Le tournant mal négocié de la reconstruction agricole en France après la Première Guerre mondiale (1920-1939)

In the aftermath of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, the question of the availability of foodstuffs was posed in France with some acuteness. The French economy had been hit severely by the global military conflict, and the public authorities were wondering about the capacity of the country?s agriculture to meet the food needs of a population, a fraction of whom, mostly farmers, had been sent to the front. Furthermore, several million hectares of arable land were taken from the national territory during the conflict. In addition to questions about the capacity to produce agricultural and food products, it was the vision of the agricultural sector?s future as a lever for national recovery, which implied an effort to modernize production structures, that was the subject of debate between the two world wars. The article revisits this dual dimension and shows that, until the advent of the Popular Front, successive governments failed to establish a modernizing dynamic for French agriculture, due to a lack of having defined an active agricultural policy. JEL codes: N5, N54, Q18