This post is also available in: Français (French) العربية (Arabic)
By Dominique Fromentin, French journalist
Morgan was born 51 years ago in Morbihan, the last of six siblings. Her mother, Manouche, was a businesswoman with an unfailing business acumen. Her father, with innate manual skills, was a mechanic.
In the 1970’s, wanting to live closer to nature with their children, her parents decided to become milk producers on a farm in Morbihan.
“My mother milked cows; she made milk and butter. My father took a keen interest in agricultural machinery.” But a new form of agriculture would then come into the picture, an arsenal of chemical products in town. “My mother was very suspicious. She was being given products to put on the cows, so that the leather of their skin wouldn’t be perforated at the slaughterhouse. She kept saying that this would pass into the milk, that she didn’t want to use it.”
Morgan says her childhood felt like paradise. “First because I had brothers and sisters to play with. We had total freedom, and the river flowed down the field… It wasn’t comfortable, though; the six of us shared the same room. We knew how to drive tractors and milk cows, but also how to run off or not answer, to avoid having to contribute. In the winter, we were a bit isolated, but in the summer, all our parents’ friends’ children came and we’d sleep in the granaries…”
The influence of your parents’ lives on your own career?
“My father had a serious accident on the farm, and he was in the hospital for a long time. My mother had to take care of everything. My oldest brother, who was 16 at the time, had to drop out of high school for three months to help her out. The banks kept harassing them, and the cows had to be sold. My parents were always being pushed to go into enclosed breeding, so the animals wouldn’t need to go outside anymore. But they never wanted to do that. They’d understood that it meant the death of the farmers…”
At 15, Morgan, a high school student, opened the agricultural seasons, watched the children, and worked in a biscuit factory. Her general studies led her to pursue philosophy. “I was faced with something I’d never experienced: intellectual bourgeoisie. I was used to adults who spoke to me like an equal, and I couldn't get used to where I was.” So at 22 years old, she went off on a different tangent and enrolled in a popular education college. “I thought it was great! I went on a lot of camps and roamed around with kids. I liked to put them in real-life situations.”
Going into journalism
She was also a nature guide in a nature reserve, carrying her son around with her on her back. During this period, she was offered a position as a summer substitute press correspondent for a weekly newspaper, Le Poher. “So much had to be done, and in two counties too! And we had to go take photos. We were very poorly paid, and I couldn’t afford to leave my son with someone to look after him. So I took him with me. And I realized that I was invisible. I’d sit my son down right next to me and take the photos, and all the while I could hear people ask where the Poher correspondent was. With a child in your arms, you become invisible!"
In 1999, at age 27, Morgan started working at RKB, a small radio station. “I was totally drawn into this form of media. I thought it was magical, and light: we arrived alone, went around meeting people and reported what they said. And it’s green—we can run the radio with little energy.”
“RKB was in bad shape when I arrived.” There were four or five people in total taking turns on the air. “I wanted to create a niche around the environment and agriculture. I worked in French, the others in Breton. I loved going out on the field.” People asked her how she wasn’t bored of breeding yet, but “at the time,” she remembers, “we didn’t discuss these subjects a lot, even if the territory itself was very rural. We didn’t even have the Internet—we didn’t get that until 2013! You really had to believe in it…”
“We realized that several among us who dealt with agricultural and environmental issues were being subjected to pressures”
A harvest of sounds
Morgan met naturalists who supported and helped her produce her series. She felt at home working with sounds—she was reaping her harvest. “Bringing these sounds back and arranging them to share them with listeners was amazing! To be in a barn with a woman, among her cows, and to have her suddenly exclaim ‘Oh no, wait, don’t kick’… it’s incredible! It’s impossible to get these kinds of results in a studio. Would she even have come to meet me there?”
One day, she was on assignment at a center that collected semen from bulls. “There were about 150 animals there. I was pregnant with my daughter. I followed a man down a very long, narrow corridor, all along which the bulls were placed in individual boxes. As soon as we stepped into that corridor, the animals lowered their heads to the ground and started bellowing. It created a massive vibration that I was even able to record… at one point, I said, ‘I don’t think I’m going to go all the way’—you can hear me say it on the tape! I wanted to turn around. The vibration was so strong that I felt afraid, I was worried for my baby.” Morgan believes it’s a good thing to express yourself freely during a recording.
