Purifying Landscapes: The Vichy Regime and The Genetic Modernization of France

C H R I S TOP H E B O N N E U I L A N D FR D R I C TH OMAS
Purifying Landscapes: The Vichy Regime and the Genetic Modernization of France
AB STRACT
This article argues that genetic modernism in seeds was simultaneously a technoscientific and a political project that materialized under wartime Vichys proto-fascist regime and that contributed to shaping and legitimizing Vichy as a planner state. The constitution of the genetically homogeneous cultivar as a scientific object, a market commodity, and a state policy object went hand in hand during the Vichy regime. A new biopolitical connection between state and seeds emerged, in which seeds were considered a priority target for state intervention because they were seen as the easiest path toward transforming agricultural practices so as to meet pressing needs for a sufficient and autonomous food supply (autarky). The state acquired the power of life and death over plant genomes in the nations landscapes and enacted a phytoeugenics that was both positive (aiming to encourage the diffusion of varieties deemed healthy or higher yielding) and negative (aiming to suppress varieties deemed obsolete). The ontology of genetic modernism considered living beings as having an intrinsic genetic identity, sealed off from the vagaries of the environment, and favored serial and stable forms of life, which were achieved materially through the production of plant populations composed of isogenotypic individuals (clones, pure lines, F1 hybrids). Such pure line ontology, planned seed-economy practices, and metrological arrangements articulated a biopolitics geared towards superseding a
*Christophe Bonneuil, Cnrs, Centre Koyr dHistoire des Sciences et des Techniques, and SenS-Inra, 57 rue Cuvier, MNHN CP25, 75005 Paris, France; bonneuil@damesme.cnrs.fr; Frdric Thomas, IRD, UMR Patrimoines locaux (Paloc), 57 rue Cuvier, MNHN CP26, 75005 Paris, France; Frederic.thomas@ird.fr. The following abbreviations are used: AN, Archives Nationales, Paris; AN CAC, Archives Nationales, Centre des Archives Contemporaines, Fontainebleau; CTPS, Comit Technique Permanent de la Slection (Plant Breeding Standing Committee); GNIS, Groupement National Interprofessionnel des Semences (Seed National Corporative Structure); INRA, Institut National de Recherche Agronomique (French National Institute for Agricultural Research); SIP, Socits Indignes de Prvoyance (Indigenous Planning Organizations). Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, Vol. 40, Number 4, pps. 532568. ISSN 1939-1811, electronic ISSN 1939-182X. 2010 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Presss Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo. asp. DOI: 10.1525/hsns.2010.40.4.532.
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nexus of biocultural crop evolutionary processes under farmers management with centralized planning of genetic progress. This turned Vichy France into a huge biopolitical laboratory. It also left major legacies in the postWorld War II decades.
K EY WO R D S:
genetics, plant breeding, France, World War II, biopolitics, pure line
In July 1941, Herbert Backe, State Secretary of Food Supply of the Third Reich, visited Paris. As an SS technocrat who had recently planned the extermination of millions of Slavs by starvation so as to secure food security for the Reich, he kept a close eye over France, ensuring there was no forestalling in its delivery of requisitioned agricultural produce.1 As an agronomist, he felt that French agriculture should be rationalized so as to increase food production. On July 9, he gave a conference on the role of agriculture in Nazi Europe. He attacked liberalism, held responsible for agricultures technical backwardness and its trade deficit. He urged French authorities to implement a strong corporative organization, a planned economy, and a technical rationalization of French agriculture. He complained about the existence of more than five million hectares of wasteland and demanded that extensive [i.e., low input] farming methods be completely abandoned and that French food supply be organized on the basis of the countrys own means and on its own land.2 It was a vibrant plea for modernization, and was followed by material consequences, such as the appropriation of 170,000 hectares of land in the east of France by a private German company, which used the most intensive of methods including mechanization, land consolidation, chemical fertilizers, and improved cultivars.3 However, most historians of twentieth-century French agriculture have interpreted Backes speech as a manifesto rooted in an outdated ideal of autarky, in line with Marchal Ptains ruralist and traditionalist propaganda.4 They are of the opinion that agricultural modernization began after
1. Gtz Aly and Susanne Heim, Les architectes de lextermination: Auschwitz et la logique de lanantissement (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 2006; German ed. 1993), 26874. 2. Herbert Backe, La mission de lagriculture en Europe, confrence faite Paris le 9 juillet 1941 (Corbeil: Imp. Crt, 1941), 28; see also Herbert Backe, Um die Nahrungsfreiheit Europas. Weltwirtschaft oder Grossraum, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, 1943). 3. Jacques Mivre, LOstland en France durant la Seconde guerre mondiale: Une tentative de colonisation agraire allemande en zone interdite (Nancy: Universit de Nancy II, 1973). 4. On such interpretation, see for instance the classical work of Pierre Barral, Les Agrariens franais, de Mline Pisani (Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1968), 26768.
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World War II, departing from the Vichy regimes backward conservatism and insignificant achievements.5 This view tends to neglect the ground-breaking works of Robert Paxton and Robert Kuisel, followed by many other historians, who convincingly argued that the Vichy regime constitutes the chrysalis of the contemporary French state.6 Vichys back to land propaganda coexisted with its introduction of a technocratic vision, as well as policy and knowledge instrumentspartly inspired by German and Italian fascist modelsto implement that vision. Following Frances stunning defeat in 1940, amid penury, disorganization, rampant plots, and German plunder, a new technical elite achieved an enduring role in the French state. There was a technocratic belief that the time had come for the remaking of society and the rational ordering of the economy. Indeed, many postWorld War II modernization policies, across a wide range of sectors, including economic planning,7 social planning and population studies,8 and applied research,9 have their foundations in visions and institutions established under the Vichy government. Considering the technocratic and modernist aspects of wartime food and agricultural policy does not only allow for a richer perspective on postwar agricultural modernization. It opens the way to a more comprehensive understanding of the nature of the Vichy regime and the role scientists played in its construction. The scarcity of basic goods, the destruction of infrastructures,
5. Michel Gervais, Marcel Jollivet, and Yves Tavernier, La fin de la France paysanne de 1914 nos jours (Histoire de la France rurale, vol. 4) (Paris: Seuil, 1976); Isabel Boussard, La politique agrarienne du gouvernement de Vichy, in Les campagnes dans les socits europennes: France, Allemagne, Espagne, Italie (18301930), ed. Pierre Cornu and Jean-Luc Mayaud (Paris: La Boutique de lHistoire, 2007), 193204. For an early divergent standpoint, highlighting modernist trends in Vichys agricultural policy, see Gordon Wright, Rural Revolution in France: The Peasantry in the Twentieth Century (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964), 7593. 6. Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 19401944 (New York: Knopf, 1972); Richard F. Kuisel, Capitalism and the State in Modern France: Renovation and Economic Management in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Michel Margairaz, LEtat, les finances et lconomie, Histoire dune conversion, 19321952 (Paris: CHEFF, 1991). 7. Philippe Mioche, Le plan Monnet: Gense et laboration 19411947 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1986); Margairaz, LEtat, les finances (ref. 6). 8. Andrs H. Reggiani, Gods Eugenicist: Alexis Carrel and the Sociobiology of Decline (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007); Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); Alain Drouard, Une inconnue des sciences sociales: La Fondation Alexis-Carrel, 19411945 (Paris: MSH/INED, 1992). 9. Jean-Franois Picard, La Rpublique des Savants: La recherche franaise et le CNRS (Paris: Flammarion, 1990); Jean-Franois Picard and Suzy Mouchet, La mtamorphose de la mdecine: Histoire de la recherche mdicale dans la France du XX sicle (Paris: P.U.F., 2009).
and the economic demands of the Germans combined to create the conditions for the emergence of a state-led agricultural economy, and for a shift in the states vocation, from the mere regulation of commercial exchanges to an effective orientation and rationalization of agricultural production itself. A key aspect of this shift was the constitution of seeds as an object of state policy and the rise of a planned seed-economy. A new biopolitical connection between state and seeds emerged, with the following defining features: (1) Seeds were considered a priority target for state intervention because they were seen as the easiest and fastest way to transform agricultural practices at large. (2) The state acquired the power of life and death over plant genomes in the nations landscapes. Owing to the support of the seed businesss corporative organization, it became the commanding arm of a phyto-eugenics that was both positive (aiming to encourage the diffusion of varieties deemed healthy or higher yielding) and negative (aiming to suppress varieties deemed obsolete). (3) The ontology of genetic modernism considered living beings as having an intrinsic genetic identity, sealed off from the vagaries of the environment, and favored serial forms of life, in Baudrillards meaning of the term, which were achieved materially through genetic purity, i.e., the production of plant populations composed of individuals with exactly the same genetic composition (clones, pure lines, F1 hybrids).10 (4) Such pure line ontology, planned seed-economy practices, and phyto-eugenic visions combined in a biopolitics geared towards superseding a nexus of biocultural crop evolutionary processes, under farmers management, with centralized planning for the genetic improvement of French agriculture. (5) The discourse of genetic modernization established a sharp divide between landraces as genetic resources and the elite cultivars crafted by science, between past and present, between farmers and scientists, thus justifying a division of labor between breeders, in charge of controlling reproduction, and farmers, in charge of operating production. Michel Foucault coined the term biopolitics for all government techniques emerging after the eighteenth century (statistics, demography, public health, etc.) that address individuals as components of a population rather than as individual subjects within a hierarchical framework.11 This notion, which Foucault originally applied to the management of human beings, is also useful in understanding how the genetic quality of livestock and crop plant populations
10. Jean Baudrillard, Lchange symbolique et la mort (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). 11. Michel Foucault, Il faut dfendre la socit, in Dits et Ecrits, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 12430.
became an object of state policies in the twentieth century to transform peasant societies. As Michael Flitner has demonstrated, mid-twentieth-century genetic modernizations targeted plant, animal, and human populations and deeply intertwined eugenic, agricultural, and geopolitical dimensions, although they did so in differing ways across national contexts.12 This article explores the French momentum of genetic modernization under the Vichy regime. The first section briefly retraces the pure line conception of heredity of modern genetics, from its roots in late-nineteenth-century industrial rationalization, to mid-twentieth-century agricultural modernization policies. We then analyze how the Vichy governments unprecedented authoritarian administrative control over food production and supply created the basis for a planned economy in the seed sector, with plant geneticists in charge. Instead of merely implying that Vichys proto-fascist state and plant genetics had some sort of influence upon one another, we trace the way in which plant geneticists offered visions and material tools of intervention that constituted seeds both as an object of knowledge and as an object of state intervention, thus transforming the states models of intervention, agricultural practices, and landscapes. Elaborating on Bruno Latours notion of centers of calculation and Foucaults notion of dispositif, we will document how the metrological arrangements of the National Variety Testing system produced wide adaptation cultivars bearing a national rather than local or regional identity. Finally, the conclusion will elucidate Vichys legacy in the postWorld War II modernization of agriculture.
