In recent days, French people traveling by road in the provinces have noticed a curious epidemic: certain signs indicating the names of municipalities have been turned over. The famous white iron rectangles framed in red and stamped with black letters – which are in our common landscape like a mother tongue: head over heels. Leaving Tarn at the beginning of November, at the initiative of Young Farmers, the so-called “returned panels” movement quickly spread. At the beginning of December, there were 350 reversals in Cher, 300 in Hérault, but also dozens in Vendée, Seine-Maritime, Alsace, Dordogne, Oise, Ille-et-Vilaine, Hérault, Ain, Seine-et-Marne, Loiret, Savoie, Haute-Savoie, Vaucluse… Everywhere, this same visual shift to accompany the same slogan: “we walk on our heads”.
As is often the case, the heterogeneous movement brings together diverse demands. But its main purpose is to point out the inflation of standards and the contradictory injunctions of public authorities. “It is an approach to denounce the inconsistencies of the State, testifies in The Dauphiné Libéré, Bernard Mogenet, the Savoyard representative of the Agricultural Operators’ unions. For example, our borders are open to imported products which do not respect the same social and environmental standards as those imposed on us on French territory. We are subject to unfair competition.” Also in the viewfinder: the Water Plan, which plans to limit consumption to the volume taken in 2019; the end of the European derogation on the cultivation of fallow land, the end of the tax exemption of non-road diesel (used for tractors), or the increase in the fee on phytosanitary products.
Mimetic reflex and identification
The success of these actions throughout the territory can be explained both by the militant network of Young Farmers, who have members in all departments capable of carrying out this type of action in their village and in neighboring municipalities, but also by the virality on social networks of images of overturned panels. These photos or videos, with their strong visual and symbolic impact, are in fact widely used on social networks. Halfway between political protest and the schoolboy mini-clip, they seem perfectly adapted to the codes of digital communication and have generated numerous actions on the ground by mimetic reflex or identification with this movement.
Like the hundreds of thousands of anonymous people who put on their yellow vest following the calls relayed on Facebook in 2018; like citizens banging pots and pans at their windows following messages on social networks of solidarity with healthcare workers during confinement; or even thousands of young rioters taking to the streets to confront the police and loot after having seen the images of the death of young Nahel but also the videos of the first scenes of riots in the communities early affected, the Panel reversals constitute a new example of digital mobilization. If the power of social networks allows the ultra-rapid propagation of a movement on the national territory, its strength and intensity are conditioned by the degree of adherence to the message sent and/or the level of anger and exasperation felt in the mobilized population.
Sometimes the movement goes beyond its original framework. In the Netherlands, the agricultural world also mobilized against new environmental standards (the “Nitrogen plan”) presented by the government and whose objective was to reduce CO2 emissions by 50%. The revolt first affected the professionals in the intensive livestock sector concerned first and foremost. But the protest quickly rallied whole sections of the Dutch population in rural areas who felt despised by the elites residing in the metropolises and who contested a technocratic policy disconnected from their daily lives. This mobilization gave birth to the Farmer-Citizen Movement which received a high score in the regional elections in spring 2023 (19% of the vote).
Symbolic gestures
In France, Willy Schraen, head of the National Hunters Federation, also intends to invest in these themes by leading a list in the next European elections. To the historic credo of CPNT (defense of the interests of hunters and rurality), the Rural Alliance list adds the defense of a way of life and traditions threatened by the “ayatollahs of ecology” and European authorities. It is intended to be a list of common sense and people with their feet on the ground against “above-ground technologists”, rhetoric echoing our panel turners.
If there is always an element of demagoguery in exalting all at once the virtue and common sense of “those at the bottom” against the harmful disconnection of “those at the top”, we would be wrong to underestimate the support that the slogan “on marche sur le tête” could win among French people from all backgrounds. Nurses, rural mayors, police officers… more and more citizens say they can no longer put an end to “processes” and standards, and bureaucracy, which sometimes disgust them to the point of resignation. Recently, Pierre Rochette, geologist and physicist, professor at Aix-Marseille University, returned his CNRS silver medal, disgusted by the “indescribable ordeal” of the bureaucracy that reigns in the prestigious institution. “Management at the CNRS is invaded by a legalism which makes every act more and more burdensome each year.” he denounced in a column in World, before pointing out “the viscosity of the system”, and “administrative inflation”, which leads engineers and technicians “to fill out forms rather than to do the scientific work for which they were hired.” And the researcher urges his colleagues to return, like him, their medals as a sign of protest. Another symbolic gesture.
If agricultural organizations have not hesitated to resort, in the past, to violence during certain mobilizations, they have also been able to demonstrate inventiveness to expand their repertoire of actions with peaceful gestures of symbolic significance such as walling up the doors of entrances to certain local administrations, parade with animals in front of prefectures or even slow down or block road traffic via convoys of tractors. This operation of reversing the panels constitutes an additional innovation, which is reminiscent of the covering of automatic radars, first initiated by angry motorcyclists then taken up more widely, when the speed limit was lowered to 80 km/h. speed on the roads in spring 2018. Common points between these two actions: a protest against regulations considered incomprehensible and devoid of common sense, and in both cases no destruction or vandalism (the municipal signs not being tagged as was the cases in Brittany or Corsica during actions by regionalist activists) all while targeting an element of the road landscape.
The fact of attacking municipal signs also has a strong symbolic significance. By turning them around, we mean that France above has lost its north and that the compass and common sense reside in this France below and its 35,000 communes. It will be recalled that Crédit Agricole, the bank for farmers and rural areas, had for a long time (from 1976 to 1987) the slogan “Common sense near you”, land anchoring and proximity as a guarantee of pragmatism continuing thereafter to be declined in the slogan “Imagination in a good way”. But today, farmers tell us, everything is upside down.
* Political scientist Jérôme Fourquet, director of the opinion and business strategies department of Ifop, has just published France after (Threshold).
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