This dissertation draws on the archives of the French rural Catholic Action association for young men, the Jeunesse agricole catholique (JAC), and its sister organization for young women, the Jeunesse agricole catholique fÌÄå©minine (JACF), to study how young men and women responded to, participated in, and influenced the social and economic change that accompanied the modernization of French agriculture in the twentieth century. I argue that the Jeunesse agricole provided rural youth with a path to the modern worldÌ¢åÛåÓthat of France's Ì¢åÛåÏthirty glorious years,Ì¢åÛå marked by a burgeoning consumer economy and industrial growth, including industrial agriculture. The Jeunesse agricole articulated a new peasant identity that was no longer bound to local customs and centered on the sacramental life of the parish. Instead the movement's new peasant was a professional farmer and his wife a homemaker and consumer. With these new social identities, rural Catholic Action associations facilitated processes of social and economic change that emptied the countryside, consolidated industrial agriculture, and reinforced and legitimized an interventionist state.  The Jeunesse agricole catholique was created in response to a perceived social and moral crisis of the French countryside in the 1920s and 1930s. The association was both a continuation of Catholic reform movements and a significant departure in terms of tone and pedagogy. During the Second World War the associations benefited from the Vichy government's rhetoric of Catholic morality and peasant virtue; they cooperated with the regime in a bid to expand their influence on rural youth. After Liberation the movement began to take greater interest in social and professional issues. The JAC became a training ground for a generation of agricultural leaders whose program of reform and modernization was inspired by Catholic personalism. The JACF struggled to articulate a role for women in agriculture that satisfied the ideal of feminine domesticity, the reality of farm life, and the aspirations of young women. This dissertation also studies the Jeunesse agricole in the context of French imperialism and decolonization, examining the real and imagined links between the association in the metropole and French North Africa.