G E N ETI C M O D E R N I Z AT I O N I M AG I N A R I E S B E F O R E V I C H Y : I N D U ST R IAL RAT I O N A L I Z AT I O N , P U R E L I N E S , A N D COLON IAL E X P E R I E N C E S
The rise of modern genetics, beyond the mere advent of the gene concept or of a hard rather than soft conception of heredity, represents a wider cultural mutation affecting the ways living organisms in space and time were perceived.13 The development of railroads and steamships in the second half of
12. Michael Flitner, Genetic Geographies: A Historical Comparison of Agrarian Modernization and Eugenic Thought in Germany, the Soviet Union, and the United States, Geoforum 34 (2003): 17586. 13. On a cultural history of heredity knowledge, see Staffan Mller-Wille and Hans-Jrg Rheinberger, eds., Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics and Culture, 15001870
the nineteenth century established large markets for agricultural goods and helped fuel the rise of large food industries mass-producing flour, beer, sugar, canned meat, etc. As global trade increased by 400 percent from 1870 to 1913, the era of industrial farming was emerging and new relationships between plants and industry were sought. Mass markets and industrial enterprises demanded new forms of life and fostered new cultural attitudes as well as new practices in cattle and plant breeding as a way to fit living organisms into the needs of economies of scale and industrial rationalization. While mid-nineteenth-century biologists, eroding the previous dichotomy of individuals and species, saw life as a web of continuous change, exchange, and admixture, early twentieth-century biologists rather envisioned life rather through lenses that sought stability, fixity, isolation, and purity. As George Shull, the father of hybrid corn, wrote, Linnaeuss old idea of the immutability of specific types, as well as the Darwinian conception of fluidity and gradual change, were based upon almost total ignorance of genetics; the work of Hugo De Vries, Wilhelm Johannsen, and of other early students of modern genetics... has brought a great change and the new idea of permanency is gaining ground with the growth of experimental knowledge... we can definitely say that types are absolutely permanent and do not, at least in some cases, gradually change into something new.14 Hugo De Vries (18481935), the rediscoverer of Mendel, as well as Wilhelm Johannsen (18571927), who first proposed the terms gene and genotype, heralded indeed a modern conception of heredity, based upon a typological thinking and a search for a stable biological type as the most biological concept in the science of heredity.15 The pure line conceptembodied in new purified
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); Christophe Bonneuil, Pure Lines as Industrial Simulacra: A Cultural History of Genetics in Agro-Industrial Context, in A Cultural History of Heredity. Vol. 2: Exploring Heredity, ed. Staffan Mller-Wille and Hans-Jrg Rheinberger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, in press); Phillip Thurtle, The Emergence of Genetic Rationality: Space, Time and Information in American Biological Science, 18701920 (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2007). 14. George H. Shull, The Genotypes of Maize, American Naturalist 45, no. 532 (1911): 23452, on 23435. 15. Wilhelm Johannsen, Arvelighedslrens elementer, on 244, quoted by Nils Roll-Hansen, The Genotype Theory of Wilhelm Johannsen and Its Relation to Plant Breeding and the Study of Evolution, Centaurus 22 (1978): 20135, on 213. On classical geneticists typological views, see also Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution and Inheritance (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1982); and Bert Theunissen, Closing the Door on Hugo de Vries Mendelism, Annals of Science 51, no. 3 (1994): 22548.
forms of lifewas a key argument against biometricians view of heredity as continuous. Within a few years, biologists endorsed the idea that Johannsen had proposed in 1903, namely that the study of the behavior of pure lines is the basis of the science of heredity.16 They competed in inventiveness, trying to come up with new terms to name the groups of individuals that had the strictly identical genomes they were interested in: pure line, biotype, clone, clonal variety, and so on.17 These huge efforts to conceptualize, and engineer, genetic sameness and purity are better understood within a larger cultural shift in the ways in which identity, efficiency, and connectedness of living beings through time and space were reframed within a quest for industrial rationalization. As the French biologist Louis Blaringhem noted,
The ideal for industry is to operate with products whose nature is well defined and always identical. There exist excellent methods for the purification of inert matter... . [But] living matter is complex and the farmer, unaware of the value of these methods, cannot provide the guarantees expected by the industrialist, hence the difficulties in economic exchanges.18
Blaringhem was one of the first French biologists to discuss Mendels laws and Johannsens work in his writings and teachings.19 He had visited the Swedish Svalf station in 1904, then the most advanced breeding station in the world, famous for its isolation of pure lines among landraces and its Mendelian research. In the course of his trip, he also visited Hugo De Vries and Wilhelm Johannsen, and was strongly influenced by their work. As a son of a peasant family and as a Liberal, for him the focus on pure lines was even more than a matter of experimental rigor to transform the study of heredity into an exact science; it was also one of economic fairness and social justice. Blaringhem denounced Darwinian selection methods, in which once the variety is put to the market,... it quickly loses its value. . . . The fast degeneration of the improved
16. Wilhelm Johannsen, ber Erblichkeit in Populationen und in reinen Linien (Jena: Gustaf Fischer, 1903), 9. 17. On the quest for purity and seriality in the rise of modern genetics, see Bonneuil, Pure Lines (ref. 13). 18. Louis Blaringhem, La notion despce, application aux progrs de lagriculture et de lindustrie des notions nouvelles sur lespce, reprint from Revue des Ides (1905), 362. 19. Christophe Bonneuil, Mendelism, Plant Breeding and Experimental Cultures: Agriculture and the Development of Genetics in France, Journal of the History of Biology 9, no. 2 (2006): 281308.
seeds [the breeder] sells ensures the renewing of his order book.20 Instead, he promoted the scientific breeding of pure line cultivars as both more scientific and more in the interest of the public, providing reliable production inputs to farmers. Of course, purity had, for a long time, been a moral/social value embodied in aristocratic views of heredity. In the pre-industrial world, purity was viewed as something highly valuable precisely because it was particularly rare and unstable. Purity had to be rare and sticky. It was tied to the distinctive social practices that maintained it rather than commanded by the internal constitution of organisms. But by around 1900, the value of purity in the understanding of heredity had become drastically reconceptualized. Purity was no longer the product of history, genealogical stories, personal knowledge, and controlled interpersonal relations, but rather a structural property, engraved in the genotype (i.e., homozygosis). Purity thus lost its domestic dimension. It was assessed not only vertically (through verified genealogies), but also horizontally in terms of seriality and predictable functional performance (whether a Gauss curve, a replicable biological effect, a safe vaccine, or a high-yielding wheat cultivar).21 At the same time, purity lost its association with rarity. It became valuable not because it was an unstable and rare state in living beings, but on the contrary, because it was amenable to mass-(re)production across time and space. In a world where large numbers of goods derived from biological products and processes were manufactured or traded over long distances, the possibility of control was associated particularly with the identity and stability of a product, and purity had to be mass-producible. Methods for isolating living beings, just like analytical chemistry methods, were designed to produce stable and predictable effects. Louis Pasteur (1822 1895), pursuing the rationalization of vinegar, wine, beer, and vaccine production, pioneered some of these methods to control microbes.22 In his works on vaccines and on fermentation Pasteur began to think about purity as a matter of presence/absence rather than a matter of degree and assayed heredity as stable predictable performance. The entrepreneur Jacob Christian Jacobsen, founder of the large Carlsberg Breweries in Copenhagen, came across Pasteurs
20. Blaringhem, La notion despce (ref. 18), 21. 21. Mller-Wille and Rheinberger, Cultural History (ref. 13). 22. Andrew Mendelsohn, Message in a Bottle: The Business of Vaccines and the Nature of Heredity after 1880, in A Cultural History of Heredity III: 19th and Early 20th Centuries, preprint (# 294), ed. Staffan Mller-Wille and Hans-Jrg Rheinberger (Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, 2005), 85100.
