\n<\/p>\n
J\u00e9r\u00f4me Bayle had spent seven nights on a major French highway, leading a group of aggrieved farmers in protest, when the prime minister arrived, dressed in his Parisian blue suit and tie, to thank them for \u201cmaking France proud\u201d and announced he would meet their demands.<\/p>\n
Before camera flashes and outstretched microphones, Mr. Bayle told Prime Minister Gabriel Attal that he had seen the standoff as a match between two teams \u2014 the revolting farmers, led by Mr. Bayle, and the government, led by Mr. Attal.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t like losing,\u201d said Mr. Bayle, dressed decidedly more casually, with a baseball hat on his head, turned backward. The thick crowd around him chuckled. It was clear his team had won.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Mr. Bayle, 42, a former professional rugby player, is widely credited with sparking a national protest movement of farmers that this week brought their grievances to the capital<\/a>, blocking highways into Paris, despite fresh pledges on Tuesday from Mr. Attal to shield them from \u201cunfair competition.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Unsatisfied, the farmers say they will continue the disruptions to call attention to what they call the insufferable hardships of growing food to feed the French nation.<\/p>\n Mr. Bayle knows those sufferings intimately. He took over his family\u2019s cereal and cattle farm in 2015, after finding the lifeless body of his father, Alain. His father had been depressed because he was facing a retirement with no savings, Mr. Bayle said, and had shot himself in the head. The suicide became an ominous touchstone for Mr. Bayle.<\/p>\n \u201cI didn\u2019t want to see my friends do the same thing,\u201d he said in an interview from his farm, some 35 miles from Toulouse.<\/p>\n It has been a terrible few years for local farmers. First they were hit by repeated droughts<\/a>, and the collapse of consumer demand for organic food after many farmers had made the difficult switch. Then, a midge-carrying disease crossed over the nearby snowcapped Pyrenees from Spain and infected many of their cattle, causing death and miscarriages. And that is just in Mr. Bayle\u2019s southwest corner of the country.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n More broadly, not just in France but all around Europe, farmers are complaining about rising costs from inflation and the war in Ukraine. Those burdens have been exacerbated as the governments look to save money by shaving farm subsidies, even as the European Union heaps more regulations on farmers to meet climate and other environmental goals.<\/p>\n It has become too much, farmers say.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Bayle was among the hundreds of farmers who rolled through the streets of Toulouse earlier this month in their tractors, joining a union-organized protest with a grab bag of demands for the government.<\/p>\n The farmers were in the city\u2019s beautiful pink main square, lined with cafes, when they learned the meeting between their union leaders and the local prefect \u2014 the top government official in the French system \u2014 had yielded no concrete relief. Friends pushed a microphone into Mr. Bayle\u2019s hands, knowing he could rally the crowd.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not waiting any longer,\u201d Mr. Bayle roared, his words coated in the melodious southwest accent. He called for those who \u201chave pride in this job\u201d to block the highway.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Two days later, an army of tractors pulled onto the highway that connects Toulouse to the Spanish border, near the town of Carbonne, with bales of hay to set into place. When the gendarmes appeared, Mr. Bayle declared he wouldn\u2019t leave until the farmers received concrete solutions to three pressing problems, or the officers shot him in the head.<\/p>\n \u201cHe is the only one who could do it. He has the charisma,\u201d said Jo\u00ebl Tournier, 43, a fellow farmer who would later take over logistics for the blockade.<\/p>\n Over days, their ranks grew, as did the donations, until their blockade under a highway overpass was transformed into the hippest hangout in town, with a wild boar turning over a spit and a D.J. spilling out tunes over a loudspeaker. They had a portable toilet installed, and a storage container filled with hay served as a giant collective bed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Twice a day, they hung a mannequin dressed in coveralls from the overpass above \u2014 to loosely represent the suicide rate<\/a> among French farmers, which continues to be high, despite government programs to address it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cWe did it all without the unions,\u201d said Bertrand Loup, 46, a grain and beef farmer who helped manage the blockade. \u201cThat\u2019s why people supported us. They felt we were talking from our hearts.\u201d<\/p>\n National polls<\/a> revealed<\/a> enormous support for the movement they had started, and other actions began around the country. Most locals agreed and tolerated the truck traffic rerouting through Carbonne to circumnavigate the roadblock, according to the mayor, Denis Turrel.<\/p>\n \u201cIt made perfect sense what they did,\u201d said Frank Bardon, 66, a retired physiotherapist and osteopath, who was walking his dog through the town\u2019s main street with his family on Sunday. \u201cTheir living conditions are difficult.\u201d<\/p>\n The farmers were following a deep-seated revolutionary tradition in France. Back in 1953, winemakers, seeing their profits collapse, set their wooden carts across a national highway at the start of the summer holiday to demand government aid and offer tastings to waylaid drivers. It worked so well that a model was set, with farmers in the southwest following suit a couple months later, said \u00c9douard Lynch, a professor of contemporary French history at Lyon 2 University.<\/p>\n \u201cThey always win a little bit,\u201d said Mr. Lynch, the author of the book \u201cPeasant Insurrection<\/a>.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s effective.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Farmers make up less than 2 percent of the country\u2019s population, but they occupy a towering space in the national psyche \u2014 in part because France industrialized relatively late, Mr. Lynch said.<\/p>\n \u201cThe French have a real sympathy for farmers. Everyone says, \u2018My father or grandfather was a peasant,\u2019\u201d he said. <\/p>\n So perhaps it was not surprising that the prime minister, trailed by two ministers and a prefect, came to the blockade for a tour and a glass of red wine. While his friends were shocked, Mr. Bayle was not.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cHe didn\u2019t have a choice,\u201d he said, sitting on a giant tractor tire outside his cattle barn, taking a moment of respite to bask in the sun and the movement\u2019s success. He was exhausted \u2014 he had slept only three hours a night while running the blockade. And his phone continued to beep and ring with demands from journalists.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was like he was a rock star,\u201d said Mr. Turrel, the mayor, describing the crowd\u2019s reaction to Mr. Bayle. \u201cHe spoke with his heart and with words of suffering that cast a phenomenal power.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n From the beginning, Mr. Bayle had demanded concrete solutions to three concrete problems \u2014 easing the process of building water reservoirs, delivering financial support to farms infected with the epizootic hemorrhagic disease and scrapping the pending cost increase on tractor fuel.<\/p>\n