The Pitchfork Maquis

Early one morning last week, 6,000 Breton farmers descended on the little town of Pontivy. They blocked the highways, then rode some 1,000 tractors into town in a wild, angry snake dance. They closed in on the local administrative building, painted its gates with manure. When the police arrived, the farmers pelted them with rotten eggs. It took reinforcements of riot police using tear gas and a helicopter to disperse the angry mob.

Similar farmers' revolts have erupted all over Brittany in the last three weeks. Using tactics remembered from the wartime Maquis days, farmers immobilized some dozen towns for as long as 12 hours. They felled countless telephone poles, hauled carts across the railway tracks, succeeded in stopping all railway traffic on the Quimper-Paris main line for six hours. At one highway barricade, Prime Minister Debre was hanged in effigy, and everywhere symbolic pitchforks were chalked on the walls and pavements.

Behind the farmers' revolt is the falling price of potatoes, long one of Brittany's staple crops. With a bumper crop this year, the price of new potatoes plummet ed to i^ a pound, less than half the support price promised by the > government. The farmers, who long have got the short end of France's antiquated, food-distribution system, took matters into their own hands.

Last week an alarmed French National Assembly met in Paris, hastily pushed through seven decrees to help out the farmers. Part of Brittany was designated a distressed area entitled to special grants to modernize its economy. Freight rates on farm produce were reduced. But Brittany's plight was only part of the larger plight of French agriculture: like the U.S., France suffers from agricultural plenty, annually growing 15% to 20% more wheat than it needs, 15% to 20% more barley, and usually producing surpluses in meat, dairy products and feed grains as well. De Gaulle took advantage of the Brittany disturbances to remind his Common Market partners and their highly protected farmers that agricultural trade barriers among the Six must be reduced as fast as industrial barriers.

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