Culture and Conservation in France and Her Colonies, 1840-1940

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Nature, Culture and Conservation in France and Her Colonies 1840-1940 Author(s): Caroline Ford Source: Past & Present, No. 183 (May, 2004), pp. 173-198Published by: on behalf of Oxford University Press The Past and Present SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3600863Accessed: 21-03-2015 10:08 UTC

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NATURE, CULTURE AND CONSERVATION IN FRANCE AND

HER COLONIES 1840-1940*

Compare, if you will, raw nature to cultivated nature; compare the little savage nations of America with our great civilized peoples, compare even those of Africa, who are only half so.

Buffon'

In 1860, a guidebook writer by the name of Denecourt addressed a plea to Napoleon III, asking him to protect the forest of Fontainebleau as a 'national museum' for the public's contem- plation. For him, Fontainebleau, 'with its splendid horizons, its superb masses of antediluvian rocks, its shadowed valleys, its empty spaces, its old-growth trees' was 'given by God to France as a model of earthly landscapes'.2 Sixteen years later, in 1876, Horace de Choiseul declared before the Chamber of Deputies in Paris that France and the United States were at the forefront of landscape preservation as evidenced by Napoleon III's subsequent

* Parts of this article were presented at the Graduate Center of the City Univer- sity of New York in April 2001; the French Cultural History Workshop, Humanities Center, Stanford University in October 2001; and at the Institute for Historical Research at the University of London in February 2002. I very much benefited from the comments that I received in these venues. I also wish to thank Laura Lee Downs, Colin Jones, Herman Lebovics and Sanjay Subrahmanyam for their help- ful comments on earlier drafts. This work was supported financially by grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and by an Izaak Walton Killam Fellowship in 2001-2.

S'Comparez en effet la nature brute a la nature cultiv&e; comparez les petites nations sauvages de l'Amerique avec nos grands peuples civilises; comparez meme celles de l'Afrique, qui ne le sont qu'a demi': Comte de Buffon, 'Des 6poques de la nature', Histoire naturelle, ginerale et particulibre, supplement, v (Paris, 1778), 237. (All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.)

2 C. F. Denecourt, Ah! Si l'empereur le savait! (Paris, 1860), 2. Born in 1788 into a modest household, he became one of the most popular and celebrated guidebook writers in France. A bourgeois entrepreneur of considerable skill, he was a whole- sale and wine merchant, and also worked as a porter at Versailles. He moved to Fontainebleau in 1832, and was probably sacked for his radical political views soon thereafter. He charted paths and walks through the forest for his readers. His works attracted a rather narrow group of enthusiasts including the Romantic bourgeoisie - writers, artists and poets. See Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York, 1995), 547-60. See also Hommage a Denecourt: Fontainebleau, paysages, ligendes, souvenirs, fantaisies par C. Asselineau, etc., ed. A. Luchet (Paris, 1855).

? The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2004



174 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 183

decree to protect approximately 1,600 hectares in Fontainebleau as a reserve artistique in 1861 and by the creation of the world's first national park at Yellowstone in 1872. As a member of the Committee for the Artistic Protection of Fontainebleau, Choiseul called for a substantial enlargement of the reserve, and noted with dismay, invoking the term 'vandalism', that just after the Franco- Prussian war 13,200 oaks, some of which were 300 years old, had been cut down.3

In the same year, 1876, M. Trottier, an agronomist working in Algeria, published a book entitled Reboisement et colonisation, in which he claimed that 'the gradual destruction of a forest can change the character of a country and that of its inhabitants for ever', as in Palestine, Spain, North Africa, and many countries bordering the eastern Mediterranean. For him the links forged between forests, nations and civilizations were all-important. He declared that it was through landscape protection and reforestation in Algeria that the so-called European race would keep 'its European [read 'superior'] faculties'.4 For Trottier, deforestation heralded the decadent decline of nations, while reforestation promised their preservation.5

Ideas about nature and landscape reveal how societies con- ceive of their past, present and future.6 How natural landscapes and the natural world were idealized, shunned or protected reflects changing ways in which they were experienced emotion- ally and intellectually - through the visual, olfactory, auditory,

3 Anon., 'La S6rie artistique de la for&t de Fontainebleau: discussion a la Cham- bre des D6put6s (seance du 16 d6cembre 1876)', Revue des eaux et forets, xvi (1877), 5-10.

4 'La destruction graduelle d'une for&t peut changer a jamais le caractere d'une contree et celui des habitants, ainsi que Palestine, I'Espagne, le nord de l'Afrique, et tous les peuples historiques du golfe Persique ' la Mediterranbe . . . Les liens tisses entre la for&t, les nations et la civilisation sont ici &vidents ... C'est par le reboisement que notre race conservera ses facultes europeennes'. Quoted in Anne Bergeret, 'Discours et politiques forestieres coloniales en Afrique et Madagascar', Revue franfaise d'histoire d'outre-mer, lxxx, 298 (1993), 26.

5Richard Grove, 'A Historical Review of Institutional and Conservationist Responses to Fears of Artificially Induced Global Climate Change: Deforestation and Desiccation Discourse in Europe and the Colonial Context, 1500-1940', in Christophe Bonneuil (ed.), Nature et environnement (Paris, 1995), 155-69.

6 Denis Cosgrove has argued that ideas regarding the natural world are bar- ometers of how societies 'have signified themselves and their worlds through their imagined relationship with nature': see his Social Formation and the Symbolic Land- scape, 2nd edn (Madison, 1998), p. xi.



NATURE, CULTURE AND CONSERVATION 175

mnemonic and tactile.7 Perceptions of landscape were, of course, also bound up with changing senses of place and definitions of 'nature' and culture.s As the differing views of Denecourt, Choiseul and Trottier suggest, there was no unitary 'environmental' or protectionist sensibility in France at the end of the nineteenth century. Since concerns about the protection of the environment in France were not always 'ecological' in origin, it is frequently argued that France lagged behind North America and northern Europe in this domain.9 One sociologist has even linked this alleged tardy interest in ecological causes to the role of Catholicism in French culture, contending that nature protection as a movement was predominantly Protestant in inspiration.10 For this reason, with some notable exceptions, the study of environmental sensibilities and their relationship to initiatives taken to protect the environment prior to the second half of the twentieth century has been neglected by historians of modern France.

This essay traces the emergence and transformation of differing environmental sensibilities in France from the mid nineteenth

7 For France, see Alain Corbin's various books: Le Miasme et la jonquille: l'odorat et l'imaginaire social, XVIIfe-XIXe sikcles (Paris, 1986); Le Territoire du vide: l'Occi- dent et le disir du rivage, 1750-1840 (Paris, 1988); Les Cloches de la terre: paysage sonore et culture sensible dans les campagnes au XIXe siicle (Paris, 1994); L'Homme dans le paysage (Paris, 2001).

8 For a discussion of seventeenth-century France, see Chandra Mukerji, Terri- torial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles (Cambridge, 1997), 21-32; see also Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World (New York, 1983).

