Rural Communals in France

Context

Michel Bauwens:

The 'Communaux' are the remnants of common rural property in France, attached to villages. There are (were ?) still about 100k of them, but they are under legal threat of a new process of 'Enclosures'

Discussion

Translated excerpt from a interview with the anthropologist Philippe Descola:

(interview conducted by Olivier Chavanon et Jean-François Joye.)

* "What does the rediscovery of ancestral land commons, also known as "communaux," inspire in you?

PD: I welcomed with joy and surprise, deep down, the information about this system of land commons, which I thought had largely disappeared in France. I know the importance these commons played at one time, as my paternal family is from the central Pyrenees, from a municipality with a very large area that is partly made up of "estives," high-altitude pastures that were held in common. In my childhood, I remember seeing the shepherds return from these high-altitude pastures in September with the herds and the different owners coming to retrieve their animals. So I knew it was something that was still in use at the time, but I didn't imagine that these systems were still so extensive today and that they still represented such a large area in France, despite, it seems, the state's attempts to reduce them, as it often perceives them as potentially dangerous exceptions.

* In the videos we made in rural areas, which you have seen [1], you could see that the people involved in the "communaux" are fighting to defend their collective properties and usage rights. What is your perspective on the struggle they are waging?

It seems to me that these struggles reflect well the contrast that exists between the two definitions of a common interest that you highlight in your writings. Essentially, the collective interest is characteristic of small territories, of people who form a society on a local scale, who have attachments to places, and common interests obviously linked to these places. Whereas the general interest is a more philosophical, legal, and abstract notion, which defines what the sovereign power considers to be the thing to defend for the interests of a community defined at the scale of the Nation. And it seems to me that there is an opposition, even a conflict, between these two conceptions of interest. It is necessary to reconcile the collective interest and the general interest, or more precisely, to better define the general interest as perhaps a form of coalition of collective interests. Because the general interest, in the sense of defending the right to property, defending the state of security in which citizens can aspire to live, refers to certain elements of the Welfare State, that is, safety nets to prevent falling into misery... These things, of course, are important and are achievements built throughout the development of republican history in France. But at the same time, these collective interests are interesting because they are linked to communities of belonging, to people who identify with places; and who are, because of this, extremely powerful, as these are bonds woven over time between individuals and families. And this contrast, fundamentally, is for me quite indicative of a problem, for example, that arose in Latin America with what were called the Bolivarian revolutions, that is, the struggles for the independence of the various Latin American countries. These revolutions replaced a system that one could not say was strictly feudal. It was a system based on the exploitation of indigenous labor by settlers from the metropolis who later became Creole elites. But this system had retained important community rights granted to indigenous populations. The Bolivarian revolutions were based on Enlightenment philosophy, that is, on individualism, on the fact that the only legitimate element to constitute the State is the collective of citizens, the collective of individuals forming the Nation. This system led to the destruction or dismantling of all forms of community property that existed before. The result was a profound injustice, as the indigenous populations found themselves completely dispossessed—they were already partly dispossessed by colonial spoliation, so they were deprived of the little that remained to them in terms of property and land rights. This example from Latin America is a beautiful illustration of the conflict that can exist between this collective interest and a general interest."

(https://metropolitics.org/Cosmopolitique-et-communaux-1-2.html)