Welcome to another edition of Historians Under the Spotlight — an occasional interview series that offers snapshots from academics’ lives: their passions, interests, and advice. You can catch up with previous posts here.
This month, our spotlight is trained on Andrew W. M. Smith (Queen Mary, University of London), whose latest book Make Cheese not War. Transnational Resistance and the Larzac in Modern France has just been published in MUP’s Studies in Modern French and Francophone History. Andrew’s first monograph, Terror and Terroir. The Winegrowers of the Languedoc and Modern France, was also published with MUP.
In a nutshell, what is your latest book about?
Make Cheese Not War looks at the Larzac struggle in its local, national, and global dimensions. This was a land-based protest in southwest France which generated a distinctive form of transnational activism from the 1970s on. The book reconstructs how ideas and people moved through activist networks, drawing on archives in six countries to foreground the practical means through which solidarity was enacted and political meaning forged. I argue for the notion of “rough-handed solidarity”, a combination of individual encounter and mutual recognition which was the basis for connected movements of rooted cosmopolitanism.
How did you first become interested in the Larzac?
There is perhaps a Freudian answer here which starts with obsessively reading Asterix as a kid (sending books into work with my Mum so she could photocopy them and I could cut things up to make obsessive fact files about characters in a binder). Or, similarly, it may start with my teenage reading of Adbusters magazine as part of a wider interest in the creative projects flourishing around the antiglobalisation movement (which gave me a general awareness of José Bové’s activism). I also read Richard Kuisel’s Seducing the French: the dilemma of Americanisation (1997) early in my undergraduate study and was interested in understanding such progressive challenges to globalisation, which is part of what led me to the topic of my first book.
In terms of this project on the Larzac, however, it probably looks back to when I was working at UCL as a Teaching Fellow in 2015/16. I supervised an outstanding undergraduate dissertation by a student on an interdisciplinary degree (and I cite her work in the book). She looked at the Larzac through an interesting lens of the self-fashioning of the activists, and I realised that I’d never read much on the protest movement that wasn’t a straight-up documenting of the movement. In supervision meetings, I became increasingly convinced there was an interesting and under-explored transnational angle here (and I was, at the time, teaching on the MA in Transnational Studies). For me, this is important as it highlights not only the importance of research-led teaching but also teaching-led research. When starting the very first steps outlining my second book as a precariously employed academic, it was difficult to imagine its realisation, but the consistently energising and challenging nature of teaching good students was a big part of what kept me on that journey.
Tell us about the highlights — and lowlights — of your research for this book.
I got working on the project in earnest in 2019 and… I think you can imagine the considerable lowlight which followed in 2020 as a certain novel coronavirus reshaped all of our lives. Research wise, this meant I was unable to visit someone with whom I’d planned an interview: Jim Forest, an American peace activist who had settled in the Netherlands (and passed through the Larzac plateau several times during the struggle). I enjoyed speaking with him over video call but was sad that I never managed to meet him before he passed shortly afterwards. I was really struck by his work and writing, and the generosity and spirit he showed in talking through his life’s commitments with me. I was particularly inspired by a piece he wrote on ‘The Duty of Hope’ which – after some of the darkest days of pandemic lockdowns – offered a chink of light. It is a piece of writing to which I often return, and would commend it you (archived on his site here).
Thankfully, there were far more highlights. When conducting interviews on the plateau, I was delighted when Michèle Vincent, an activist who was at the heart of the Paris Larzac committee, agreed to welcome me to her home for a chat. She contacted me the day before to ask if it was alright if José came along? I was over the moon for the chance to speak with José Bové alongside Michèle – of course I didn’t mind, I replied! Both made me very welcome and were extremely generous with their time, and it was a real joy to talk over their memories of the struggle and get their unique perspectives on some of its minutiae. Similarly, the Breton anti-nuclear activist and pastor Gilbert Nicolas welcomed me to his and his wife Marie’s home in Quimper, and I enjoyed speaking about decades of globe-trotting activism and the finer points of their political beliefs over crêpes and cider.
What advice would you give to researchers working on transnational history?