9 Indeed, much of the existing literature on the subject focuses on the 1960s and 1970s, when the Ministry of the Environment was created and when a 'green' movement came into being. See, for example, Frangoise Dubost, Vert patrimoine: la constitution d'un nouveau domaine patrimonial (Paris, 1994); Michael Bess, 'Ecology and Artifice: Shifting Perceptions of Nature and High Technology in Postwar France', Technology and Culture, xxxvi (1995); Michael Bess, 'Greening the Main- stream: Paradoxes of Antistatism and Anticonsumerism in the French Environ- mental Movement', Environmental Hist., v (2000); Michael Bess, The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity, 1960-2000 (Chicago, 2003). A notable exception to this general rule is Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge, 1995); see also Richard H. Grove, Ecology, Climate and Empire: Colonialism and Global Environmental History (Cambridge, 1997).

10 Jean Viard, 'Protestante, la Nature?', in A. Cadoret (ed.), Protection de la nature: histoire et idiologie, de la nature a l'environnement (Paris, 1985), 162: 'In a word, if one compares France and England, it is necessary to state that there is almost a century time-lag in the development of associations protecting nature in these two countries'. See also Jean Viard, Le Tiers Espace: essai sur la nature (Paris, 1990).




century to the Second World War. The history of these sensibilities indicates that environmental concerns in the form of landscape protection did not follow a linear path into the second half of the twentieth century." I emphasize, in particular, the importance of the French colonial encounter in shaping two distinct sets of ideas regarding the protection of the natural world. Concep- tions of landscape and environmental protection came to imply two opposing, and sometimes irreconcilable, visions of 'nature' and its meaning. One reflected 'preservationist' and the other 'conservationist' theories and practices. Preservationism encompassed the protection of the non-utilitarian, aesthetic features of nature or landscape for reasons of history and culture. Conservationism called for the judicious management and use of a resource to ensure its perpetuation.'2 The shifting emphases placed on one or the other eventually came to constitute a bifurcated and dia- lectical vision of the relationship between landscape, culture, people, nature, and history in France and her colonies. Ulti- mately, that refracted vision was one in which the preservation of the historic, cultivated landscapes of metropolitan France came to be inextricably linked to the conservation of the wild and unpeopled landscapes of the non-European continents of the world.

I

SAVING THE FORESTS FIRST

The roots of French conceptions of environmental protection lie deep in the history of France's forest administration. Indeed, the early history of laws governing the protection of 'nature' was centred on forested land because of its importance as a military resource. The French monarchy, particularly Francis I, was a leader in issuing regulations designed to protect and manage royal, ecclesiastical, and some private forests, but it was Louis XIV and his minister Colbert who were by and large responsible for

1" Emma Spary makes a similar point about the alleged links that have been made between eighteenth-century climate theories and twentieth-century environmentalism in her Utopia's Garden: French Natural History from the Old Regime to the French Revolution (Chicago, 2000), 151.

12 For a discussion of the distinction that must be made between 'conservation' and 'preservation', see Jane Carruthers, The Kruger National Park: A Social and Political History (Pietermaritzburg, 1995), 5.




establishing a generalized forest ordinance in 1669.13 This ordinance, which continued to shape subsequent policy and thinking about the state of forests in modem France, was guided by the desire to create a safe haven for wild game on royal domains, ensure a steady supply of timber in time of war, and consolidate the power of the state.14 It defined the rights of peasants with regard to pasturing and wood-gathering and laid the groundwork for subsequent conflicts between the peasantry and the state throughout France.

The ordinance of 1669 disappeared with the French Revolu- tion, as did the administrative structure that implemented it, the Eaux et Forets. Unrestricted pasturing and wood-gathering by the French peasantry had led to the destruction of woodland areas during the Revolution. This came to haunt the minds of nineteenth-century elites and foresters, who, in some cases, exag- gerated the extent of the devastation. The spirit of the Colbert ordinance lived on in the re-establishment of the Eaux et Forets and shaped the implementation of a new forest code, enacted in 1827.15 The code also had an important impact on forest conservation elsewhere. Gifford Pinchot, one of the founding fathers of American conservationism, recalled with fondness his initial training in the French school of forestry established in Nancy after 1827, and claimed that Americans had a great deal to learn from the French. Similarly, British colonial administrators studied French methods closely and employed many of France's practices in India.16

The early nineteenth century marked the beginning of new concerns about deforestation on the part of foresters, and led to

13 For Colbert's forest ordinance, see Tamara L. Whited, Forests and Peasant Politics in Modern France (New Haven, 2000); Andree Corvol, L'Homme aux bois: histoire des relations de l'homme et de la foret, XVIIe-XXe sidcle (Paris, 1987).

14 For the way in which the French state applied principles of scientific management to forests, see James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, 1998).

15 Whited, Forests and Peasant Politics in Modern France, 21-6; Corvol, L'Homme aux bois; Peter McPhee, The Politics of Rural Life: Political Mobilization in the French Countryside (Oxford, 1999); Robert Delort and Franqois Walter, Histoire de l'environnement europeen (Paris, 2001), 267-75.

16 Gifford Pinchot, 'Preface', in Theodore S. Wooley Jr, French Forests and For- estry: Tunisia, Algeria, and Corsica with a Translation of the Algerian Code of 1903 (New York, 1917), p. vi; R. Thompson, 'Report on the Forests of Mauritius', Indian Forester, vi (1881), 223-41, 287-8; Major Frederick Bailey, 'Forestry in France',

(cont. on p. 178)




divisions among them regarding the use of woodlands.17 Jean- Antoine Fabre's Essai sur la thdorie des torrens et des rivibres of 1797 explored the increase in the number of flash floods in mountainous areas in the Var as a result of deforestation and the con- sequent deleterious impact of the phenomenon on soil quality. Alexandre Surell's Etude sur les torrents des Hautes-Alpes further crystallized these new concerns. Published in 1841, this study of Alpine torrents examined the climatic effects of deforestation.18 He described the devastation caused by mountain 'torrents' in dramatic language, comparing them to a 'leprosy' eating away at the mountains and 'disgorging' the bits onto the plains below.19 He warned that such devastation that had occurred in France's forests since the eighteenth century had been disastrous because upland forested areas sustained both agricultural and climatic balance in lowland areas. He was not opposed to the removal of trees, and even suggested that this might be done without ill effect in lowland areas.20 For Surell, however, 'the mountain is the natural patrie of the forest'.21

George P. Marsh, commenting on Alpine regions of France that he visited, wrote in his Earth as Modified by Human Action:

(n. 16 cont.) Indian Forester, xiii (1887), 341-55, 389-407, 439-50, 489-501, 537-45. Stephen Pyne notes that Rudyard Kipling describes in his story 'In the Rukh' how a British forester in India sought the 'reboisement of all India', according to the French forestry school based in Nancy: see Stephen Pyne, Vestal Fire: An Environmental History Told through Fire, of Europe, and Europe's Encounter with the World (Seattle, 1997), 107.

17 Bernard Kalaora and A. Savoye, La Forit pacifiee: les forestiers de l'cole de Le Play, experts des societis pastorales (Paris, 1989). They make a distinction between 'forestiers 6tatiques', who wanted to severely restrict the peasantry's use of forests, and a minority of 'forestiers sociaux', who believed that the state needed to take into account the social plight of the peasantry in defining state policy.

18 Alexandre Surell, Etude sur les torrents des Hautes-Alpes, 2nd edn, 2 vols. (Paris, 1870-2). The volumes were awarded a prize by the Acad~mie des Sciences in 1842, and they owe much to the earlier work of Fabre, who, as a forest official, first explored the relationship between deforestation, erosion and flooding in the depart- ment of the Var: Jean-Antoine Fabre, Essai sur la thiorie des torrens et des rivibres ... (Paris, 1797).