1876 work on beer fermentation. Pasteur had noted that commercial beer contained not only brewers yeast but also other undesirable species of yeast, bacteria, and fungi, which were responsible for turning the beer sour. This problem of beer conservation was only partly solved, and at a high cost, in 1880 by the large-scale use of refrigeration techniques (ice machines), and keeping quality remained a hurdle for late-nineteenth-century beer industrialists. Emil Christian Hansen (18421909), scientist at the Carlsbergs R&D Laboratory, developed Pasteurs taxonomy of micro-organisms present in beer leaven. He used Robert Kochs gelatin-substrate technique to produce a yeast strain derived from a single cell. Large-scale production of pure yeast bottom-fermented beer was achieved in 1885. In the 1890s, most of the large breweries in continental Europe turned to pure yeast (i.e., produced from a single cell) technology, an innovation that, together with steam boiling, ice machines, bottling machinery, railway transportation, and changes in alcohol consumption patterns, transformed the brewing industry into one of the most advanced, concentrated, and mass-scaled industries of its time. If yeast, a working machine transforming barleys sugar into alcohol, could be standardized, why not barley as well? Its germination time as well as its sugar and protein content were key properties, the optimization and standardization of which were required to rationalize the production process. From 18811887, just at the time when pure line beer was invented, Wilhelm Johannsen worked as a research assistant at the Carlsberg R&D Laboratory and explored the biochemistry of barley germination. Appointed at the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural College in Copenhagen, Johannsen continued collaboration with Carlsberg and engaged in barley breeding in the 1890s. In his research he combined Galtons biometrical statistical approach and experimental pure line breeding of populations derived from single individuals by self-fertilization. It is thus within a culture of industrial rationalization of the beer industry that Johannsen developed his pure line concept as the requisite for studying heredity as an exact science. In this rationalization culture, the vagaries of uncontrolled and changing environmental conditions and uncertain ancestry had to be neutralized in order to achieve large-scale control over new forms of life, serially engineered to react in an identical way to given conditions.23 Another source for Johannsens pure line concept was Louis de Vilmorins genealogical breeding (pedigree breeding). Vilmorin (18161860) pioneered and systematized the technique, which consisted of selecting individuals (rather
23. For more detail, see Bonneuil, Pure Lines (ref. 13).
than populations) as the starting point for a new breed, and then documenting a perfectly correct genealogy of all my plants, right from the start of the experiment. Breeding beets for increased sugar content, he noted in 1856 that the progeny of individuals was sometimes homogeneous and sometimes highly variable, and he suggested that not only high-performance types, but also lines with minimum variability, should be bred. Disciplining plants into a stable inner genetic identity helped standardize their behavior and turn them into reagents that could help measure other external parameters. As Vilmorin stated in 1856:
In a few years I hope to be able to obtain a race of constant composition, i.e., in which all beets with the same weight will have the same sugar content. Once I achieve this result, it will become possible to determine with certainty and to investigate fruitfully the influence of external agents on sugar production.... My first investigations have been unsuccessful because I was unable to separate the variations due to these [external] influences from those merely caused by the law of individual variations.24
In this quote, Vilmorin prefigures two key aspects of the new vision of heredity emerging in the second half of the nineteenth century. First, he viewed heredity as something that could be analytically assessed at an individual level through measurable performance for certain key traits. Second, in an analyticoexperimental mode of knowing, the neutralization of individual variation became a precondition to separate the influence of heredity from external influences (climate, fertilizers, farming practices, etc.), two categories of causes that were separated and whose relation was conceived as additive rather than interactive.25 This paved the way to a representation of living beings as having an intrinsic genetic identity, sealed off from the vagaries of the environment. As the seed sector moved from a cottage industry to an industrial enterprise, the building of trust required new metrologies and standards, resulting in the establishment of seed regulations in late nineteenth-century Europe, which set minimal standards for purity and germination rate. A standard, rather than variable, output for farmers was expected from commercial seeds. Finally, the quest for purity was also related to a challenge in quality management in large-scale seed production. The Vilmorin Company, for instance, employed
24. Louis de Vilmorin, Note sur la cration dune nouvelle race de betteraveconsidration sur lhrdit des vgtaux, Comptes Rendus de lAcadmie des Sciences 43 (1856): 87174, on 874. 25. Ibid., 874.
at least 500 permanent employees in 1890 (as well as nearly 300 seasonal workers). As one of the leading seed companies in the world, it had to meet the challenge of quality standardization and control to maintain its position. Even before national seed trade regulations established standards, Vilmorin conducted routine seed quality testing. To ensure the quality of the seeds commercialized under its brand, Vilmorin controlled quality upstream at the stage of seed multiplication. Ideally, seed production could be done at Vilmorins estate near Paris by skilled, disciplined, and carefully managed manpower. But in-house production with waged staff at Vilmorins estate was costly. To decrease production costs, seed production was subcontracted to farmers near the Loire, under the supervision of inspectors who oversaw all farming operations. The assessment of seed purity produced by these farmers was made easier if the initial purity of the seeds delivered to them for multiplication was perfect, so as to make it easier to detect adventitious mixtures. A visiting engineer specializing in scientific work management concluded with admiration:
In seed production, the division of labor adopted at the Vilmorin Company aims at producing, with all the necessary care, seeds of extremely pure races, and multiplying them extensively in such conditions that, without losing their purity of race, they can be produced at the lowest possible price.26
The Vilmorin Company thus developed pedigree breeding techniques and pure lines as the mainstay of a wider industrial strategy to streamline the mass production of seeds along the principles of division of labor, standardization of pieces, and economies of scale. Producing genetically homogeneous cultivars and advertising them as pure line or pedigree also enabled early-twentieth-century breeders to enforce (partially) intellectual property rights through trademark protection or registers and to differentiate their products from varieties obtained from population breeding methods cast as archaic. This helped establish the boundaries of an emerging professionalized sector of public and private breeders.27 In 1925, a
26. Emile Flavien, La culture des graines, bulbes et plants reproducteurs: Maison VimorinAndrieux, reprint from Les grandes usines de Turgan, revue priodique (1889) consulted in the archives from Vilmorin-Limagrain, La Mnitr, on 17. 27. For similar strategies used by plant breeders to disqualify other breeding practices in the UK and Germany, see Jonathan Harwood, The Reception of Genetic Theory among Academic Plant-Breeders in Germany, 19001930, Sveriges Utsdesfrenings Tidskrift 107, no. 4 (1997): 18795; Paolo Palladino, Between Craft and Science: Plant Breeding, Mendelian Genetics, and British Universities, 19001920, Technology and Culture 34, no. 2 (1993), 30023.
wheat seed trade decree limited the use of the term bl de slection (improved wheat) exclusively to seed lots above a varietal purity of 99 percent and cultivars obtained from pedigree breeding. Breeders who used other breeding techniques such as mass selection were no longer allowed to claim that their variety had been selected.28 Despite this expanding web of norms, practices, and discourses of genetic sameness and purity, the formal sector of certified seeds from improved commercial cultivars represented less than one percent of the wheat acreage in France in the 1930s.29 There were at least 385 wheat varieties being grown in France in the 1930s, much to the despair of Emile Schribaux, head of the French network of public breeding stations:
This abundance of varieties is a pain for everybody: for the farmers who dont know which one to choose; its even more of a pain for the millers and the bakers who have to... process seeds and flours whose variability of composition is a nightmare; it is this variability that is one of the main reasons why our wheat is of an inferior quality to that which is purchased abroad.... For years we have been recommending in vain that an axe be taken into the thick forest of French wheat and cleared... 12 or 15 varieties of wheat at the most would be enough for the whole of France.30
Inspired by the German Seed Law of 1934, Schribauxs phyto-eugenic dream of drastically reducing cultivar range and streamlining genetic fluxes from breeding stations to agricultural landscapes only materialized in colonial peripheries, where authorities were able to enforce a planned seed-economy as part of state-led agricultural policies. In French Tunisia, wheat for the metropolis was mostly produced in large estates managed by white settlers. The plant geneticist Flicien Buf (18741961), head of Tunisias agricultural department, created Florence-Aurore, a new variety designed specifically for these producers. He had selected this early ripening and good-baking-quality cultivar in the mid-1920s within populations sent by Schribaux, which came from crosses between early varieties from several dry countries. Buf then disciplined farmers, grouped into cooperatives, to cultivate only five varieties of highest-yielding hard wheat and five varieties of soft wheat with the highest
28. Decree of 26 Mar 1925. 29. Christophe Bonneuil and Frdric Thomas, Gnes, pouvoirs et profits: Recherche publique et rgimes de production des savoirs de Mendel aux OGM (Paris: Quae, 2009), 59. 30. Emile Schribaux, La qualit des bls indignes et le problme du bon pain, Le Slectionneur franais 7, no. 1(1938): 4155.
bread-making quality. In 1937, a cultivar Register was established and only homogeneous and stable cultivars with superior agricultural and technological performance could be commercialized as seeds.31 After British India, French Senegal was the worlds second largest exporter of peanuts in the interwar period. French colonial rulers put all their energy into one goal: raising the colonys peanut exportation figures. Along with tax policies and transportation infrastructures, scientific research was also geared towards this purpose. Plant breeding work began at the Bambey station in 1924. At the request of the governor, the local administrators had seeds collected from the most promising plants in farmers fields. They were purified via pedigree breeding, compared and screened at the station. Once pure and productive lines had been identified in the controlled world of the station, they were tested in field conditions by village chiefs and religious leaders. The improved seeds were first distributed in 1936 as part of a new pioneer land settlement program. The social structure of this isolated area, where colonial authorities installed newcomers, was more malleable to the obligations of control which demanded the multiplication of seeds from a few improved cultivars while keeping them free from contamination from other groundnuts. The Socits Indignes de Prvoyance (SIP, Indigenous Planning Organizations), created in 1910, provided the seeds and bought the harvest. These were corporative organizations, with obligatory membership and fees, serving as the instruments of the colonial administration. The seeds distributed by the SIP were marked with methylene blue to prevent farmers from eating, mixing, or selling them. Using the SIP and the pioneer land settlement program authoritarian context of state intervention, peanut geneticists, just as military high commanders would do, established maps to plan the upscaling of the top-down distribution of improved cultivars throughout the territory. While the Green Revolution was just starting in Mexico and India, in the early 1950s, half of Senegalese groundnut cultivation area was already sown with improved cultivars.32 But such aggressive state-led genetic modernization of agriculture was not possible in the metropolis as it was in the colonies. First, the small-scale public breeding sector played only a minor role in the cultivar market compared to private companies. Second and most important, for most crops and for most
31. Jean-Marie Sgula, Technique de la slection du bl en Tunisie, Annales du Service Botanique et Agronomique de Tunisie 17 (1941): 67114. 32. Christophe Bonneuil, Penetrating the Natives: Peanut Breeding, Peasants and the Colonial State in Senegal (19001950), Science, Technology and Society 4, no. 2 (1999): 273302.