Allow yourself to follow the trails of your transnational actors, you can always trim the storytelling in the edit. I tried to turn to methods developed in the study of wartime resistance, specifically by the much-missed Rod Kedward, to emphasise moments of individual encounter and mutual recognition, while reconstructing the networks that crossed political and national boundaries. After a session of the IHR Modern French History seminar during lockdown, I stayed on the zoom call with Rod and we talked about his time visiting the Larzac, and also how, if I drew my boundaries more flexibly, I could be more imaginative, using the phrase Kedward borrowed from Stuart Hall: roots and routes. We can study the roots of resistance (its formative influences, its cultural specificities deriving from distinct groups and landscapes) and also the globe-trotting routes it travelled (looking at how the creation of networks relied on individual encounters which shaped the object of study along the way). Given that, I found myself following the eclectic life stories of quite a few people who crossed over with the Larzac struggle: the Breton pastor who sailed on a protest voyage into Pacific nuclear testing sites, an American peace activist who handed out Roquefort on Fifth Avenue in New York, an English Quaker who donned a sheep mask as he marched to Westminster, a Native American group who performed alongside a Krautrock jam band.
Allowing myself to follow these sorts of traces in my book was one of the key challenges of trying to tell a transnational story. I was inspired by my old university tutor and friend Professor Jerry DeGroot. He described his big synoptic books on the 1960s and 1970s as ‘kaleidoscopic’. Jerry, despite or perhaps because of his many qualities, is not a man with much time for historical theorists. I think he’d sooner launch copies of Michel Foucault or Reinhart Koselleck at you than cite them, but I think there is a whiff of methodology to this notion of the kaleidoscopic history. He describes how looking through a lens into coloured glass and bevelled mirrors reveals complex patterns, but, when you twist the glass, different, equally-logical patterns also emerge. Perspective matters and making sense of complex process means sometimes looking at your subject through different eyes and allowing for the way its complexity fits into different narratives. I was interested in the self-authoring of the Larzac peasants, but I also wanted to read their story critically and understand what encouraged others from very different backgrounds to engage. That meant twisting the kaleidoscope, examining the roots and routes of transnational actors, and trying to understand what they found on the plateau.
What are you working on now?
I am – hopefully – about to have my first ever research sabbatical for the first semester of next academic year, which is a real privilege. I’m really excited about the possibilities of focussed research and the opportunity to frame a new project. I currently have two projects in development, though which order I work on them may depend on external factors (basically grant bids!). The first, which I explored in an initial article published in February 2026, is a history of the development of the Southern French coast by the Mission Racine. This was when the French state decided to build a whole host of new tourist towns designed to transform the Mediterranean coast of the Languedoc-Roussillon for a new civilization of leisure. My article outlined different perspectives on the project, though I want to work much more thoroughly with the archival material on the project (and those who pushed back against it).
The second project will look more in depth at clandestine wartime flights to support resistance in France. Collaborative work with Tangmere Military Aviation Museum about a decade or so ago led to me doing research on clandestine Franco-British flights, which I published as an article back in 2018. I remained interested in the topic, however, and felt there was more to do, especially as I’ve continued to work on public history projects, including support for the Free French Association in London and organising a joint Franco-British commemoration of the 75th anniversary of Jean Moulin’s last flight to France. I’m now a director of the Save Tangmere Tower heritage campaign and that has ensured that I’m still interested in thinking and writing about wartime aviation. The idea for the book is to trace the conception, transmission, and reception of specific documents through networks of wartime resistance to understand these as distinct sites of intellectual formation. That way, I can combine the big idea stuff alongside the rousing tales of derring-do.
Quick-fire questions
Which French place would you most like to visit right now?
As ever, I love spending time in the Bas Languedoc, so I will hopefully return soon (either for more archival research, or maybe even a family holiday).
Favourite archive or library?
I’ve always enjoyed my visits to Lo CIRDOC in Béziers, the Occitan cultural document centre. They have brilliant holdings and the staff there have always been extremely welcoming. By way of a more unexpected collection I loved visiting, however, I’d recommend the Special Collections at the University of Bradford, where the Commonweal Collections are held. These were a treasure trove that I wrote about recently in Paper Trails.
Favourite century?
Twentieth
Éclair or saucisson?
Saucisson, now with accompanying roquefort !