19 'Attaches comme une lkpre au sol des montagnes, ils en rongent les flancs, et les degorgent dans les plaines sous forme de debris. C'est ainsi qu'ils ont cre', par une longue suite d'entassements, ces lits monstrueux, qui accroissent toujours et menacent de tout envahir': Surell, Etude sur les torrents des Hautes-Alpes, i, p. iv. Moreover, Surell argued that deforestation and the subsequent degradation of the soil led to out migration and to the disappearance of village communities.

20 Ibid., 269. 21 Ibid., 271.




'I have never seen its equal even in the Kabyle villages of the province of Constantine; for there you can travel on horseback, and you find grass in the spring, whereas in more than fifty communes in the Alps, there is nothing'.22 Clarence Glacken has argued that Fabre's influential work 'begins a new chapter in Western natural science and engineering', and it was one that led to the publication of large numbers of works on the relationship between deforestation, the environment, and flooding as a natural disaster.23

A series of torrential floods that occurred in France between the 1840s and 1870s appeared to confirm the views of Fabre and Surell.24 The worst floods were those of 1846, 1856 and 1875, prompting one commentator to ask why France seemed to be prey to such frequent flood disasters, which had formerly happened perhaps once in a hundred years.25 He concluded that their frequency was due to deforestation. Surell, in particular, reflected on the role of man and governments in protecting the environment by concluding his study of torrents with the following question: 'Is it not, moreover, the duty of each state to examine all the resources of its territory and to develop each

22 Quoted in John Croumbie Brown, Reboisement in France: or, Records of the Replanting of the Alps, the Cevennes, and the Pyrenees with Trees, Herbage and Bush (London, 1876), 70-1. He further noted that Arthur Young had commented on the richness of the region in his travels through France on the eve of the French Revolution.

23 Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley, 1965), 698.

24 A substantial literature on the relationship between torrents, floods and deforestation began to be published following some of these floods: LUon Boitel, Lyon inondi en 1840 (Lyon, 1840); A. Berger, Inondations de 1846: relation complete et officielle . . . (Paris, 1846); E. de Chamberet, Des inondations en France (Paris, 1856); [Claude Antoine] Rozet, Moyens deforcer les torrents des montagnes de rendre a' l'agriculture une partie du sol qu'ils ravagent ... (Paris, 1856); Charles de Ribbe, La Provence au point de vue des bois, des torrents et des inondations avant et apris 1789 (Paris, 1857); F. Vallis, Etudes sur les inondations, leurs causes et leurs effets, etc. (Paris, 1857); Maurice Champion, Les Inondations en France depuis le VIe siecle jusqu'a nos jours, 6 vols. (Paris, 1858-64); Armand Landrin, Les Inondations (Paris, 1880). The flooding of the Garonne in 1875 left Toulouse and the area surrounding the city devastated. It was estimated that over 3,000 people lost their lives. Brown, Reboise- ment in France, 329 ff. George P. Marsh also commented on the phenomenon in his Man and Nature, ed. David Lowenthal (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), 327-41.

25 'Pourquoi, comment se fait-il que de nos jours, en plein dix-neuvieme siecle, alors que les sciences et les arts ont fait d'immenses progres, comment se fait-il que les inondations soient si frequentes et 6tendues?': C. Chauvelot, Quelques mots sur les inondations de 1856 (Paris, 1856), 4.




region according to its natural conditions without discouraging any? Is it not also the task given to man to enrich the earth and his planet?'26

Under the influence of ideas concerning the ecological role of forests, the French state began to embark on a ferocious campaign to curb the peasantry's customary use of them, and to reforest mountainous areas in France. Between the 1820s and the 1870s the forest administration cracked down on the peasantry, which led, in one case, to a full-scale revolt in the so-called 'guerre des demoiselles' in 1829, when men dressed as women chased royal guards out of the forest, cut wood in prohibited areas, and freely pastured their sheep without regard for the restrictions of the forest code. The revolt of the 'demoiselles' was brutally repressed, but incidents of violence continued. At the end of the July Monarchy, in 1830, there were 100,000 cases of misdemeanours involving infractions against the forest code. A number of forest guards also lost their lives attempting to enforce the law, especially during the 'hungry forties', when scavenging peasants invaded the forests for survival, claiming their traditional communal rights.27 During the revolution of 1848 there was an explo- sion of hatred against forest agents.28

After the middle of the nineteenth century the state passed a series of laws in 1860, 1864, 1882 and 1913, aimed at an exten- sive planting of trees. The fear of natural disasters and changes in climatic conditions thus replaced the Ancien Regime's utilitarian concern for maximizing wood production. However, the political attention given to the conservation and management of forested landscapes continued to reside primarily in France's state bureaucracy - among the foresters trained at the School of Nancy employed by the Eaux et Forets.

II

A 'GREEN MUSEUM'

By the end of the nineteenth century, calls for specific legislation governing landscape protection came from an entirely new quarter: a bourgeois public. While various groups - principally Parisian

26 Surell, Etude sur les torrents des Hautes-Alpes, i, 284. 27 Anon., Les Eaux et Forits du 12e au 20e sidcle (Paris, 1987), 475. 28 Louis Badre, Histoire de laforitfranfaise (Paris, 1983), 149.




tourists and the artists who painted en plein air - frequently fought with one another over how and why landscapes should be preserved, their campaign reflected a major change in the symbolic function of landscape and those who inhabited it.29 This became clear in the battle over France's first protected landscape: the historic forest of Fontainebleau.

Fontainebleau was one of France's oldest royal domains, and grew in size from 14,242 hectares in 1716 to 17,092 hectares in 1832. As such, it was the most important forested area in the Ile- de-France. The forest lies sixty kilometres from the centre of Paris, and by the end of the nineteenth century, consisted of approximately 18,000 hectares of forested terrain that contained about 44 per cent oak, 10 per cent beech and 41 per cent pine. In 1839, the journal L'Artiste published an anonymous article (by A. S.), entitled 'The Forest of Fontainebleau: Destructions', which attacked the forest officials for the degradation of the natural forest and declared that the forest 'is needed as a sacred oasis in the midst of the pious invasions of a destructive and improvi- dent civilization'.30 The author ironically criticized the forest administration, which had done much to preserve the integrity of wooded areas since the seventeenth century, for making them into a resource for profit. Choiseul, too, in arguing for the aug- mentation of the reserve in the late 1870s, lambasted the state's forest administration. For them, the forest should be preserved as an aesthetic refuge, a mnemonic device recalling a rich historic past, bearing out Madame de Stall's view that 'the most beautiful landscapes in the world, if they evoke no memory, if they bear no trace to any notable event, are uninteresting com- pared to historic landscapes'.31

The Barbizon School painter Theodore Rousseau crafted a petition for the emperor in 1852. He defended the protection of the forest as 'the only living souvenir that remains from the heroic times of the Motherland from Charlemagne to Napoleon. For artists who study nature, it offers what others find in models

29See Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London, 1973); Jean- Claude Chamboredon, 'La "Naturalisation" de la campagne: une autre maniere de cultiver les "simples"', in Cadoret (ed.), Protection de la nature.

30 Quoted in Greg M. Thomas, Art and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century France: The Landscapes of Thdodore Rousseau (Princeton, 2000), 165.