French farmers, seeds remained a domestic good rather than a commodity, and in each region there was a very high crop genetic diversity, far from the genetically standardized world of Pasteurs vaccines or Carlbergs yeasts. Apart from the prohibition of six grape cultivars in 1935 that were blamed for producing too much wine of bad quality, Schribauxs phyto-eugenic dream did not become a reality before World War II. In the 1920s, French public plant geneticists had secured an institutional space within the Institute for Agricultural Research (Institut de Recherches Agronomiques) established in 1921. Schribaux had recruited a dozen young phytogeneticists (as they called themselves) and established a central plant-breeding station in Versailles, coordinating the research of half a dozen breeding stations in France.33 French phytogeneticists knew their German and Italian colleagues fairly well. Most leading European plant geneticists and plant breeders met in International Conferences on Genetics and in the Association Internationale des Slectionneurs de Grandes Cultures (International Association of Plant Breeders), established in 1927 by Schribaux. French phytogeneticists exchanged germ plasm with Nazareno Strampelli and were aware of its key role in fascist Italys battle for wheat. They were also aware of the 1934 German Seed Law. But it was not until the advent of Vichys authoritarian regime, which undertook to control and manage economic activities to an unprecedented degree, that they could put not only seed trade regulation but also phyto-eugenics on the states agenda.
PLANT G E N E T I C I S T S A N D V I C H Y S D I R E CT E D E C O N O M Y : TH E CO N ST R U CT I O N O F A P L A N N E D S E E D - E C O N O M Y
In the same vein as Karl Polanyis thesis on the reaction of European societies to the social dislocation established by an unrestrained free market, many historians have documented a continuous rise of interventionist economic policies, from the early 1930s up to the postwar years, through the Vichy regime and the Popular Front, regardless of these governments diverse political orientations.34 A technocrat movement, made up of an heterogeneous mix of social Catholics, business executives, socialists, corporatists, and high-ranking civil servants graduated from the Grandes Ecoles, emerged after the Great
33. Bonneuil and Thomas, Gnes, pouvoirs et profits (ref. 29), 3437. 34. See Kuisel, Capitalism and the State (ref. 6); Margairaz, LEtat, les finances (ref. 6).
Depression advocating a post-liberal planned economy.35 Its influence resulted in new schemes, measures, and institutions under the left-wing Popular Front, the proto-fascist Vichy regime, and postWorld War II governments. Vichys ruling elite was dominated by senior military personnel and conservative Catholics. Only a few of the Third Republics members of Parliament were part of the first Ptain government, and all of them were dismissed in December 1940. Under the motto Work, Family, Homeland instead of Libert, Egalit, Fraternit, the regime was the revenge of the armed forces and the authoritarian conservatives over the republic. But it was also a triumph of administration over politics, as Yves Bouthillier put it. 36 Bouthillier, the finance minister, was part of Vichys young modernist guard. This included Pierre Pucheu, a graduate of the cole normale suprieure and top manager of the Worms Bank, who became Minister of the Interior under Vichy; Franois Lehideux, a graduate of Sciences Po and Director General of Renault, who headed Vichys newborn Plan administration (Dlgation lquipement national); Jean Bichelonne, a brilliant graduate of the cole Polytechnique who was State Secretary of Industrial Production; Jean Berthelot, another graduate of the cole Polytechnique and Deputy Director General of the SNCF (the French railway company), who was State Secretary of Transportations and Communications; and so on. Along with the old-fashioned agrarian conservative discourses of Marchal Ptain, the Vichy government gave key positions to this new type of expert willing to modernize the French economy and merge the state and big business under the banner of technical progress.37 Under the shadow of the Ptainist old guard, these technocrats seized power and used the Rvolution Nationale and wartime challenges as an opportunity for a rational ordering of French society and economy. All economic sectors were assigned a corporative organization endowed with vast powers, headed by representatives from major companies and state technicians, united under the banner of alleged apoliticism and the pressing needs of the nation. Vichys
35. Olivier Dard, Les technocrates: archologie dun concept, gnalogie dun groupe social, in LOccupation, lEtat franais et les entreprises, ed. Olivier Dard, Jean-Claude Daumas, and Franois Marcot (Paris: ADHE, 2000), 21327. 36. Quoted by Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 194044 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 145. 37. On the rise of the technocrats under Vichy rule, in addition to the Kuisel and Margairaz books (ref. 6), see Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Jackson, France: The Dark Years (ref. 36), 16166; Mioche, Le plan Monnet (ref. 7).
authoritarian ideology, as well as wartime penury, demanded a central allocation of manpower, raw materials, and energy, which provided an opportunity to expand the power of the administration, unchecked by democratic parliamentary control, over French society. The same pattern applied to agricultural policy: forms of intervention inaugurated by the Popular Front were not discarded but rather reinforced under Vichy. For instance, partly inspired by Soviet, Italian, and colonial experiences, the Popular Front government established a Wheat Board (Office du Bl) to protect farmers from market forces. The Wheat Board gained monopolistic control over foreign and domestic wheat trade. Initially spurned as statist by corporatist leaders of the agrarian right, it was eventually reinforced and expanded into a Cereal Board by the Vichy government, to address the difficulties of food provisioning. The Corporation Paysanne (Peasant Corporation), established in August 1940, took over the role of farmers unions. This was an institutionalization of a corporatist ideology, born in the 1930s in the agrarian right, which was partly and selectively inspired by German and Italian fascist experiences.38 This French agrarian corporatist ideology postulated a single social group of farmers, organized into a single economic/moral/political organization, and promoted peasants autonomy from both the market and the state. In practice, however, as in other fascist regimes,39 the corporative system, rather than an instrument of farmers autonomy, quickly became an instrument for the state to keep a firmer grip on food production. Furthermore, corporatism was also a tool to put agricultures governance under the control of a few tycoons from special interest groups, such as wheat, seed, and sugar-beet interest groups. As in industry sectors, a coupling of corporative organizations and unprecedented interventionism of the state in alliance with big private interests was a key aspect of Vichys agricultural policy.
38. On the ideological origins of the Peasant Corporation, see Robert O. Paxton, French Peasant Fascism: Henry Dorgrs Greenshirts and the Crises of French Agriculture, 19291939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); David Bensoussan, Mystique paysanne, agrarisme et corporatisme: les droites radicales dans le monde rural en France au milieu des annes trente (http:// evenements.univ-lille3.fr/colloque-droites-radicales/downloads/abstract4) (last acessed on 8 Jul 2010); Zeev Sternhell, Ni droite ni gauche, lidologie fasciste en France (Paris: Complexe, 2000). The classical work on the Peasant Corporation is still Isabel Boussard, Vichy et la Corporation paysanne (Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1980). 39. For an analysis of different corporatist systems in fascist Europe, see Aldo Mazzacane, Alessandro Somma, and Michael Stolleis, Korporativismus in den sdeuropischen Diktaturen (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2005).
Henri Dorgres, former leader of the Greenshirts fascist movement, was appointed as Corporation Paysannes delegate-general for propaganda. He coined the term the peasant Marshal for Ptain.40 From his first speeches, Ptain indeed asserted peasantism as his regimes official creed. There were certainly many VichyitesPtain himself heading the listwhose ideal was a pre-industrial traditional and docile peasantry as a social basis for the Regime. But this was not the dominant view. Most men who gained positions of influence in the Department of Agriculture and Food Supply, the Cereal Board, and the Corporation Paysanne were trainees of the Grandes Ecoles engineering schools, owners of mid-size or large advanced farms, or both. Jean Achard, the State Secretary of Food Supply, Pierre Hall, the Chair of the Cereal Board, and Adolphe Pointier, the head of the Corporation Paysanne, were all graduates of the Institut National Agronomique (as was Pierre Caziot, the Minister of Agriculture) and former leaders of the wheat and sugar-beet interest groups in interwar years. Pointier had founded one of the first wheat seed production cooperatives in France. Far from Ptainist bucolic pastorals, they represented the interests of advanced, specialized farmers, an elite advocating change, advance, and reform.41 In March 1941, Caziots law on the regrouping of lands (remembrement) endeavored to tackle the problem of fragmented farmholdings. This ground-breaking legislation was maintained and strenghthened after the war. Lehideuxs Plan administration (Dlgation lquipement national) and the services of the Ministry of Agriculture also launched a war against wasteland. Vichys officials hated wasteland no less than did Nazi technocrats such as Herbert Backe (see above). They set out to develop sterile hectares through irrigation and drainage works. More generally Vichy officials envisioned to sanitize infested areas, improve the nations territory, and regenerate the French population (youth movement camps operated on some of these works). One of the largest projects endeavored to turn the marshes of the Crau (Camargue, near Marseille) into 35,000 hectares of fields devoted to rice cultivation, so as to replace imports from Indochina.42 As problems of food supply intensified, Corporation Paysanne officials and civil servants of the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Supply attempted to increase their control over agricultural production. As early as mid-1940, the
40. Wright, Rural Revolution (ref. 5), 76. 41. Ibid., 7677; Denis Pesche, Fondement et mcanismes de linfluence des craliers au sein du syndicalisme agricole en France, Economie Rurale no. 312 (2009), 6679. 42. Chris Pearson, Scarred Landscapes: War and Nature in Vichy France (Palgrave: Macmillan, 2008), 2729 and 6891.
food situation had become worrisome due to several converging factors: a shortage of manpower in farms; the 19391940 winter had been particularly cold, resulting in a poor harvest; transportation was disorganized; and France had been divided into annexed, prohibited, occupied, and free zones, etc. Furthermore, the Collaboration agreements stipulated the German requisition of French production for the war effort. By mid-1940, the German authorities forced the French government to set the official food ration lower that the food ration in Germany and at a level below human physiological needs (a daily intake of 1,500 calories, instead of the recommended 2,0002,500).43 The Nazi authorities also forced the French administration to set agricultural prices at low levels so that produce could be bought cheaply by German traders, either through official transactions or on the black market, which they actively encouraged.44 Food supply problems only worsened from 1940 to 1944, due to an increasing quantity of produce bought or confiscated by the Germans, the fact that France was cut off from its colonies, and the rise of the black market. In the fall of 1940, widespread discontent began to be felt among the population, sometimes expressed as labor or housewives protests. Securing food supply became a critical political legitimacy problem for the regime.45 A blatantly state-led system was hence established to implement a French version of autarky. For every product, there was a National Distribution Office, which held a monopoly over the purchase of crops and their retail sale in towns. The food supply administration enacted voluntary contracts with farmers. In addition, as of 1941, compulsory production quotas on potatoes, beans, sugar-beet, rapeseed, and wheat were enforced. Every village had to deliver a set quantity of produce to the food supply services. A new corporative organization, the GNIS (Groupement National Interprofessionnel des Semences), under the leadership of major firms such as Desprez and Vilmorin, took over the management of the seed sector in October 1941.46 This forced seed-producing farmers, seed traders, and breeders into a compulsory organization whose decisions were binding on their members. All
43. Michel Cpde, Agriculture et alimentation en France durant la Deuxime Guerre mondiale (Paris: Gnin, 1961). 44. Paul Sanders, Economic Draining: German Black Market Operations in France, 1940 1944, Global Crime 9, nos. 1 and 2 (2008), 13668. 45. Fabrice Grenard, Les implications politiques du ravitaillement en France sous lOccupation, Vingtime sicle 2, no. 94 (2007): 199215. 46. Law of October 11, 1941, Concerning the Organization of the Seed Market, Journal Officiel de lEtat Francais, 12 Oct 1941, 440607.
