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

“Too much local history,” wrote the historian Marc Bloch more than a half century ago, “is useless for general history, that is, for the only history that matters, when all is said and done.” ¹ Bloch’s judgement is perhaps no less valid today: in an age of excessive academic specialization and crisis in scholarly publishing of what use is yet another scholarly and deeply-rearched monograph in English on rural life in France across the revolutionary divide? In this case, the answer is not quite clear. Peter McPhee has chosen a territory he knows well, an isolated and arid region in southern Languedoc, the Corbières, part of the Aude département. There, peasants fought a protracted battle with their seigneurs and, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, their former seigneurs over control of the rough, sparsely wooded hillsides (garrigues). He has written a local history based on extensive research in departmental and municipal archives, one that relies on and generously acknowledges the foundational work of local historians of the region. The detail is impressive: McPhee informs us about the average weight and height of the tiny sheep of the Corbières and seems to account for every seigneurial piece of land and rights owned by the abbot of Lagrasse. Along the way, he returns to central figures, such as the “highly-intelligent, irascible, and pro-revolutionary figure” Jean-Baptiste Ciceron, who had been the abbey of Lagrasse’s main legal officer before 1789, and who became the major public figure administering the area during the revolutionary decades. Indeed, like the poorer peasants engaged in massive land-clearance that are the heroes of his work, McPhee is something of a défricheur himself—the term Bloch himself used to describe local historians whose work is so necessary to “general history.” But what general lessons can be drawn from this book?

McPhee’s local history certainly has implications for broader historiographic concerns of French historians. For example, the book devotes a central chapter to the “battle over the rural environment” during the French Revolution, and the author inserts his story of land-clearing into wider debates about deforestation and peasant abuses. At times, it is not always clear how this “new history” of the environment differs from older historiographic concerns of French social geographers and their detailed studies of changing landholding patterns: the engagement with environmental studies is somewhat limited. In any case, McPhee lays the blame of environmental degradation squarely on the shoulders of the monarchy, that had encouraged such massive clearing in its legislation of 1776 and 1770, and on noble and bourgeois owners of the forges and other charcoal-based industries that denuded the garrigues of wood. Of more general interest, perhaps, is his account of the nascent viticulture of the poorer peasants on the cleared hillsides. McPhee gives a detailed account of how, in the decades after the Revolution, the peasants became small commercial producers of wine whose activities transformed the rural economy and led the way toward capitalism. Here the author connects the Corbières to a larger story of the “peasant road” through the French Revolution. Critiquing Peter Jones (largely inspired by Georges Lefevre) who made much of the “anti-capitalism” of the peasantry, McPhee makes a general argument about the peasant transition to capitalism, from a subsistence economy, based on stock- raising and agriculture, to commercial viticulture.

These days, a local history must be comparative: it has to consistently identify the singularities and convergences with other local histories, both proximate and distant, within France and beyond. It has to connect local events to national and international contexts (the Corbières, after all, is virtually a border region with Spain). Moreover, since the success of “micro-history,” local history should at least consider the methodological advantages and costs of “thinking small,” and of “experimenting with scale...