This article traces the principal watersheds in the evolution of governmental ideas and attitudes concerning agriculture and its relationship to French rural space. Beginning with the policies of the 1960s which, following rapid change in the French countryside and the appearance of local socio-economic problems, focussed on the need to transform agricultural structures, the article goes on to examine the emergence of a specific rural management policy within a broad context of national land management and its eventual replacement by a policy rural/local development. In tracing these policy shifts, the article considers the question of the territorial management of agriculture : from state technocracy to regional, or indeed micro-regional, initiative ; from a policy of national, or indeed international economic balancing to a search for local political dialogue.