seed companies and seed producers had to be French and to be registered with the GNIS, although some applications could be rejected if certain technical standards (including purity) were not met. In February 1942, a technical standing committee for the seed sector was created, the Comit Technique Permanent de la Slection des plantes cultives (CTPS, Permanent Technical Committee for Plant Breeding).47 This committee, made up of private breeders, seed-producing farmers cooperatives representatives, public plant geneticists, and civil servants, became the commanding arm of a planned seed-economy. It was in this directed economy that plant geneticists won an unequaled position. They became the conductors of a planned seed-economy. In 1942 a seed bureau was set up at the State Secretariat of Agriculture. In 1943, Charles Crpin (18741976) was nominated as head of the Research and Experimentation Service, coordinating governmental laboratories and agricultural stations. Crpin formed part of the web of plant geneticists set up by Emile Schribaux in the interwar years. After several years of working alongside Schribaux at the central plant-breeding station in Versailles, Crpin was sent to the center of France to create, in 1924, a plant breeding station in Clermont-Ferrand, as well as one in Dijon in 1928. In 1937 he returned to take over the station in Versailles. There he produced cross-breeds that would result in the future wheat variety Etoile de Choisy, released in 1950 to great commercial success. As he was closely acquainted with certain top civil servants of the Ministry of Agriculture as well as with leaders of the Corporation Paysanne, Crpin exerted a growing influence from 1940 on. As a conservative who had been wounded in during World War I, he was highly esteemed in the Vichy environment thanks to his wooden leg, his lgion dhonneur, and his military medal, while also commanding respect from German representatives.48 If, in 1943, Crpin was chosen as the head of the Research and Experimentation Service instead of the soil scientist, Albert Demolon, who had better academic credentials, it was because he embodied a technocratic model of state intervention over agricultural production and distribution which corresponded to the statecontrolled style of the time. Furthermore, amid the penury of other inputs such as manpower, pesticides, fertilizers, and machinery, the improvement of seed input for farmers appeared as the most workable option to increase agricultural production.
47. Decree of May 27 1942, Journal Officiel de lEtat Francais, 10 Jun 1942, 2023. 48. On Crpins career, see AN CAC 200770373/11.
There were two other plant geneticists besides Crpin who played a key role in the new emerging seeds biopolitics: Buf and Jean Bustarret (19041988). Buf had been one of the first French public breeders to develop Mendelian research in Tunisia in the 1900s.49 He had developed wheat breeding and established a state-led seed sector in colonial Tunisia (cf. above). Back in France in 1936, he was appointed professor and held the chair of genetics at Paris Institut National Agronomique, the most prestigious French agricultural college. In 1942, he was selected as chair of the new Plant Breeding Standing Committee (CTPS). Jean Bustarret, a graduate of the Institut National Agronomique, had been appointed by Crpin in 1930 at the Dijon station. Bustarret joined Crpin once again in Versailles in 1940, and succeeded him as head of the central plant-breeding station in 1943. Bustarret spoke German and wrote short reports about the state of the Reichs breeding research and regulation in the Annales Agronomiques, expressing admiration for the regulation that arose out of the 1934 Nazi Seed Law.50 While other agricultural scientists were joining the Resistance, Bustarret, Buf, and Crpin took over the reins of French agronomic research, called upon to fuel production for the food supply services and for the Reich. The organization of potato production was one of the first fields in which these geneticists advanced their position. Potatoes were at the time a staple food source both for the French and for the Germans. In early 1941, the Vichy government accepted to deliver 600,000 tons of potatoes to the Reich.51 The shortage this created, as well as the disorganization around its production and transportation, meant that this food was sorely missed: the average annual consumption of Parisians fell from 165 kg/year/person in 1938 to only 50 kg in 1943.52 Meanwhile, the development of the black market prompted the law of February 9, 1941, which established either voluntary or, more often, compulsory contract cultivation schemes. Under the Corporation Paysannes management, an increasing number of farmers were obliged to enter into crop contracts,
49. Bonneuil, Mendelism, Plant Breeding (ref. 19). 50. See for instance Bustarrets review of the German Register for 1942 in Annales Agronomique 28 (1942): 89. On plant breeding and seed economy in Nazi Germany, see Harwood, this volume; Susanne Heim, Plant Breeding and Agrarian Research in Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institutes, 19331945 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008); Thomas Wieland,Wir beherrschen den pflanzlichen Organismus besser...Wissenschaftliche Pflanzenzchtung in Deutschland, 18891945 (Munich: Deutsches Museum, 2004). 51. AN F10 5278. 52. Commission consultative des dommages et rparations, Prlvements allemands de produits agricoles. Monographie P.A. 9Pommes de terre (Paris: Impr. Nationale, 1947), 24.
which forced them into handing over their entire output, in exchange for a small premium over the very low set national price. In 1941, 132,000 hectares of potatoes were grown under these contracts. Farmers under such contracts were promised to have priority access to seeds and fertilizers, but in 1941 seed potatoes were often delivered to farmers too late (seed potatoes arent literally seeds). Moreover, they were of a poor quality or from varieties unsuitable for the regions there were distributed in. Finally, the Bureau National de Rpartition de la pomme de terre, a para-administrative corporative supply organization controlled by traders, was accused of serving a few wholesalers private interests rather than ensuring an efficient supply system. This took place in a context of widespread discontent in regards to food rationing and food supply, which was instrumentalized by the fascist collaborationist press, intending to destabilize Darlans Cabinet. In July 1941, the State Secretary of Food Supply, former leader of the sugar-beet growers interest group and close to business interests, was forced to resign.53 This political crisis created a window of opportunity for some groups within the administrative apparatus, enabling them to reclaim a more state-led, rather than business-led, management of potato production and supply. Together with civil servants of the Ministry of Agriculture, Crpin and Bustarret were involved in this movement and provided technical arguments in favor of it. Bustarret had established close relations with local seed potato producers cooperatives, most of them based in Brittany, as well as with the officials in charge of the potato section in the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Supply. He was consequently asked to put forward a new seed distribution scheme that the agriculture and food supply administration, the central and local Food Supply Committees (which replaced the Bureau National de Rpartition de la pomme de terre in October 1941), the Corporation Paysanne, the seed sector (being granted its own corporative structure also in Octoberthe Groupement National Interprofessionnel des Semences), would be responsible for implementing. This scheme envisioned the development of a seed chain (breeders to seed producers to farmers) so as to increase the use of certified seeds, and planned their distribution over the territory.54 A key technical rationale for the scheme was to provide healthy seeds to farmers, free from viruses causing the degeneration of potatoes. While some soil scientists and agronomists including DemolonCrpins unlucky
53. Grenard, Les implications politiques (ref. 45). 54. See AN F10 52785280; AN CAC 200770373/7.
challenger for the leadership on agricultural researchobserved that fertilizers could lessen the virus-related yield losses, Bustarret argued that the only effective way to fight was to use virus-free seed potatoes. The production of such seeds required a certain number of rules, which together are known as sanitary selection (slection sanitaire) including pedigree breeding of healthy strains, multiplication under isolation rules, recurrent cleansing (puration) of infected plants in the fields, and so on.55 Schemes for the production and distribution of virus-free potato seed were already underway in Western Europe in the interwar years, and about 20,000 tons of such seeds were produced in France in 1939. But the scaling-up of purification practices to mass-produce virus-free potato seed really took off in wartime years through the impetus of Bustarret, up to 356,000 tons in 1943, part of which was delivered to the Reich.56 In 1941, among the seeds distributed to farmers, nearly half were imported from the Netherlands and Germany. In the following years an increasing percentage of the virus-free certified seed potatoes were produced in France, though they were often derived from foreign cultivars such as the Dutch Bintje or the German Ackersegen and Flava. There was more than a kind of semantic appeal in constructing a French seeds chain: it was an autarky issue. The government had to pay a high price for seeds bought from the Germans while being forced to sell potatoes at low prices. Building a larger professional group of seed growersfrom 3,000 seed producers in 1939 to 25,000 in 1945was a way to ensure that the added value of seed production would benefit French agriculture.57 Bustarrets scheme also instigated an extensive experimental network. In 19411942 he spent most of his time visiting Brittany and southwest France to supervise seed distribution and production and variety trials. In 1943 Bustarret was at the head of ninety-eight field trials set up with him by the Corporation Paysanne to test the performance of different cultivars in different environments.58 It was in this nationwide network that he could experiment with some of his recent crosses and observe the promising behavior of his cultivar BF 15, which would be released by INRA, the newborn National Institute for
55. Jean Bustarret, La dgnrescence de la pomme de terre, ses causes, son importance agronomique: Essai de mise au point, Annales Agronomiques 13, no. 1 (1943), 1827, on 25. 56. Jean Patissier, Pommes de terres slectionnes (Paris: Flammarion, 1950), 222; AN AJ 40 444, Report from the Militrbefehlshaber in Frankreich, 28 Apr 1944. 57. Patissier, Pommes de terres slectionnes (ref. 56), 82. 58. AN F10 5136, Corporation Paysanne:Activit du groupe spcialis de la pomme de terre au cours de lanne coule, May 1944; see also Bustarrets career file, AN CAC 200770373/7.