31 Quoted in David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, 1985), 114.




that have been left to us by Michelangelo'.32 These aesthetic and nationalist considerations are borne out in the evolution of French landscape painting in the nineteenth century. By 1867, one critic, writing about the work of these painters, argued that

through landscape, art becomes national . . . it takes possession of France, of the ground, of the air, of the sky, of the French landscape. This land that has borne us, the air that we breathe, this harmonious and sweet whole that constitutes the face of the mother country, we carry it in our soul.33

This sentiment was echoed by Denecourt, who in his numerous guidebooks almost single-handedly inspired the droves of tourists to come to Fontainebleau on newly constructed rail lines in the 1850s and 1860s. In 1860 Denecourt wrote a pamphlet for Louis Napoleon, entitled 'Ah! If the emperor only knew!'34

Theodore Rousseau, making a distinction between the 'historic' trees of Fontainebleau, which included oaks and beeches, and 'newcomers' (pines), argued for the preservation of only certain types of forested landscape. He established a hierarchy of trees that was based on history and age rather than 'nature'. Oaks were the most valuable, and the incursion of pine to be lamented. They were allegedly introduced into the forest by Marie-Antoinette's doctor, Lemonnier, who brought seedlings from the Baltic, but the high point of the new plantings came under the stewardship of Marnier Bois d'Hyver, who transformed the forest between 1830 and 1847. By 1888 all empty spaces had to all intents and purposes disappeared with the invasion of pines, and old-growth trees covered only about half of the entire forest.35

Rousseau accused foresters of sowing 'in profusion unaccount- able quantities of northern pines that wipe out this forest's old Gaul character and will soon give us the severe and sad spectacle of Russian forests'.36 Forests and plant life were not valued in and

32 Quoted in Thomas, Art and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century France, 214. 33 'Par le paysage l'art devient national . .. il prend possession de la France, du

sol, de l'air, du ciel, du paysage franqais. Cette terre qui nous a portbs, cette atmos- phere que nous respirons, tout cet ensemble harmonieux et doux qui constitue le visage de la mere patrie, nous le portons dans notre dme'. Quoted in Fran:oise Cachin, 'Le Paysage du peintre', in Pierre Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de mimoire, 3 vols. in 7 (Paris, 1984-6), ii, pt 1, p. 476.

34Denecourt, Ah! Si l'empereur le savait!; Bernard Kalaora, Le Musee vert ou le tourisme en forit: naissance et diveloppement d'un loisir urbain, le cas de la forit de Fontainebleau (Paris, 1981), 132.

35Jean-Claude Polton, Tourisme et nature au XIXe siicle (Paris, 1994), 188. 36 Quoted in Thomas, Art and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century France, 173.




of themselves, but rather as an expression of the past, of history. For the artists, pines were an aesthetic atrocity, and in the 1830s the painters would gather in a local inn close to Fon- tainebleau to combat the problem. They agreed to allow foresters, whom they regarded as enemies, to come to the inn for an evening meal only on condition that they bring in at least a pair of young pines pulled up from the forest - a practice they called pine to dine.37 John Croumbie Brown, however, who wrote extensively on forestry practices in France and in Europe during this period, noted that 98 per cent of the soil in Fontainebleau was sand, and asserted that the area would be a 'drifting desert' without trees, which included pines.38

In 1861, the emperor, Louis Napoleon, responded to the pleas of Denecourt and the artists by protecting 1,097 hectares, or 6.56 per cent of the forest as a rserve artistique. Foresters could neither cut nor replant in this area.39 This decree, in effect, constituted France's first governmental measure to protect a specific landscape in France. It was to have far-reaching consequences for determining which landscapes would be protected in metropolitan France and for the ways in which landscape came to be protected subsequently by the state.40

The foresters, in turn, pilloried the artists and responded by arguing that they foresaw the 'ruin' of Fontainebleau.41 Without judicious cutting and replanting, the trees would choke one

37 Ibid., 178. 38 John Croumbie Brown, Pine Plantations on the Sand Wastes of France (Edinburgh,

1878), 99. Brown was a lecturer at King's College, Aberdeen, subsequently a botan- ist at the Cape of Good Hope for a number of years, as well as professor of Botany in the South African College, Cape Town and an honorary vice-president of the African Institute of Paris. He wrote several books on forests and on French forestry, including: Forests and Moisture: or, The Effects of Forests on Humidity of Climate (Edinburgh, 1877); The French Forest Ordinance of 1669: With Historical Sketch of Previous Treat- ment of Forests in France (Edinburgh, 1883); and Reboisement in France.

39 Bulletin des lois, suppl. to vol. xviii, no. 764 (Paris, 1862), 577-8. 40 Philippe Fritsch, 'Les S&ries artistiques dans la foret de Fontainebleau: genese

d'une perception', in Andree Corvol (ed.), La For&t: perceptions et reprisentations (Paris, 1997).

41 The artists, Denecourt and his tourists had other critics. Arthur Mangin wrote of Fontainebleau that 'despite its enormous trees, its rudely broken surface, its stags and roebucks, reserved for imperial sport; despite its few adders and problem- atical vipers, it is now little better than a rendezvous for amateur artists and listless idlers. Its well-kept avenues resound with rapid wheels, and you can scarcely stir a step without finding the associations of the place interrupted by the stalls of vendors of cakes, or the apparatus of itinerant gamblers'. Quoted in Brown, Pine Plantations on the Sand Wastes of France, 98.




another and die. One forest official wrote in the Revue des eaux et forits of 1876 that 'there is no forest without a forester, any more than there is a garden without a gardener. The virgin forest is nothing other than a poetic fiction'.42 Some who commented on the disastrous floods of 1846 also ridiculed an urban public's allegedly misguided understanding and appreciation of nature.43

In a broad sense both foresters and artists represented the desire to protect and safeguard the natural world. However, foresters were conservationists in their wish to manage and use a natural resource judiciously. The artists focused on preservation, which is 'posited on the principle of non utilitar- ianism', demanding 'the prevention of any active interference whatsoever'.44 While both approaches to nature protection coexisted, the idea of setting aside significant segments of the state forests from any form of state management soon took hold and represented a new relationship with France's past. As David Lowenthal has suggested, preservation ultimately became a 'principal mode of appreciating the past'.45

While the artists were deeply critical of the foresters, who themselves claimed to be agents of true conservation, they did not remark on the presence of the peasants who gathered wood, grazed their sheep, or attacked forest guards. These were the very peasants who had fought pitched battles with the state over the communal rights and whose dramatic example was the 'guerre des demoiselles'.46 Foresters had railed against peasants and the devastation that they wrought since the French Revolution. The forests they attempted to conserve were to be uninhabited.47 These peasants, however, figure very prominently in the actual

42 Anon., 'La Reserve de la foret de Fontainebleau', Revue des eaux et forits, xvi (1876), 14.

43 Berger attacked the tourists who flocked to the countryside for idealizing mountain torrents: 'Tourists, literary dandies - one of the most unfortunate results of the last election being that of propagating the frivolous and pretentious race in the Cham- ber of Deputies - go into raptures at the sight of these impetuous currents which bound, which roar, which turn blue at the horizon': Berger, Inondations de 1846, 130.

44 Carruthers, Kruger National Park, 5. 45 Lowenthal, Past is a Foreign Country, p. xxiv. Tom Griffiths makes a similar

point in his masterful Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia (Cambridge, 1996), which explores the evolution of European environmental sensibilities in Australia.

