Revolution and Environment in Southern France, 1780-1830: Peasants, Lords, and Murder in the Corbieres (review)

Revolution and Environment in Southern France: Peasants, Lords, and Murder in the Corbières, 1780-1830. By Peter McPhee (New York, Oxford University Press, 1999) 272 pp. $75.00

Few regions of France remain to be dissected by historians of the Revolution, but McPhee has found one--the Corbières. This area's "rough hillsides," or garrigues of scrub and green-oaks, set it apart from the rest of the department of Aude. Its relatively nonviolent politics also contrasted with the uneasy situation in the rest of revolutionary Midi. McPhee aims for a comprehensive history of this isolated region during the Revolution, and, in so doing, delves into territory little explored in another sense--the social and environmental history of the "long French Revolution" up to 1830.

The Corbières emerges as an oasis of pragmatism and consensus within the context of debates about radical church reform, new taxes, conscription, and requisitioning--issues that rocked other parts of France. Terror and White Terror left the Corbières virtually untouched. Analysis of the political values and skills of departmental administrators--particularly, Jean-Baptiste Ciceron, former seigneurial judge turned agent of the Revolution as first procureur-syndic of the district of Lagrasse--proves the crucial role, but also the limitations, of local leadership. There was a revolutionary drama in the Corbières that largely escaped political management, the peasantry's unremitting attack on the seigneurial system. McPhee's focus is the "inextricable link between anti-seigneurialism and the desire for a cultivable plot," the latter particularly acute in the Corbières due to an extremely unequal property-holding structure and the early death throes of the textile and sheep industries after 1783 (133). With pastoralism in decline, peasants rushed to clear land, encouraged by the absence of seigneurial justice and the perceived liquidation of the seigneurial system. Conflict between remaining pastoralists and small-scale clearers lay within a larger struggle between peasant communities and former seigneurs over ownership of the garrigues.

The author's attention to the environmental dimensions of, and poignant debates about, land use make this a unique study. Accelerated clearing resulted in erosion, siltation, and flooding, and these connections informed a nascent conservative discourse that equated social and environmental excesses. McPhee demonstrates, however, that the era of clearing was well underway by the onset of the Revolution; Louis XV had also rewarded land clearance by his decrees of 1766 and 1770. The Revolution removed significant barriers to, without providing the cause of, land clearance in this ecologically sensitive region.

Uncovering this chronology of land clearance leads McPhee to show that Gauthier's thesis concerning the "peasant route" to capitalism holds for the Corbières, especially the eastern lowlands. ¹ Less intent on retaining the garrigues for common use, clearers instead wrested tiny units of private property out of them, and many began to plant vineyards in the early 1790s. These economic and ecological shifts rendered the "rough hillsides" valuable as never before, and they go far to explain the passions culminating in the double murder and mutilation in 1830 of former seigneur Auguste Latreille and his son Gonzague, two obdurate noblemen determined to win back "their" garrigues. McPhee argues convincingly that the murders were political acts marking the end of an era; in the new, still shaky, peasant economy of the Corbières, a revolutionary victory was defended literally unto death. Combining social, political, and environmental analysis with a final compelling tale, this book advances our understanding of the rural revolution in France on several fronts.

Tamara L. Whited
Indiana University of Pennsylvania

Note

1. Florence Gauthier, La Voie paysanne dans la Revolution française: l'exemple picard (Paris, 1977).

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