Agricultural Research, in 1947 to great commercial success. Besides his breeding work on cereals, Bustarret had carried out potato breeding research in 1937 in search of a cross that would combine resistance against viruses and blight, high yield, precocity, and cooking quality. BF 15 resulted from a cross between the Belle de Fontenay, a famous old French variety, and Flava, a German cultivar released in 1931. Bustarrets fieldwork and these nationwide variety testing trials resulted in the publication of the July 5, 1943 Circular as a way to control the circulation of seeds and plant varieties on a national scale. It listed the administrative districts (dpartements) authorized to produce seed potatoes, which meant that in many dpartements, seed potatoes were not allowed to be produced at all. While the potato cultivar register had contained 117 varieties in 1937, the Circular also established a list of a dozen authorized varieties. All other cultivars were not allowed to be grown for seed production. Among the cultivars sentenced to disappearance, the famous Rosa cultivar, still appreciated by cooks today, was discarded for insufficient yields.59 In designated dpartements and for authorized varieties, farmers groups could act as seed producers. If certified, their potato production would be paid at the national fixed price plus a 2025 franc premium per quintal. From the planting of the potatoes to their harvest, these seed producers had to comply with the instructions of the controllers supervising multiplication. Surface areas under controlled multiplication by seed producers amounted to no less than 40,000 hectares in 1943 (of which only 25,000 were accepted), supervised by a thousand controllers.60 In order to achieve this, a growing service of inspection and certification developed within the corporative organization of the seed sector (GNIS), to which authority was given to enforce technical norms, thus building a professional group of seed growers, whose identity was constructed not in the image of peasants but rather in that of bearers of a technical knowledge organized around purity practices. This scale of intervention was no longer a matter of sporadic control over the seed trade; by using corporatist professional discipline enforcement, and providing the technical ideology that legitimized it, Crpin and Bustarret established a regime of ongoing control over seed-producing farmers and tightly controlled state (and professional) technocratic planning of the distribution of plant genotypes throughout the national territory.
59. AN F10 5278, Circulaire aux Directeurs des Services Agricoles, 5 Jul 1943. 60. AN F10 5136; AN F10 527880.
A similar biopolitics was initiated for cereals. While the Reich was sucking up some 1015 percent of the annual French wheat production, farmers were both ideologically and economically under the stern control of the Cereal Board and the Corporation Paysanne.61 Crpins Research and Experimentation Service established in 1943, with the assistance of agronomic teaching schools and the Corporation Paysanne, an extensive network of regional testing fields for the purpose of determining the varieties most suitable for each region. As it had done with potatoes, Vichy also implemented negative phyto-eugenic measures, such as the deletion of seventeen wheat varieties from the variety register.62 It was only in a wartime context, under the proto-fascist regime of Vichy, that the dream of centralized manipulation of the agricultural landscapes genetic composition could take shape, making it possible to cleanse France of a host of varieties deemed to be worthless, and to replace them with healthier and more productive varieties.
D I STI N CT, U N I F O R M , A N D S TA B L E : A F I X I S T VA R I E TA L PA R A D I G M
Along with his work on potato and wheat breeding, creating a national variety testing system, and his role in launching the seed chain, in 1944, Jean Bustarret published a seminal article on the concept of variety. This article, entitled Varieties and Variations, systematized a fixist paradigm of variety that would provide the framework for a consistent regime of research and regulation of innovation throughout the next decades.63 Bustarrets article begins by highlighting the fact that the concept of variety is not at all a straightforward one. It is, for instance, relatively easy for a farmer to distinguish between two varieties of wheat, whereas the same exercise for
61. Commission consultative des dommages et rparations, 1947. Prlvements allemands de produits agricoles. Monographie P.A. 1Crales panifiables (Paris: Impr. Nationale, 1947). 62. CTPS Archives (at GEVES, Groupe dEtude et de controle des Varits Et des Semences). Section Crales, procs-verbal de la runion du 3 novembre 1942. The wheat cultivar Register had been established in 1933, and the decree of April 7, 1937, on the retail sale of seeds banned the retail sale of seed varieties that werent listed in the Register. However, in contrast with Germany after the 1934 Seed Law, close to 400 varieties were listed in the catalogue at the time, and between 1933 and 1940, no cultivar was removed from the cultivar register (only some synonymies were established). 63. Jean Bustarret, Varits et variations, Annales agronomiques 14 (1944): 33662.
two varieties of beet proves much more difficult. Following Johannsen, he distinguished between fluctuation, which takes place within the same variety, and variation, which separates two varieties. He added that botanists had not been able to reach a consensus regarding the dividing line between species and variety, and were divided between lumpers, large species concept advocates, and splitters, small species concept (Jordanon) advocates. He further disqualified botanists expertise on cultivated plants, arguing that botanical variety is not superimposed on that of variety in the agronomical sense of the term and that botanists and agronomists dont even speak the same language when they talk about varieties.64 Disregarding macro-evolutions, which for him were only to be apprehended through methods of Historya rather pejorative view of evolutionary biologyhe focused rather on micro-evolutions, which, according to him, were the sole interest of geneticist of cultivated plants.65 For Liberty Hyde Bailey, who coined the word cultivar to designate a botanical variety... that has originated under cultivation, a cultivar was essentially the equivalent of the botanical variety except in respect to its origin.66 Twenty years later, Bustarrets concept of cultivar had implied a radical departure from botany and evolutionary biology. In Bustarrets ontology, the cultivar was not an evolutionary issue, but rather a technological object that could be characterized through its mode of obtention (pedigree breeding, asexual reproduction, mass breeding, etc.), through its level of distinctiveness, stability, and uniformity,and through the fraction of its phenotype that is of agronomic and technological relevance. This conceptualization of the cultivar did not disregard Mendelian genetics. Bustarret defined the pure line variety as possessing from the inside a homozygote genotype for each of its genes. But for Bustarret, pure line varieties could be more readily defined from the outside by their phenotype, because they possess distinct, stable characters that can be analysed in detail to give an accurate description with the aim of creating an accurate data sheet.67 The value of these varieties stems from the possibility of accurately determining, through controlled agronomical experimentation, their value for cultivation, according to their environment, and their reaction to certain climatic, agrological and cultural factors; i.e., their degree of adaptability in a given environmentthat
64. Ibid., 339. 65. Ibid., 338. 66. Liberty Hyde Bailey, Various Cultigens, and Transfers in Nomenclature, Gentes Herbarum 1 (1923): 11336. 67. Bustarret, Varits et variations (ref. 63), 34041.
is the degree of abundance and of profitability of the output they result inis an a priori property of this line.68 Bustarret viewed the pure line as the most perfect form of variety and as an unquestionably natural unity, of utmost importance for agricultural science.69 His conception of the pure line combined four main perspectives: First, as a genotypically identical and homozygotic series of forms, it was a genetic concept inherited from Johannsens modern view of heredity. Second, it was a research object: creating and testing new and improved lines was what the breeding work was about. Third, pure line was also a technical object in testing stations experimental systems.70 Once a varietys phenotype is made into a fixed parameter, it becomes possible to study the effect of other parameters in the analytic-experimental epistemic culture of mid-twentieth-century agricultural science. Bustarret thus saw the pure line as the ideal material for any genetic, biological or agronomical study... due to its intrinsic stability in space and time, and the fact that it is consequently able to eliminate the heterogeneity factor of plant material in experiments.71 Finally, from Bustarrets perspective, the pure line variety was also a standardized factor of production: working on homogeneous and immutable living forms makes it possible for agronomy to determine, once and for all, the optimal user conditions for any given variety (like a recipe) for farmers, as well as its technological characteristics for transformers. As Bustarrets co-worker would later put it: the advantage of a stable variety (pure line) is that the reactions to an environment and to cultural techniques can be theoretically determined once and for all, and can consequently obtain the maximum yield.72 The pure line is, on the whole, a cognitive and material construction of the breeder who aims to align life along an industrial logic of standardized production, by conserving its qualities of auto-reproduction and eradicating its variations. Unbounded from the vagaries of the space-time of evolution, place, and history, the living world was disciplined to enter the space-time of modern industrial production, as intended by the Plan and rationalized by science.
68. Ibid., 342. 69. Ibid., 339. 70. On the interplay between technical objects and research objects (or epistemic things) in experimental systems, see Hans-Jrg Rheinberger, Towards a History of Epistemic Things: Synthetizing Proteins in the Test Tube (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). 71. Bustarret, Varits et variations (ref. 63), 353. 72. Pierre Jonard, Commentaires sur la lgislation du commerce des semences en France, Bulletin Techniques des Ingnieurs no. 157 (1961): 20713, on 209.
In addition to pure line varieties, Bustarret also discussed clone varieties, F1 hybrid varieties, and population varieties. For him, a clone variety, without being necessarily produced from genetically homozygotic individuals, presented for agronomy the same characteristics from one sample to another; from one generation to another, a clone remains identical to itself.73 An F1 hybrid variety (such as hybrid corn), in spite of the heterozygosis of many of its alleles, also shares a number of similarities with a pure-line-variety, such as homogeneity, stability, and predictability. These varieties are the ideal solution to conciliate the biology of allogamous plants for which a a certain degree of heterozygosis is necessary in order to ensure adequate vitality while gaining homogenous varieties.74 For Bustarret, pure line varieties, clone varieties, and F1 hybrid varieties displayed similar properties, which set them apart from population varieties. According to him, a plant population can only earn the term variety if the individuals that make it up possess a certain number of common particularities. But compared to a pure-line-variety, the fluctuation within a population variety is much greater. In the eyes of Bustarret, population varieties had two major setbacks: they are much more difficult to describe and characterize, and they are prone to vary in space and time. He argued that if wheat landraces have a relative homogeneity with several distinguishing features, as selected by farmers (color, morphology, precocity, height, etc.), they remain very heterogeneous regarding other criteria such as resistance to cold, resistance to mycosis, or for technological baking value. Bustarret also remarked approvingly that they were being grown only on increasingly limited areas.75 Bustarret considered these population varieties as ecotypes, originating from populations in which, for a great number of successive generations, and in the same environmental conditions, natural selection had dominated.76 By speaking of natural selection rather than mass selection, the article conceals the human work of developing landraces. In a modernist conception passed down from Nicolai Vavilov, landraces comprise gene reservoirs and genetic resources inherited from the past. In contrast to current representations of crop biodiversity, which regard the genetic diversity of crops as a dynamic process and acknowledge the importance of farmers networks in its in situ management, the