46 See Peter Sahlins, Forest Rites (Harvard, 1995). 47 The forest code of 1827 was guided by this conviction and was later extended

to Algeria until a special code was drawn up in 1907 following a governmental inquiry (cont. on p. 185)




paintings of Diaz, Rousseau and especially Millet, where they are portrayed heroically. Indeed, the peasants, with whom the French state had waged several century-long battles for control of the forest, became landscape within dyads such as nature and culture, forest and genre de vie. They formed landscapes of nostalgia, where local peasant practices pose no threat. Indeed, the painters came to idealize the waning pastoral tradition. In another case, we have snapshots of practices in the forest that would be in clear violation of the law. The Faggot Gatherers of 1851 depicts, for example, a woman brandishing metal hatch- ets with a man at her side. The law only allowed for the gathering of fallen wood by women, and any form of cutting was strictly forbidden. The human presence in the forest did not appear to be decried by the painters as long as that presence reflected an older rural economy.

For a Parisian public, which had experienced political turmoil several times between 1789 and 1848, there was increasing concern about hygiene, pollution and finding rural solace. Fon- tainebleau became a haven from the social strife and vicissitudes of urban politics, which may in part explain how the symbolic image of the peasantry had changed from 'disorder to order'.48 Indeed, it was this selfsame peasantry that put down the working class of Paris during the June Days of 1848 at the command of General Cavaignac. When Gustave Flaubert's anti-hero Frederic Moreau and his mistress fled Paris in the midst of the revolution of 1848, they went to Fontainebleau. There in the royal forest he found animated beauty in a kind of theatre of nature. Soon the 'solemnity of the forest overtook' Moreau and his mistress:

The different trees afforded a changing spectacle. The beeches, with their smooth white bark, mingled their foliage; ashes gently curved their grey-green boughs; in the hornbeam coppices bristled holly-bushes that seemed to be made of bronze; then came a line of slender birches, bent in elegiac attitudes; and the pines, as symmetrical as organ pipes, seemed to sing as they swayed continuously to and fro. Huge gnarled

(n. 47 cont.) into the principles and practices of governance in Algeria: see Henri Pensa, L'Algirie: voyage de la dcligation de la commission senatoriale d'9tudes des questions algiriennes prisidge par Jules Ferry (Paris, 1894); Henri Marc and Andre Knertzer, Le Code forestier algirien (Algiers, 1931). For the conflicts between native populations and the French government over forest policy prior to the 1890s, see David Prochaska, 'Fire on the Mountain: Resisting Colonialism in Algeria', in Donald Crummey (ed.), Banditry, Rebellion and Social Protest in Africa (London, 1986).

48 Chamboredon, 'La "Naturalisation" de la campagne', 142.




oaks rose convulsively out of the ground, embraced one another, and, solidly established on their torso-like trunks, threw out their bare arms in desperate appeals and furious threats, like a group of Titans struck motionless in their anger. The solemnity of the forest overtook them; and there were hours of silence when, abandoning themselves to the gentle rocking of the springs, they lay sunk in a calm intoxication.49

Fontainebleau was transformed from a place for hunting and harvesting wood into an object of inspiration, a spectacle, a place for spiritual renewal, a haven from industrial life, a refuge from political turmoil and a natural national icon.50 It was a landscape of nostalgia, reflecting a new relationship between town and country, as well as between landscape and the national past. Ironically the early impulse behind the protection of so-called natural landscapes in France was born in a forest that was perhaps the least 'natural'.51

Aesthetic and nationalist concerns came to dominate the movement for landscape protection in France until the First World War, and this was evidenced in the formation of a number of organizations devoted to the cause. They included the Alpine Club (1872), the Touring Club of France (1890), and most importantly the Societe pour la Protection des Paysages de France (1901).52 The Society for the Protection of the Landscapes of France sponsored France's first law relating to the protection of 'sites et monuments naturels', which was passed on 21 April 1906. The law reflected the way in which landscape protection had come to be articulated during the debates over Fontaine- bleau, and revealed the extent to which preservation was defined in aesthetic and patriotic terms. It provided for the protection of sites and natural monuments 'de caractere artistique' exclusively.53 To this extent landscape protection represented a longer cultural continuum, harking back to the drive to protect France's architectural, historic and aesthetic heritage as patrimoine from

49Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education, trans. Robert Baldick (New York, 1982), 323-4.

50 See Polton, Tourisme et nature au XIXe sitcle; Nicholas Green, The Spectacle of Nature: Landscape and Bourgeois Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (Manchester, 1990).

51 Kalaora, Le Musee vert ou le tourisme en foret. 52 Jean Lehor, Une sociltj crier pour la protection des paysages franfais (Paris, 1901).

53 Pierre Leroux de la Roche, La Protection des paysages (Paris, 1932), 31. See also Lucien Sorel, La Protection des paysages naturels et des perspectives monumentales (Paris, 1932).




the French Revolution onwards.54 The notion of patrimoine was merely extended to a natural world that had historical associations and implied a traditional, rural way of life.55 Maurice Faure, who gave a speech in support of the law before the National Assembly, declared that patriotism was not 'solely a moral entity, an abstract conception, a geographical or historical expression. It is in some way a material and visible representation of the country itself'.56

The movement that emerged to protect the landscape of Fontainebleau can be linked to a new culture of middle-class consumption, the rise of the urban garden, the commodifica- tion of the picturesque, and to anxieties produced by urbaniza- tion.57 While new moves to protect landscapes were grounded in these social changes, they were also guided by political changes. An urban republican bourgeoisie embraced new ideas about what constituted the national patrimoine, which reflected a larger turn- of-the-century redefinition of the nation in terms of territory and geography.

The French Revolution had left France with a divided, dual notion of nationhood, one of which was republican or Left, which was abstract and based on consent and contract rather than founded 'in the course of rivers and mountain chains', as Ernest Renan described it in his famous 1882 speech 'What is a Nation?'58 The other came to be grounded in the soil of La France profonde, and, while associated with the Right and with figures like Maurice Barres, it came to be appropriated by the Left, as manifested in the work of Vidal de la Blache, founder of the French discipline of geography. He, like the Barbizon School painters, most of whom were on the Left, did much to relate geography to French identity, saying that the 'history of a people is inseparable from the land it inhabits', and 'the land

54 Dominique Poulot, 'Alexandre Lenoir et les musees des monuments frangais', in Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de memoire, ii, pt 1; Andre Chastel, 'La Notion de patrimoine', ibid. As David Lowenthal has argued, 'raw, unfinished America dismayed sensitive souls' who preferred the historic landscape of Fontainebleau: Lowenthal, Past is a Foreign Country, 114.

55 Dubost, Vert patrimoine. 56 Quoted in Yves Luginbuhl, Paysages: textes et representations du siecle des lumidres

a nos jours, 60. 57 This argument is made by Green in his Spectacle of Nature. 58 Pierre Nora, 'Nation', in Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, ed.

Frangois Furet and Mona Ozouf (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 749.




itself becomes a kind of medal on which the effigy of a people is struck'.59 This perspective was one that necessarily militates against separating nature from history and human culture, and stresses the interconnection between the two.

