In 1963, the translation of the American best-seller Silent Spring was a big hit in France. It launched a highly visible controversy on the detrimental health effects of agricultural pesticides, which eventually compelled the French government to revise the French system of “pesticides homologation” – established in 1943. The 1972 changes required government authorization prior to marketing any pesticides and prohibited the sale of any products that had not been granted such authorization. This paper will explore this transformation, showing how it sedimented a series of separate controversies which were deployed in different public arena with various temporalities, complexifing what was at stake within debates over agricultural pesticides and their health effects.

Controversies on the effects of agricultural pesticides started in France in the early 1950s. They were limited to specific scientific, medical, agricultural and industrial spheres. They involved scientists and medical doctors working in ecology, toxicology and occupational health research, top civil servants from the Ministry of Agriculture crop protection service, and representatives from industry and agriculture. Following the translation of Silent Spring, concern about pesticides’ health effects were discussed very broadly in newspapers, magazines, TV programs, and put forward by the nascent French consumer movement. Linked to issues such as hormones and antibiotics in meat production, food additives and contaminants (such as plastic food containers), they then nourished a growing public concern on the health hazards posed by industrial agriculture. By the 1970s new actors took part in the controversy, bringing in new issues and debates. Organic agriculture proponents placed the debates on pesticides’ health effects within the larger question of which model of agriculture to promote. Activist movements coming from abroad, such as Ralph Nader and Friends of the Earth, located pesticides’ health hazards within a broader activism for environmental and consumer protection.

While analyzing these different–but interconnected–controversies, I will highlight the very limited effects of the deployment of a multifaceted critique of pesticides in France between the 1950s and the mid-1970s. I will stress how the different actors in charge of the so-called modernization of the French agriculture managed to control the potential detrimental effects of the “pesticides controversy” on their own endeavor.