Abstract EN:

Thirty five years (1945-1979) of evolution and modernization of middle-mountain agriculture, observed through a critical reading of the professionnal weekly newspaper "Paysans de la Loire". A thick and picturesque film where the pioneers of the rural elite, formed by the "jeunesse agricole catholique", organized a resising fight by setting up a multitude of co-operatives, which at the beginning have been considered as privileged tools of trade-unionism in order to keep free peasants on familial framings. It also emerges a permanent quest to make progress the co-operatif mind. An effective pedagogy and didactic allowed cooperators to achieve a spectacular progress from the technical point of view. A significant advance as regards social education : from isolated and competitive peasants, they have become disciplined farmers agreeing with rules of production and putting on the market in a co-operative assumed solidarity. A democratic running of co-operatives enables co-operators to express themselves, to contest and to question themselves about the finality of agricultural development, proving so the educative reality of agricultural co-operatives of the Loire. A research and a strenuous commitment, at the end of period, in co-operative "human-sized" structures and the installation of a new process of education and formation taken care of, by the "eduquants" who, among the "eduques