III

CONSERVATION IN THE COLONIES

If utilitarian, aesthetic, preservationist and nationalist concerns continued to guide the movement for landscape protection in metropolitan France, the inspiration behind state initiatives in France's colonies emerged in the scientific community, and among colonial administrators and settlers, out of anxieties about the overall climatic effects of deforestation that harked back to those that were advanced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by, for example, Pierre Poivre, in France's tropical island Eden of Mauritius.60 However, discussions on the subject at the turn of the twentieth century were expressed in terms of fears about its effect on 'civilization' itself that were specific to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Landscape protection in the colonies was not governed by the desire to preserve historic landscapes that evoked a human past. It was shaped to a greater extent by ecological considerations and by anxieties concerning the impact that environmental degradation might have on the survival of European civilization. Indeed, many authors feared that this degradation might result in Europe suffering the fate of the great civilizations of the ancient world. In 1876, M. Trottier wrote in Reboisement et colonisation that 'above all in warm countries forests give placidity and calm to the spirit', and that their disappearance 'renders the spirit excitable, enervates at times and makes us a people of the imagination'. He asked 'where does one find the most developed forms of exaltation other than in arid countries?'61 Dr Trolard, a Frenchman

59 Vidal de la Blache, Tableau de la geographie de la France (Paris, 1979), 8. 60 Grove, Green Imperialism. 61 'Ainsi, et surtout dans les pays chauds, les forets donnent la placidite et le calme i I1'esprit ... la denudation au contraire rend l'esprit excitable, l'6nerve par moments et nous fait gens d'imagination. Oh trouve-t-on l'exaltation le plus develop'e que dans les pays d'ariditb?' Quoted in Bergeret, 'Discours et politiques forestibres coloniales en Afrique et Madagascar', 26.




and conseiller gendral in Algiers, who helped to found the League for Reforestation in Algeria in 1882, wrote:

Forests are indispensable to man and to civilization. Their disappearance precedes by little the decline, then the death of empires. It is in the middle of sandy, rocky deserts that we look for the ruins of Babylon, Nineveh, Tyre, Sidon, and Carthage. With the last tree, the last man disappears.62 These ideas bore some relationship to those advanced by

correspondents and associates of the Jardin du Roi, which was to become the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle during the French Revolution.63 The great eighteenth-century naturalist Buffon reflected on climatic change and was optimistic about man's power to control the temperature-level of the climate in a way that would suit him. He offered proof in the fact that Paris was at the same latitude as Quebec, and yet Paris was warmer because it had fewer trees and a greater population.64 Buffon did not advocate an unmitigated protection of forested areas, because he believed that it was important to increase the earth's temperature, as human life could not exist without heat. At the same time, he thought that forests conserved the moisture for human cultivation and husbandry. Buffon wished to create balances in nature, and while he advocated deforestation in the New World, he maintained that forests should be conserved in the Old.65 In short, he believed that 'large areas inimical to man had to be cleared to make the earth habitable, but once societies were established on them, the forests were resources which had to be treated with care and foresight'.66 Long before the nineteenth century, the French monarchy, under the influence

62 Quoted in Whited, Forests and Peasant Politics in Modern France, 202. See also Dr Trolard, La Question forestidre alg&ienne devant le sinat (Algiers, 1893); Dr Trolard, La Question forestidre en Algirie et le programme de reboisement du gouvernement gendral (Algiers, 1885); Ligue du Reboisement [de l'Algerie], La Forit: conseils aux indigines, suppl. to Bulletin de la Ligue du Reboisement d'Algmrie, no. 16 (Algiers, 1883); Ligue du Reboisement de l'Algerie, De la promulgation en Algirie de la loi du 4 avril 1882 sur la conservation et la restauration des terrains en montagne (Algiers, [1883]); Ligue du Reboisement de l'Algerie, L'Arbre (citations): programme du Comite Central de la Ligue (Algiers, 1884).

63 See Grove, 'Historical Review of Institutional and Conservationist Responses to Fears of Artificially Induced Global Climate Change', 155-69.

64 Buffon believed, however, that it was easier to raise temperatures than to decrease them: Buffon, 'Des 6poques de la nature', 245.

65 Buffon, 'Sur la conservation et le retablissement des forets', and 'Sur la culture et l'exploitation des forets', both in Supplement a l'histoire naturelle, ii (Paris, 1775). 66 Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, 671.




of these ideas, began to set up tree nurseries throughout France and in her colonies, and embarked on significant projects of large- scale tree planting.67

During the Napoleonic period and the Restoration, naturalists and government administrators again began to reflect on the relationship between deforestation and climate. This time, however, they considered the question in the context of the political upheaval of revolution and the 'progress' of civilization. In 1825, Moreau de Jonnis, a correspondent at the Academy and Insti- tute of Sciences in Paris, wrote a memoir on the subject for the Royal Academy in Brussels. He declared that 'the torrent of revo- lutions has made the last vestiges of the old forests of Europe disappear almost entirely', and he set out to explore the effects of deforestation on climate, society and politics.68 While he saw the devastation to be most pervasive in southern and Mediter- ranean Europe, he regarded the problem as one that affected the continent as a whole. For Moreau de Jonnes, forests had a powerful influence on temperature, rainfall, rivers, the quality of the air and the fertility of the soil. Unlike Buffon, he appears to have been more concerned about the effects of deforestation in raising the earth's temperature. He argued that the more a country was forested, the more it resembled the original state of the earth, and the more it was deforested, the more it resembled the earth's final days.69

The link that Moreau de Jonnes made between deforestation and the development and decline of civilization came to obsess nineteenth-century writers and naturalists. Some twenty-five years later, in 1853, Becquerel published his influential Des climats et de l'influence qu'exercent les sols boises et non boises for the Paris Academy of Sciences. He attempted to show how the ancient cities celebrated for their civilization, such as Baalbek, Babylon, Nineveh and Palmyra, were now in ruins as deserts and swamps.70

67 Spary, Utopia's Garden, 254. 68A. Moreau de Jonnes, Premier mimoire en riponse la question proposee par

l'Acadimie Royale de Bruxelles: quels sont les changemens que peut occasionner le dboisement deforits considirables sur les contries et communes adjacentes ... (Brussels, 1825), p. v.

69Ibid., 182. 70 A. Becquerel, Des climats et de l'influence qu'exercent les sols boises et non boises

(Paris, 1853), pp. iii-v. Becquerel explored the effect of climate on human society, and pointed to the problems posed by difficult climates with respect to hygiene and mortality in Algeria, in his Traiti ilimentaire d'hygiine privie et publique, 3rd edn (Paris, 1864), 307-10.




