Laurence Roudart has been invited by the Assembly of the Collège de France, upon the recommendation of Professor Samantha Besson, holder of the Chair in International Law of Institutions.
This series of four lectures by Laurence Roudart is part of the Collège de France’s “Europe” lecture series. From 2026 to 2028, this series will focus on the theme “Rural Europe .”
In 1967, Henri Mendras, a French sociologist, published a book titled La Fin des paysans. By this, he did not mean the extinction of farmers, but rather the near-complete disappearance, in the industrialized capitalist societies of that era, of peasant communities characterized by specific ways of working and living. Yet, since the early 2000s, in Europe and elsewhere around the world, individuals and social groups have been proclaiming themselves “peasants” in an increasingly vocal manner.
This series of four lectures aims to analyze the evolution of the reciprocal relationships between peasantry and capitalist economic structures in Europe, from a perspective that combines political economy and agronomy in the broadest sense.
After World War II, the agricultural sectors took very different paths in Eastern and Western Europe: to put it simply, family farms in the mixed-economy systems of the West, and collective farms in the planned-economy systems of the East. The lectures presented here will focus primarily on Western Europe, but the major concurrent trends in Eastern Europe will be presented as a counterpoint.