Make Cheese Not War - (Studies in Modern French and Francophone History) by Andrew W M Smith (Hardcover)

About the Book

Make Cheese Not War traces international support for the community struggle against the expansion of a military base on the Larzac plateau during the 1970s. Across decades and continents, they mobilised a protest rooted in local issues, but travelling routes of resistance with a protest that was creative, humorous, and ultimately successful.

Book Synopsis

In 1971, the French government announced a massive extension of its military base on the Larzac plateau in southern France. Land was to be expropriated from 107 farms around the small town of La Cavalerie. Limited resistance was expected, but what happened next exceeded all expectations.

Local sheep farmers set up protest camps and occupied the land. They soon attracted an astonishing level of support, pioneering a form of regional radicalism with global implications. Drawing out the international dimensions of the protest, Make cheese not war explores a transnational resistance movement in the 1970s that challenged dominant visions of modernity and became a wellspring of radical alternatives. Exploring previously unconsulted archives in France and elsewhere, the book offers an in-depth analysis of the decade-long peasant movement and its aftermath.

Repositioning the Larzac struggle within a wider network of French and international solidarities, from the US to the UK, Germany, Burkina Faso, New Caledonia and Japan, the book retraces political networks of pacifist activism, as well as environmental movements and anti-nuclear protest. It shows how this French peasant campaign became both a platform and a model for popular engagement.

From the Back Cover

Make Cheese Not War transports readers to the rustic landscape of the Larzac plateau in France, where a local struggle became a global movement. In 1970, the government announced plans to expand a military base, threatening to seize the land of 103 farmers, who united in defiance. What grew from rooted rural resistance soon blossomed into an international cause célèbre, drawing on the power of regional identity, memories of the Algerian War, and renewed religious conscience after Vatican II.

In this story of successful struggle, farmers chose wheat over guns, and sheep over tanks, turning the symbols of their pastoral landscape into markers of peaceful protest. Tractor convoys rumbled across France towards Paris, and flocks of sheep grazed beneath the Eiffel Tower, capturing the media's attention and the public's imagination.

After a decade of non-violent resistance, these farmers won a hard-fought victory against the French state, but their impact was felt far beyond their homeland. They forged bonds with a global cast of radicals, from migrant workers to Native American activists, Japanese fishermen, Irish Republicans, and Kanak autonomists. Through gritty determination and inventive protest, they built networks of rough-handed solidarity that transcended borders. Make Cheese Not War shows how, in their non-violent resistance to state power and militarism, a small group of farmers pioneered new visions of political, economic, and spiritual renewal. This book will appeal to historians of Modern Europe, as well those interested in the Politics and Sociology of resistance across borders.

About the Author

Andrew W.M. Smith is Senior Lecturer in Liberal Arts at Queen Mary, University of London