The fears expressed by Trolard and Trottier concerning Algeria reflected, therefore, both eighteenth-century ideas regarding the effects of deforestation on public health and hygiene as well as new, nineteenth-century assumptions about the relationship between cdboisement and civilisation. Trolard noted that the Algerian climate was neither attractive nor salubrious at times, and that if France wished to encourage colonization, the government had to make it more so. Trolard, who founded the Ligue du Reboise- ment de l'Algerie in 1882 and defended the application of French laws regarding the reforestation of mountain areas in Algeria, drew on the established literature regarding the effect of forests on climatic change.71

Much of the impetus behind initiatives to protect landscape and environment in colonial France originated in the scientific community associated with the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle and in the Societe d'Acclimatation de France founded by Albert Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in 1854.72 From the 1850s onwards the museum and the society had sponsored a variety of expeditions to Africa and Asia to collect exotic specimens, including bison, llamas, Indian deer and Egyptian geese. The society created a lavish zoo (the Jardin Zoologique d'Acclimatation) in Paris in 1860, which served as a showcase of its ideas, and its original concern for fauna extended to flora. The society's most ambitious projects included the establishment of various jardins d'acclimatation in France and a jardin d'essai in Algeria; these jardins were devoted to the acclimatization of tropical plants and insects. In many ways both projects were halfway houses for the arrival of a wholly new emphasis that emerged in the museum and in the society by the First World War. From 1918 onwards both set out to expand their colonial mission in the form of conservation sur place, abroad. Indeed, by the late nineteenth century, they began to reconsider some of the consequences of acclimatization and colonization for environmental degradation in the colonies. This shaped new conceptions of

71 Trolard, La Question forestiire en Algirie et le programme de reboisement du gouvernement gineral; Trolard, La Colonisation et la question forestiire (Algiers, 1891); Trolard, La Question forestiire algirienne devant le sinat. See also Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore.

72 For a history of the society, see Michael A. Osborne, Nature, the Exotic, and the Science of French Colonialism (Bloomington, 1994).




landscape preservation, which focused principally on forests, on fauna, flora and habitats.73

In 1920, M. R. Maire, professor of botanical sciences at the University of Algeria, proposed the creation of natural reserves (reserves naturelles) in areas that were 'particularly expressive', and he stipulated that these reserves had to be of scientific, artistic and touristic interest. Their purpose was 'to maintain or re-establish the flora and fauna in their wholly natural state and to protect them from the intervention of man', particularly in forested areas.74 The governor general, Charles Luytaud, charged the director of the forest service in the colony with studying the question. A year later, on 17 February 1921, he decreed that a series of 'national parks' be created in the interest of preserving 'the natural beauty of the colonies and [of] developing tourism'.75 Article 1 of the decree declared that 'forests or parts of forests whose botanical composition, picturesque beauty, or climatic conditions' made them particularly amenable would be designated as both 'centres of scientific study and tourism'.76 In such protected areas all hunting and wood-gathering by indigenous populations would be prohibited, while the government, in article 8, would favour building hotels and other forms of accommodation. Thirteen 'national parks' were subsequently established between 1923 and 1927 in the dipartements of Alger and Constantine.77

In 1925 Georges Petit, an associate director at the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, was asked to study the question of 'national parks' and reserves naturelles in Madagascar

73 There were some precedents for this new concern about animal life in the nineteenth century, but unlike earlier demands for animal protection, discussions surrounding the conservation of animals in the colonies centred on landscapes and habitats: Maurice Agulhon, 'Le Sang des bates: le probl~me des animaux en France au XIXe siecle', in his Histoire vagabonde (Paris, 1988).

74 'Considerant l'int'ret scientifique, artistique, et touristique qu'il y a, en cer- taines regions particulierement expressives, a maintenir ou a retablir la flore et la faune dans leurs conditions naturelles integrales, et a garantir contre l'intervention de l'homme'. P. de Peyerimhoff, 'Les "Parcs nationaux" d'Algerie', in A. Aubre- ville et al., Contribution a l'tude des reserves naturelles et des parcs nationaux (Paris, 1937), 128-9.

75 Ibid., 132. 76Ibid., 133. 77 For Algeria's national parks, see Gouvernement G6neral de l'Algerie, Service

des Eaux et Forets, Commissariat Genbral du Centenaire, Les Parcs nationaux en Algirie (Algiers, 1930).




by the Commission for the Protection of Colonial Fauna at the request of the Ministry of Colonies. After he had explained the importance of the principle of reserves naturelles to the governor general, he made a presentation to Madagascar's Academy on the protection of nature. Following the publication of a report and its submission to the governor general, the latter provided for the designation of ten reserves naturelles on 31 December 1927.78

The creation of protected landscapes in colonial France must be viewed in terms of the beginnings of protracted debate (and competition) between European powers about how to protect natural landscapes and the natural world more generally. This debate, and the gradual inclusion of fauna and flora in the discussion, was pursued in three separate international congresses, all of which took place between 1923 and 1933.79 The first two were held in Paris and were international conferences for the protection of nature, the second coinciding with the international colonial exhibition of 1931. The third, which was held in London, was the international conference exclusively devoted to the protection of the landscapes, fauna and flora of colonial Africa.

Late nineteenth-century initiatives governing landscape preservation had centred on forests and natural sites, but by 1931 they had come to focus on the preservation of the integrity of larger 'ecosystems', the fauna and flora associated with those sites. The Soci&te d'Acclimatation had previously had no qualms about capturing animals and bringing exotic fauna and flora to France. Indeed, until the 1920s the annual ddjeuner amical of the society featured big game and rare colonial delicacies on its menus.

The history of the ddjeuner amical reveals the transformation of the conservationist cause. In the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, Pierre Amed&e Pichot and

78 G. Petit, 'Les R6serves naturelles de Madagascar', in Aubreville et al., Contri- bution a l'itude des rnserves naturelles et des parcs nationaux. Reserves were not only created in France's African colonies. One reserve was established by the French in Antarctica.

79 Premier congres international pour la protection de la nature, faune et flore, sites et monuments naturels (Paris 31 mai - 2 juin 1923), rapports, vceux, rdalisations (Paris, 1925); Deuxidme congres international pour la protection de la nature, Paris, 30juin - 4 juillet 1931 (Paris, 1932); American Committee for International Wildlife Protec- tion, The London Convention for the Protection of African Fauna and Flora (Special publication, vi, Cambridge, Mass., 1935). Captain Keith Caldwell, 'The Inter- national Conference for the Protection of the Fauna and Flora of Africa', Jl Soc. for the Preservation of the Fauna of Empire, pt 22 (London, 1934).




Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, among others at the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle, had a meal prepared from slaughtered exotic animals that the museum could no longer afford to feed.s8 In 1884, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the foun- dation of the Societe Nationale d'Acclimatation, a meal was organized by its secretary general, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Animals provided by the Jardin d'Acclimatation were presented and eaten, including the neck of a giraffe, which left the 'convives un souvenir 1kgendaire'.81 Several years later, one of the members of the society, M. Favez-Verdier, had an exotic animal, which had been mortally wounded during an exhibition, eaten in a meal which took place in the restaurant Marguery near the museum. Out of this dcgustation it was decided that the members of the society should meet once a year.

The first of the society's formal ddjeuners amicaux took place in 1905 at Vianey, a restaurant in the place Valhubert, near the Jardin des Plantes. Nothing 'unusual' was consumed, and the president of the society, Edmond Perrier, remarked that it would be desirable to make known the products and delicacies from abroad and from France's colonies. In 1907, the products of the colonies began to be featured in a systematic fashion, and the number of participants increased to such an extent that the venue had to be changed. In 1908, the lunch took place at the buffet of the Gare de Lyon, where most subsequent lunches were held,82 and was at its most popular during the international colonial exhibition held in Paris in 1931, when over two hundred people attended. The paradox of eating wild game while attempting to protect fauna in the wild seems to have passed unnoticed, at least until 1934 when Andre Demaison, a hunter and explorer, was asked to officiate at the meal that year. In his postprandial speech, he remarked:

It is strange, at least paradoxical, that it is I who preside today over your annual lunch and who praise our common friendship with animals.

