As he grumbled privately: ‘The peasants are never happy. Either it is raining too much, or it is too dry, or too cold … We are always having to feel sorry for them.’92 Whenever farming organizations agitated for higher prices, de Gaulle exhorted Debré to be firm.93 The idea that the government was indifferent to the sufferings of the peasantry was the origin of the first accusations that Gaullism had been hijacked by inhuman technocracy.