73. Ibid., 344. 74. Ibid., 350. 75. Ibid., 348 and 346. 76. Bustarret, Varits et variations (ref. 63), 346.
concept of genetic resource in the middle of the twentieth century implied a view of crop diversity as a standing reserve, which local farmers hardly knew how to harness. Genetic resource from the past needed to be prospected and assembled (including through interspecific artificial crosses) by scientists into new, modern cultivars. In this modernist narrative, the world of farmers was a Sleeping Beauty world of static genetic diversity, which was waiting for the magical kiss of science to reveal its full value. This discourse of genetic modernization established a great divide between past and present, between landraces and elite cultivars, and between farmers and scientists.77 Far from the evolutionary genetics of its time, Bustarrets varietal paradigm focused on the fixity and predictability of plant life forms. It assigned an important place to the requirement of distinctive characters, homogeneity, and stability, also deemed indispensable for researchers to establish the law of a phenomenon as well as to farmers who wish to judge the economic results of a given culture.78 This echoes the definition given subsequently by the first International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants in 1953: A cultivar is an assemblage of plants that (a) has been selected for a particular character or combination of characters, (b) is distinct, uniform and stable in those characters, and (c) when propagated by appropriate means, retains those characters.79 The uniform and stable variety was an essential feature of the specific experimental and statistical culture of agricultural science, and its mode of studying a few parameters separately. It was also an industrial object, i.e., a predictable and standardized factor in an industrialized system of agriculture and food production. In the context of Bustarrets experimental culture and the new task he assigned to the state, i.e., to distribute genetic improvement rationally throughout the national agricultural territory, genes appeared neither as the key scientific unit nor as the relevant object for intervention and regulation. Even if breeders did indeed work hard to combine favorable alleles from different sources into a single cultivar, the kind of seed biopolitics that Bustarret was giving life to operated upon the level of variety as a stable and functional
77. On the notion of genetic resource in genetic modernism see Christophe Bonneuil, Savoirs, pouvoirs et imaginaires de la gestion du vivant de Darwin aujourdhui, in Sciences en campagne: Regards croiss, passs et venir, ed. Bertrand Hervieu and Bernard Hubert (Paris: Laube, 2009), 7798. 78. Bustarret, Varits et variations (ref. 63), 337 and 341. 79. William T. Stearn, ed., International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants (Utrecht: International Association of Plant Taxonomy, 1953), 5.
assemblage. Finally, this fixist paradigm of variety was an object of intellectual property: it allowed breeders to protect their inventions: trademarks were granted as of the nineteenth century, and national registers were established in Germany (1905) and France (1922) for wheat; later came Plant Breeders Rights, granted by the international treaty on the Protection of New Varieties of Plants, signed in Paris in 1961. It is not incidental that Bustarret acted as chair of the technical committee that drafted this treaty.80 Much in line with the kind of technocratic-corporative scheme he implemented for seed potatoes, Bustarrets fixist concept of variety, which was to dominate French plant breeding and genetics for several decades, encompassed both a specific view of living organisms and a particular worldview. It incorporated what Madeleine Akrich calls a socio-technical script, which assigned various entitieshuman and nonhumanclearly defined skills, interests, and roles. The distinct, uniform, and stable plant variety concept was the point of co-construction of a way of knowing, a market, a profession, and a new form of the state. First, it crystallized a specific way of knowing, a specific conception of how to build scientific proof within the epistemic culture of agronomical sciences, rooted in analytico-experimental statistic-based knowledge. Second, it supported the development of an economic sector. Plant breeding companies were to witness their markets soar owing to this seed biopolitics, which eliminated landraces and constituted a club of economic playersand their property rightsthrough technical norms. Farmers, who had previously been both curators and creators of varieties, were supposed to become the happy consumers of modern improved cultivars created and multiplied by specialists. This standardized seed input was to be more predictable, more amenable to mechanization, and more responsive to chemical fertilizers. Third, the fixist variety paradigm helped construct a specialized profession of seed producers. This agricultural elite set itself apart from other farmers by forming a profession based on highly technical practices (maintaining purity). This new social group of seed producers consisted predominantly of large-scale farmers, who had been the previous leaders of specialized interest groups in the interwar years, and who gained access to political responsibilities under Vichy. Finally a phytoeugenicist state was born, which became the conductor of genetic fluxes from breeding stations to farmers fields, and which used seeds as a Trojan horse for
80. UPOV (Union pour la protection des obtentions vgtales), Actes des confrences internationales pour la protection des obtentions vgtales 195719611972, UPOV no. 316 (Geneva: UPOV, 1974).
the transformation of whole farming systems. Demonstrating the superior efficiency of a state-led seed production and distribution system was also a way to legitimate the construction of a post-liberal, modern state-led agricultural economy.
B I OP OL IT I CAL M E T R O LO G I E S
The fixist paradigm of crop variety and the new planned seed-economy thus mutually shaped each other in the Vichy years, and profoundly reconfigured the relations between farmers, market, state, and science. A new seed regime and a new knowledge production regime emerged, in which scientific breeders would supplant farmers agency in crop evolution: they would take on the double role of conserving genetic diversity, termed genetic resources, and of adapting crops to human needs, termed scientific breeding (or, later, varietal innovation).81 Bruno Latours work is helpful in understanding the making of this divide between resources and innovation, farmers and scientists, landraces and pure lines, and the rise of a centralized planning of French landscapes genetic composition. In Science in Action, Latour attempts to explain the modern construction of a Great Divide between scientific knowledge, viewed as reliable, effective, and universal, and popular forms of knowledge, deemed merely local, and reduced to simple beliefs.82 He argues that the power of science neither stems from inner virtues of Reason nor from a mere act of power to impose one kind of knowledge over another. It rather lies in the particular dynamics of circulation and transformation of objects and inscriptions. Statistical services, laboratories, herbaria, and agricultural stations are, for Latour, examples of centers of calculation at the core of these cycles of accumulation and translation that transform the world. The process can be analytically described in three stages. First, elements from the wider world are collected. These elements (e.g., answers to questionnaires, geodesic measurements, blood samples, seeds, dried plant specimen, local names) are collected in the center
81. On seed regimes, see Robin Pistorius and J. van Wijk, The Exploitation of Plant Genetic Information: Political Strategies in Crop Development (Wallingford, UK: CABI, 2000). On knowledge regimes in plant breeding and genetics, see Bonneuil and Thomas, Gnes, pouvoirs et profits (ref. 29). 82. Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).
of calculation. In this process, these elements are reconstructed as immutable mobiles: they incorporate some features of the wider world from which they originate, and which they represent. But they also acquire a new form of life that is disconnected from the nexus of their original local attachments, which makes them comparable and combinable in the center of calculation. In the second stage, these immutable objects are manipulated in the micro-world of the center of calculation. They are measured, classified, compared, experimented with, combined, and transformed into other objects or inscriptions. Then, in the third stage, some elements of this micro-world (immutable objects, inscriptions, standards and disciplines, norms of proofs, narratives, etc.) are moved into the wider world so as to transform it.83 In our case, plant geneticists such as Schribaux, Crpin, and Bustarret collected a wide range of genetic resources at the Versailles Central Station, owing to exchanges with foreign institutions and to the regulation that required breeders to provide a seed lot when registering a new cultivar. Through this process, seeds from all over France were extracted from the local farm cycles of sowing-harvesting-storing-exchanging-sowing and acquired a new experimental form of life in the station, where they were weighed, sorted into types and varieties, planted alongside one another, transformed into pure line by pedigree breeding, recorded in cultivars registers and inventories, cross-bred, and so on. Cultivars, formerly caught in the inextricable web of peasant seed systems (soon to be called informal because they were structured around tacit knowledge and social relations that remained impenetrable to both authorities and scientists) within changing and diverse environmentshence generating a dynamic pattern of differentiation in the genetic composition of crop plant populations entered a modern space-time in which traits were combined into uniform and stable cultivars. The genesis of the wheat cultivar Etoile de Choisy exemplifies this process. This cultivar was the product of Emile Schribaux and Charles Crpins efforts to gather and cross material from all over the world (including Japan, Italy, England, Russia, etc.) so as to combine various traits into a single pure line. As illustrated in Figure 1, its ascendancy included Mouton pis rouges, a landrace from eastern France carrying cold-hardiness alleles; K3, a line descended from English and Ukrainian origins obtained and selected by Schribaux for its resistance to lodging and to stem rust; as well as Ardito, created by Strampelli
83. Ibid.; see also Michel Callon, Pierre Lascoumes, and Yannick Barthe, Acting in an Uncertain World: An Essay on Technical Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009).
in Italy in 1920, that carried earliness allelesa key feature for cultivation in Mediterranean regionsand resistance to lodging, two traits inherited from a Japanese parent, which contained dwarfness genes.84 Crpin had made the final crosses towards Etoile de Choisy in Dijon in the 1930s and in Versailles during the war. This combination of traits, usually not present in a single variety, made it a blockbuster cultivar. This illustrates how immutable mobiles (genes from different varieties around the world, which the famous Soviet geneticist Nikolai Vavilov talked of as primary elements or bricks) were combined into an elite cultivar (which Vavilov talked of as modern machinery 85). This elite cultivar constituted a new kind of immutable mobile because of its genetic homogeneity and stability resulting from pedigree breeding (several years of selfing after the cross), thatthis is the third stagewas distributed into large areas. Etoile de Choisy was released in 1950 by INRA and was cultivated on almost a million hectares of land ten years later, occupying half of the wheat acreage of southern France. Its resistance to lodging, allowing for high use of fertilizers, convinced traditional farmers from southern France to buy more chemical inputs. The stunning harvests provided them with cash flow that encouraged them to buy their first tractors and to shift to hybrid corn commercial monoculture. It is not an exaggeration to say that Crpins Etoile de Choisy was the Trojan horse of southern Frances postwar green revolution.86 What made Etoile de Choisy such a success story? The genes combined from distant parents of course played a key role, but screening for the right combination of heterogeneous offspring of crossbreeds and field-testing along with other cultivars was also of utmost importance. It was out of this experimental web of multi-regional field trials that the genetic value of each variety emerged. Evidence of the value of cultivars operated through their diffraction upon a wide array of local environments, used as reagents to assay their genetic value. As we have seen, Crpin and Bustarret used the corporatist structure of the Corporation Paysanne as a tool to expand an experimental empire: almost a hundred potato cultivar testing sites and dozens of cereal cultivar testing sites were established by the Corporation Paysanne under the direction of the Research and Experimentation Service. Because most commercial breeders had bred for the wealthier northern France, there was a lack of performant cultivar
84. See Saraiva, this volume. 85. Nikolai Vavilov, The Process of Evolution in Cultivated Plants, Proceedings of the VIth International Congress of Genetics 1 (1932): 33142, quotes on 341. 86. For more details, see Bonneuil and Thomas, Gnes, pouvoirs et profits (ref. 29), 14357.
