HISTORIANS, GEOGRAPHERS, AND THE RELATION MAN-ENVIRONMENT IN FRANCE: FROM VIDAL DE LA BLACHE TO THE INTERDISCIPLINARY PROGRAMMES OF THE LAST OF 19TH XX

Abstract

This article explores the way French historians and geographers dealt with environment during the 20th century. A non-determinist vision of the environment (French scholars use at that time the word milieu) appears at the beginning of the century with the geographer Vidal de la Blache and his disciples, not least Bernard Brunhes,the first who talks of a “destructive occupation of nature”. Between the two world wars, historians of the Annals School Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch or the geographer-historian Roger Dion and others publish books who grant a large place to environment and seem, today, pioneering. After WWII, the second generation of Annals, on the other hand, if they grant a large space to the milieu, see it like something fixed, immobile. In Braudel’s work, nature has to be tamed, improved, “be drawn into modernity”. Nonsensical colonial interventions in Maghreb are not questioned. IN the same generation, Le Roy Ladurie has a more critical view, and launches a climate history — “without man” in a first time. Pleading for the writing of an environmental history, he rapidly turns, however, towards other fields of research and has no immediate disciples. It is not until 1975 that a geographer, Georges Bertrand, publishes in the Histoire de la France rurale (History of rural France) a noticeable chapter in which he pleads for the integration of ecology in history and for a dynamic vision of the relationship between man and its environment, as opposed to the traditional historical “tableau” (picture). The end of the 20th century see the development of several interdisciplinary fruitful research programmes, but few historians take part in them. It is not until the first decade of the 21th century that environmental history blooms in France.