ABSTRACT
It is appropriate to devote a whole chapter to agriculture, because in spite of the existence of the Peasant Party, MRP was in a very real sense the farmers’ party, especially in the early years of the Fifth Republic. (The extent to which MRP was a rural party has already been discussed in the chapter on elections.)1 It was therefore natural that the Christian Democrats should be deeply involved in agricultural politics, both in government, especially in the Fourth Republic, and through their rural organizations, especially in the early years of the Fifth Republic. Pierre Pflimlin was both Minister of Agriculture in the formative years of the Fourth Republic and one of the fathers of the common agricultural market of the European Community. Then in the late 1950s and early 1960s the young Catholic farmers of Jeunesse Agricole Chrétienne (JAC) won control of the two most important agricultural organizations, the Centre National des Jeunes Agriculteurs (CNJA) and the Fédération Nationale des Syndicats d’Exploitants Agricoles (FNSEA), a development which opened the way for what has been described as the ‘rural revolution’2 of the 1960s.