FIG. 1
The genealogy of Etoile de Choisy, bred in interwar years and released by INRA in 1950. Source: Authors drawing.
to grow in the southern part of France. This turned out to be a major problem for the Vichy government because when they divided France into an occupied zone and a non-occupied zone, the Germans had made sure to have two thirds of Frances wheat acreage in the occupied zone, where their draining of the food supply could be most effective. Finding a cultivar that could increase production in the non-occupied zone thus became a priority for public research. Crpin and Bustarret worked hard to develop and experiment new varieties among which Etoile de Choisy turned to be the best high-yielding commercial cultivar for southern France. Compared to the small number of prewar experimental stations and their uneven coverage of the territory, the Vichy era offered a critical expansion of the experimental network, which was maintained by the Libration government, with ever more demanding protocols and statistical treatments. It was institutionalized into a National Service for Variety Testing, created in 1948 as a branch of the INRA, the new national agricultural research agency established in 1946 under Crpins direction. This evidence-based phyto-eugenics sought hard evidence to build consensus on the need for widespread distribution of a few elite cultivars and for suppressing less productive varieties. This network and its associated methods (layout, statistical treatment, grading scales, etc.) constructed a metrology that constituted cultivars, and their genetic value, as objects of a knowledge from a national (state) viewpoint. Scripted within technical discourses of efficiency, fixist ontology, and sophisticated metrologies, there was a governmental issue: it is much harder for a centralized state to govern an informal distributed complex biosocial seed nexus than a formal streamlined top-down system. James Scott proposed the notion of legibility to clarify this issue. In Seeing Like a State, he argues that, in order to maintain control over the society/environment complexes that technocrats
intended to improve, twentieth-century modernist states had to render them legible, i.e., commensurable with a state-centered mode of knowing.87 How exactly did the national experimental network for variety testing, implemented in the Vichy years, embody in its metrology a particular biopolitical option which addressed this legibility issue? In March 1942, the Chair of the CTPS, FlicienBuf, set the corresponding goals and guidelines. The Variety Testing System, he said, should aim at screening cultivars that could be adapted to large areas of cultivation, which would result in a decrease in the number of cultivated cultivars without a need for arbitrary decisions and administrative constraints.88 This centralized genetic governance of national agriculture not only aimed to promote good cultivars and outlaw bad ones; it also required an experimental metrology that would generate a few national blockbusters instead of dozens of elite cultivars each optimized for a specific region, hence creating a mass-market for breeding companies. In its early days, the wheat variety testing system distinguished between six zones and three different types of soil, but these eighteen different contexts were reduced to only two in the 1960s: Northern France and Southern France (soil diversity had been erased thanks to the massive use of fertilizers).89 Testing protocols worked to turn France into an isomorphic experimental space and erase regional genotype x interaction rather than attempting to capture and harness these interactions (as postGreen Revolution decentralized participatory breeding has endeavored to do in the last decades). They thus engineered French cultivars rather than local or regional identities. The genetic homogeneity of cultivars was necessary for building a national genetic identity for French agriculture. Indeed, when Bustarret complained that for a heterogeneous population variety, it is always difficult to determine its adaptation to a certain environment and its value in use and cultivation,90 he implicitly positioned himself from a panoptical view from the state. Any farmer who is deeply familiar with his environment can indeed make a reliable local judgment on the value
87. James C.Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 88. Flicien Buf s intervention in the discussion following a talk by CharlesJacob,La recherche scientifique et lagriculture, Comptes Rendus de lAcadmie dAgriculture de France (1942): 278322, on 309. 89. On post-World War II metrology of the French National Variety Testing System, see Christophe Bonneuil and Franois Hochereau, Gouverner le progrs gntique: Biopolitique et mtrologie de la construction dun standard varital dans la France agricole daprs-guerre, Annales HSS (2008): 130540. 90. Bustarret, Varits et variations (ref. 63), 348.
of any given population variety after cultivating it for a number of years on his farm. But this was not the kind of local expertise that Bustarret was seeking when he established a national variety testing system. He was rather looking to assign cultivars a genetic value across diverse regions and conditions. In all sites of experimentation the same few control varieties were used as yardsticks to level off the effects of place-specific factors (weather, pests, soils, and climate). For instance, wheat strength, a technological property related to baking quality, was strongly influenced by the soil, farming practices, and climate conditions. For a same given cultivar, it could vary from W = 64 to W = 156. But if one measured the cultivars baking strength not as an absolute value but as a relative one (a percent of the backing strength of a common control cultivar cultivated along the studied ones in the different sites), it then became possible to single out a cultivar effect. Baking strength, a property highly dependent of environmental conditions, could be constructed, through these metrological tactics, as an intrinsic genetic property of cultivars.91 Here, the fixist variety concept of assigning an intrinsic genotypic identity to living beings independent from the environment and of postulating pure and stable cultivars as a natural unit, synergistically combined in the production of wide adaptation cultivars as units of a centralized government of the genetic improvement of French agriculture.
CON CLU S I O N : T H E L E G ACY O F V I C H Y S G E N E T I C M OD E R N I S M S L E G AC I E S
Seed high modernism has its roots in late-nineteenth-century industrial rationalization and the rise of seed market. But it also became a political project in France that materialized under wartime Vichys proto-fascist regime and which contributed in return to shape and legitimize Vichy as a planner state. The constitution of the genetically homogeneous cultivar as a scientific object, a market commodity, and a state policy object went hand in hand. Pure line ontology, planned seed economy practices, and metrological arrangements articulated a biopolitics that was geared towards superseding a confusion of
91. Robert Mayer, Les facteurs de la qualit du bl, Bulletin des anciens lves de lcole de Meunerie (1950):11822; see also Bonneuil and Hochereau, Gouverner le progrs gntique (ref. 89). On similar calibration strategies in telecommunications and medicine, see Joseph OConnell, Metrology: The Creation of Universality by the Circulation of Particulars, Social Studies of Science 23, no. 1 (1993): 12973.
biocultural crop evolutionary processes and agricultural practices through centralized planning of genetic progress. This turned France into an enormous biopolitical laboratory. Vichys industrial planners, such as Lehideux and Bichelonne, understood the national territory as a space in which populations and equipment should be efficiently distributed. They used the corporatist hierarchical structure and the central allocation of means of production to facilitate the modernization of economy by closing the less productive companies. Similarly, seed technocrats, such as Bustarret, Crpin, and Buf, envisioned French agricultural landscapes as a space in which improved genetic assemblages should be rationally and efficiently distributed, and they used corporatist disciplinary power to enforce positive (aiming to encourage the diffusion of a few elite and healthy varieties) as well as negative (aiming to devalue and outlaw varieties deemed obsolete) phyto-eugenic measures. Far from discarding Vichys directed agricultural economy and seed biopolitics, postwar governments rather reinforced it: the Wheat Board, the seed sector corporative organization (GNIS), and the corporative advisory committee administering variety testing and registration (CTPS) were maintained. Moreover, the seed technocrats took over the new National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) created in 1946, now the leading public agricultural research institution in Europe. In the period from 1944 to 1946, two groups and two visions competed to hold the reins of the INRA.92 On the one hand, the soil scientist Albert Demolon (former director of the agronomy research station at Versailles, Crpins unlucky opponent for the directorship position of the Research and Experimentation Service in 1943) and microbiologist Maurice Lemoigne (Pasteur Institute) wanted to emancipate agronomic research from the administration of the Ministry of Agriculture, in the name of scientific excellence. On the other hand, for the sake of securing food supply and increasing agricultural production, a group headed by Charles Crpin and Jean Bustarret advocated an applied research model. The creation of INRA on April 25, 1946, under the direction of Crpin (and later of Bustarret until 1972), marked the victory of the latter. It represented the recognition of genetic modernism, and the kind of seed biopolitics and expertise they had stood for during the Vichy years, as a keystone of the modernization of agriculture that was sought in the postwar reconstruction period.93
92. AN CAC 800 284, liasse 211; Jean Cranney, INRA 50 ans dun organisme de recherche (Paris: INRA, 1996): 7885; Picard, La Rpublique des Savants (ref. 9), 14353. 93. Bonneuil and Hochereau, Gouverner le progrs gntique (ref. 89), 130540.
ACK NOW LE D G M E N T S
This paper was first presented at the 2006 conference of the Committee for the History of INRA. The authors thank the members of this committee who helpfully commented on the communication, as well as Herve Joly, Fabrice Grenard, Tiago Saraiva, Norton Wise, and anonymous reviewers who did much to improve this article. We also thank Jean-Noel Plags (Limagrain) and Sosthne de Vilmorin for trying to locate relevant documents in Vilmorin Companys archives, as well as Fanny Kaller, archivist at INRA, for her skillful assistance.

Purifying Landscapes: The Vichy Regime and The Genetic Modernization of France

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Purifying Landscapes: The Vichy Regime and The Genetic Modernization of France

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G E N ETI C M O D E R N I Z AT I O N I M AG I N A R I E S B E F O R E V I C H Y : I N D U ST R IAL RAT I O N A L I Z AT I O N , P U R E L I N E S , A N D COLON IAL E X P E R I E N C E S

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