80 For a discussion of the consumption of the exotic animals from the Jardin des Plantes during the Paris Commune of 1871, see Rebecca L. Spang, '"And They Ate the Zoo": Relating Gastronomic Exoticism to the Siege of Paris', Mod. Lang. Notes, cvii (Sept. 1992).

81 Anon., 'Les Dejeuners de la Soci&te d'Acclimatation', Bulletin de la Socidtd d'Acclimatation de France, lxx (1929).

82 Ibid. The lunches were interrupted during the First World War (from 1915 to 1919).




In effect, we haven't gathered together to stroke antelopes, buffalo or porcupines, but to eat them.83 The idea of landscape restoration and species protection gave

rise to an intense debate about which landscapes and which species should be protected and in what form. That debate crystallized in discussions at the London conference about establishing a hierarchy of protected fauna in Africa, and about distinguishing between different forms of landscape protection. Whereas in metropolitan France the legislation of 1901 and 1906 centred exclusively on those landscapes singled out for their aesthetic beauty and historic associations, in France's colonies landscape preservation was inspired by different motives, and distinctions were made between types of protected landscapes.

Sharp divisions began to emerge among conservationists in the colonies, just as they had in France, regarding the accessi- bility and administration of protected landscapes. The two groups that increasingly fought over the administration of protected sites were the forest service and the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle. In many respects battles arose over widely conflicting conceptions about the role of conservation, and particularly about the importance of forests in the colonial and metropolitan economy. In 1923, Emile Sinturel, Inspecteur des Eaux et Forets at Fontainebleau, argued that there were profound differences between sdries artistiques, such as Fontainebleau, which were ver- itable 'museums of nature', accessible to the public, and reserves naturelles, 'vast territoires protected from the hand of man', and in which animals and plants live in harmony.84

In 1937, A. Aubreville brought together a number of botanists and scientists who were employed at the museum to reflect on the issue. Many had taken part in colonial expeditions that had been sponsored by the museum since the early 1920s, and had attended the international conferences on the protection of nature in 1923 and 1931. Georges Petit, who had called for the creation of Madagascar's reserves naturelles, made a distinction between seven types of protected landscapes. These comprised reserves naturelles, hunting reserves, forest reserves, national parks, reserve parks, biological reserves, and botanical and touristic

83 Bulletin de la Socidtd d'Acclimatation de France (1934), 407. He proceeded to provide an elaborate defence for the eating of wild game.

84 Premier congris international pour la protection de la nature, 268.




reserves.85 The function and operation of these various protected sites were discussed extensively in London at the Inter- national Conference for the Protection of Fauna and Flora in Africa. For Petit a national park was an 'American conception', whereas an 'integral natural reserve' (rdserve naturelle intigrale) was a uniquely French notion. While the former was open to the public and placed under state control for the conservation of the natural fauna and flora, the latter, like the reserves that were established in Madagascar, were areas that would be protected from any form of hunting, fishing or exploitation. They were to exclude human presence of any kind. Surprisingly, Petit opposed the idea of acclimatation in these areas, an idea that had been an inherent part of early notions of conservation at the museum and the Societ6 Nationale d'Acclimatation. For Petit, the reserve naturelle replaced the idea of the 'spectacular', which was central to the idea of a national park, with the 'biological', or 'nature left to her own devices'.86 However, Petit's hope was not to re-establish nature in its original form, which he believed impossible. Rather, his aim was to safeguard the last vestiges of primeval vegetation. The purpose of the reserve naturelle integrale was to 'conserve a natural state and the conditions of stability', and to 'encourage the spontaneous evolution of this state'.87 Petit did not envisage landscape as a site, but as a living organism, without (in contrast to the painters who sought to protect the forest of Fontainebleau) the presence of man. This new conception of landscape, which was born in France's colonies, inspired legislation governing the creation of reserves not only in Algeria and Madagascar but also in French West Africa.88

Despite the intensive exploitation of forested land in North Africa and Madagascar by the colonizing French, environmental destruction was laid entirely at the feet of indigenous populations. Local populations were not regarded as objects (or subjects) of nostalgia, with a culture and a historic past embedded in the landscape of which they were an integral part, but rather with

85 G. Petit, 'Protection de la nature et la question des "definitions"', in Aubreville et al., Contribution a l'tude des riserves naturelles et des parcs nationaux, 6.

86 Ibid., 9. 87 Ibid., 13. 88 J.P. Raffin and G. Ricou, 'Le Lien entre les scientifiques et les associations de

protection de la nature: approche historique', in Cadoret (ed.), Protection de la nature, 63.




scorn.89 Colonial administrators and the scientific community that supported them embraced landscape protection in the form of reserves naturelles encompassing fauna, flora, and unpeopled topographical sites. While aesthetic appeals were not absent, and many colonial officials favoured tourism, the dominant language of landscape preservation was one that focused on landscape as an ecological system.

The way in which the protection of natural landscapes and environment was conceived in France from the 1840s to 1940 reflected two distinctive - if sometimes overlapping - visions of the natural world and of man's relationship to it. In metropolitan France what was to be protected by the early twentieth century was not only landscape, but a rural economy that evoked a pre-industrial past - a paysage culture - a genre de vie that still figures very large in debates about price supports, the protection of French agriculture and a rural way of life in the European Union.90 Moreover, visions of the natural world in metropolitan France were strongly historicized. In France's colonies what was to be protected by the Second World War was not so much a virgin landscape, but one that was unpeopled - paysage nature - landscape which represented a bulwark against an alleged environmental devastation that would bring an end to European and, by extension, world civilization. Although both encompassed a form of protectionism, the dominant language of landscape protection in metropolitan France up to, and in many instances following, the Second World War was preservationist. Its dominant form in her colonies was conservationist. While 'ecological' concerns were not absent from preservationist and conservationist

89 There were parts of East and Central Africa in which local populations resisted attempts by colonial governments to remove trees. Wilson cites the case of 'indigenous conservation', in which there were taboos against cutting down fruit trees in fields and in destroying trees linked to ancestral sprits. See K. B. Wilson, 'Trees in Fields in Southern Zimbabwe', JI Southern African Studies, xv, 2 (Jan. 1989); J. M. Schoffeleers (ed.), Guardians of the Land: Essays on Central African Territorial Cults (Gwelo, 1979).

90 As early as 1841, Alexandre Surell attributed deforestation to the sanctity with which the French regarded cultivated land: 'Chacun veut avoir son champ au soleil, dans notre France surtout, oii le peuple a, peut-etre plus que partout ailleurs, l'amour de la terre, et une repugnance secrete pour le triste travail des fabriques': Surell, Etudes sur les torrents des Hautes-Alpes, 297-8.




initiatives, particularly in Africa, they were relatively weak.91 Ultimately, the paradox of French conceptions of landscape protection resided in the dualistic value placed on the rural, peopled, historic and cultivated landscape that harked back to France's past, and on the 'natural', unpeopled paradises of the non-European world - on whose protection the very survival of European civilization allegedly came to depend.

University of British Columbia Caroline Ford

91 As Emma Spary argues, one should perhaps avoid linking climatic concerns prior to the twentieth century with 'environmentalism' in the twentieth century. According to Spary, earlier preoccupations were 'of a broadly conceived Hippocratic project, which scarcely resembles modern environmentalism either in its content or social uses'. Spary, Utopia's Garden, 151.



Culture and Conservation in France and Her Colonies, 1840-1940

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