Abstract

Between 1945 and the 1980s, French agriculture underwent profound changes. These changes are particularly visible in Brittany, where farms moved from a mixed farming system to systems that are increasingly specialised in only one or two types of animal production. This contribution aims to review the history of pig farming during this period and to study the gradual emergence of a dominant farming model: operating in closed, specialised buildings, on slatted floors, supervised upstream and downstream by feed and pig trade cooperatives, and based on agricultural work that was gendered differently than it had been until then. Drawing on a variety of sources (interviews, cooperative archives, private archives, departmental and ministerial archives), this contribution aims to study the region around the town of Lamballe, where a veritable ‘pig territory’ emerged, based on farms operating according to this dominant model.

Bio

Clémence is a PhD student at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, in Paris, under the supervision of Prof. Christophe Bonneuil. She studies the history of the modernisation of pig farming, seeking to understand how a certain type of farming became a dominant agriculture model, between 1945 and the 1980s. She is currently writing her thesis. She has edited a book and published several articles and book contributions on the topic, and more generally on the history of postwar French agriculture, in environment, gender, and technology perspectives.

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