Comités de défense paysanne
[1][2] It was originally founded by an agricultural editor Henri Dorgères in January 1929[3] in Rennes, Brittany as the Comité de défense paysanne contre les assurances sociales,[4][5] the promised extension[6] of which was seen as unacceptably expensive to many small farms.[8] The historian Robert Paxton said there were three elements to the rise of militant right wing Peasant action in interwar France; an agricultural recession triggered by low farm prices, the Third Republic's cultural contempt for rural life and a lack of conventional political leadership for small farmers which meant that public policy was committed to cheap food for urban voters.[11] The first President of the Jeunesses Paysannes was Modeste Legouez,[12] a future Senator for Eure[13] who opposed the socialist leader Pierre Mendes France in the 1936 French legislative election.[17] The Peasant Defense Committees were seen as differing from the more established and conservative Syndicats agricoles through a willingness to embrace direct action (including tax strikes[18] and opposing foreclosure sales[19]), a more egalitarian organisational structure that did not rely on aristocratic rural social hierarchies and the use of more militaristic attributes such as oaths and uniforms.[21] In 1934 it would join up with the larger and more conservative Union nationale des syndicats agricoles and the politically eclectic French Agrarian and Peasant Party to form the Front paysan.