion was not at all a ‘radical political movement’. Instead, ‘it was a movement inscribed in the land’. It was, he said, ‘a struggle of ordinary people who did something extraordinary’. This was not a dismissive use of the word ordinary, but as in the sketch of Guiraud and Tjibaou at the Blaquière sheepfold, recognises that many of these people were self-described peasants with comparatively few resources who built a long-lasting and wide-reaching movement. By taking a kaleidoscopic view of this rooted struggle, we can unpack alternative forms of grassroots internationalism, understanding how the roots and routes of resistance mapped onto the connections and meaning of the Larzac struggle, and were often marked with a calloused handshake.