ABSTRACT
It was the acceptance of nonviolence, as both ideology and practice, that provided the Larzac peasants with an unbeatable riposte to national power. As one of them put it at the end of the struggle, “We won because we were the weakest.” As the conflict developed, the peasants and their allies exploited the concept of nonviolence, making it encompass a set of powerfully successful symbolic oppositions between themselves and the state. In their terms, the Larzac was life-giving; the army represented death and destruction. The Larzac movement embodied small-scale, grass-roots democracy; the army, as an arm of the state, embodied central power and, therefore, repression. The Larzac was the protector of a local archeological, architectural and natural heritage; the army would destroy that heritage.
