French Intellectuals Who Have Traded Urban Life for the Countryside, Taking Voltaire's Famous Advice to "Cultivate One's Garden" Literally

Charles Stépanoff, a respected anthropologist and director of studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), has recently become a market gardener. Gaspard Koenig, a popular novelist, political provocateur, and media essayist converted to ecology, has likewise settled in the countryside with his horse to work his land organically. For both men, digging, hoeing, and weeding are ways of living in accordance with their ideas.

Stépanoff, author of "Attachements" (La Découverte, 2024), a major study of how humans—these "empathetic predators"—form close bonds with adopted wild species, has opened a peasant school at the Domaine de Lignerolles, a former manor surrounded by 20 hectares in Le Thieulin, in the Eure-et-Loir department. The question of food and energy resilience in our ways of life is no longer a luxury; it is a crucial issue that must stimulate research and experimentation. You hold the future of the world in your hands, the specialist in Siberian shamanic rites tells students who come each year to train in agroecology. Both men are convinced that one cannot change the world without first transforming one's own life.