Laurence Roudart has been invited by the assembly of the Collège de France, on the proposal of Pr Samantha Besson, Chair of International Law of Institutions.
This series of four lectures by Laurence Roudart is part of the Collège de France's Europe cycle. In 2027-2028, this cycle is devoted to the theme " L'Europe paysanne ".
In 1967, French sociologist Henri Mendras published a book entitled La Fin des paysans. He was not referring to the extinction of farmers, but to the almost complete disappearance, in the industrialized capitalist societies of the time, of peasant communities marked by specific ways of working and existing. However, since the beginning of the 2000s, individuals and social groups in Europe and elsewhere in the world have been proclaiming themselves as " paysans ", in an increasingly audible way.
This cycle of four conferences aims to analyze the evolution of reciprocal relations between peasantry and capitalist economic structures in Europe, from the perspective of Political Economy and Agronomy in the broadest sense.
After the Second World War , the agricultural sectors in Eastern and Western Europe took very different paths: to simplify, family farms in the mixed-economy regimes of the West, collective farms in the planned-economy regimes of the East. The lectures offered here will focus on Western Europe, but the major synchronous trends in Eastern Europe will be presented as a counterpoint.
