Paper short abstract:

Tensions between farmers and the State have emerged after the reintroduction of the brown bear in the Pyrenees. Although the conflict has brought about new struggles and forms of resistance, it must be seen within a larger historical context of rebellions and opposition to the State in the region.

Paper long abstract:

The reintroduction of the brown bear in the Pyrenees launched by the French government and the EU in 1996 has brought about a process of valorization —deeming the bear as the hallmark of wilderness— based on a previous devalorization —undermining these territories as a place for agropastoral production. It is also a vivid example of an environmental conservation project implemented by the State and contested through resistance and conflict. In Ariège —where predation rates are the highest by far among the Pyrenean districts— farmers have engaged in street protests and everyday forms of resistance, opposing implementing a set of measures recently funded by government agencies to prevent bear attacks, rejecting changing their herding practices, or boycotting State officers' work. These prevention measures, the ensuing transformation of herding practices and the bear itself have been perceived as State impositions by farmers. Although mountain pastures are State lands, farmers envisage them as their mountains and resent a loss of governance and a feeling of dispossession. I argue that the present conflict in Ariège entailed new struggles and forms of resistance, but it must be seen within a larger context of a historical opposition to the State in the region. Peasant revolts followed the implementation of the 1827 Forest Code, in which administrators justified the partitioning of uncultivated communal holdings and eliminated customary rights while blaming peasants for forest degradation. I suggest that these two forms of dispossession share a similar mechanism through which the State disciplines rural communities and imposes its will.