Did listeners get hooked immediately?
“Not at all,” she says, still surprised… “I did it all anonymously and with total indifference. A lot of people would tell me they hadn’t caught the show and asked if I could re-broadcast it…” Laughs…
Morgan decided to learn Breton (through evening classes) the day she put her son in a bilingual school. She’d decided to do the same for her daughter. “Some people find it uncomfortable that I speak Breton and that I have an education in agriculture. They’d like to attack me on the grounds of my legitimacy.” At 40 years old, Morgan enrolled in a training course which would earn her a professional farming certificate.
Do you think a woman needs to be more legitimate than a man?
“Obviously!” How many ‘Ma’am, you don’t know a thing about this’ must she have had to deal with… “Sometimes, even though I’d be talking about something I mastered, a man would cut me off to explain it himself!” Another thing that was also very difficult for Morgan was being a working mother. Juggling nannies, meetings, press conferences in the evenings: “It’s violent. We’re made to feel that we’re less efficient. It’s violent for the children too, with daycare in the morning, daycare in the evening…”
I read that you drove 100 km for a question you forgot to ask?
“Yes. I had interviewed Simone Pâris de Bollardière, the wife of Jacques Pâris de Bollardière, the only general who said no to torture in Algeria. I had forgotten to ask her what her husband would have said about the way migrants are treated today. I re-drove 100 km to get my answer. She declared herself to be in support of the defense of undocumented migrants.”
“This system is violent toward nature and the weak, and I have always denounced it.
It forced all the farmers who didn’t conform to the industrial model that was being imposed on them to leave”
In 2021, what denouncement did you make that bothered people?
“I brought up the documentary, ‘La Bretagne, une terre sacrifiée’. I don’t say much in it, I only talk about an investigation I’d carried out on the public funds dedicated to the Breton productivist system. I criticized a model that we don’t have the right to criticize.” Before this, she had spoken as a guest on the show Les Pieds sur terre on France Culture: “This system is violent toward nature and the weak, and I have always denounced it. It forced all the farmers who didn’t conform to the industrial model that was being imposed on them to leave.”
Up until then, her shows on RKB hadn’t really picked up, but the televised documentary proved to be an incredible sounding board. “It bothered a lot of people. I was receiving threats on social media, ‘We will come to your house!’ The doors of the RKB headquarters were forced open. In January 2021, they opened all my fences and left my Cobs to wander, putting them at risk of causing an accident. My dog was poisoned.” Two months later, Morgan spotted a bolt in her driveway and realized that several were missing from one of the rear wheels of her car: “I’d been driving like that for four days, with the wheel unscrewed and only the wheel lock on there.”
She filed a complaint, but it was dismissed in 2022 for lack of evidence. She was denied police protection and the use of an emergency telephone number that she was requesting.
Fortunately, major demonstrations of support* were organized in her department.
These acts resumed recently, in March 2023
She had thought that the media coverage would protect her and that the police investigation had been a sort of legal warning to the perpetrators. She thought those problems were over. But last March, one of the rear wheels of her car was unbolted again, and the RKB doors were forced open too. Morgan filed another complaint. “Now I’m doubting everything. I’m even wondering if filing that complaint was the right thing to do. if the message isn’t—‘If you stop making noise, we’ll leave you alone.’” She brings up Paul François, the farmer who was poisoned by a herbicide marketed by Bayer-Monsanto. Soon after he won his case against this company, he was violently physically attacked on his farm: ‘we’re tired of hearing you and seeing your face on TV.’ “It’s the agro-industrial lobby that got to him…” Morgan translates.
Do you think that you being a woman is a key factor explaining the pressures you’re under?
“Being a woman may have been helpful sometimes because (being underestimated—editor’s note) people then took the time to explain things to me. But back then, I did not yet have the tools to deconstruct patriarchy. My eyes have been opened since. Particularly by a collective of women journalists, of which I am a member. We realized that several among us who dealt with agricultural and environmental issues were being subjected to pressures.”
We can feel how excited Morgan is about the possibility of this collective, which is as yet unnamed, meeting for the second time.
