Natural Interests: The Contest over Environment in Modern France by Caroline Ford (review)

Documenting the richness and variety of environmental ideas and initiatives in modern France, Natural Interests aims to restore pride of place to the formative era from the French Revolution to World War II. Although Ford thankfully does not seek the absolute origins of environmental ideas, her book amply demonstrates “the emergence of an environmental consciousness” in the period under review (193). Her book showcases and interprets a range of environmental thought within metropolitan France, the role of France’s colonies as important terrains of environmental experimentation, and the multiplicity of political persuasions among those who articulated environmental ideas, an important point in situating the larger cultural context of environmentalism.

The scope of this monograph extends to the following topics—concern for the protection and expansion of France’s forest cover, largely revealed through the writings of François-Antoine Rauch and Rougier de La Bergerie; the genesis of preservationism in France, its aesthetic ethos, and its framing as “heritage”; France’s leading role in international nature protection, with an emphasis on the preservation of particular landscapes in the French colonies and the specifically French idea of the réserve naturelle intégrale, a protected area designated for purposes of scientific research; the drive to reforest Algeria, undertaken in the interests of settler colonialism; and the “greening” of Paris, at best a relative achievement, centering on the visionary plans of architect Eugène Hénard, as well as the implementation of the English garden-city ideal as the cité-jardin in the suburbs of Paris.

Ford draws mostly from the cultural and institutional strands of environmental history. She also explores a variety of scientific debates that took place during the decades treated, mostly pertaining to forests and their relationships to flooding, climate, and agricultural productivity. Scientific data itself receives little treatment, an exception being her analysis of the extraordinary number and intensity of floods in nineteenth-century France. Her protagonists are largely social elites—the scientists, engineers, cultural figures, and governing officials who crafted treatises, proposals, and laws. Although Ford gives attention to the roles played by a broader public, or civil society, in forging and communicating environmental ideas, full evidence comes forth only in Chapter 3, “The Torrents of the Nineteenth Century,” which successfully demonstrates the place of floods in the imaginaire of nineteenth-century France. Anxieties about floods, not to mention the basic desire to document them, emerged through painting, photography, popular imagery, and literature.

In her zeal to document the importance of her chosen era and the leading international role of France, Ford at times succumbs to labored lists of organizations and laws.

The book’s strengths, however, outweigh its weaknesses: It delineates vigorous debates and initiatives undertaken by individuals largely forgotten by all but a handful of specialists, and it issues a needed corrective to the typical emphasis placed on the post–World War II incarnation of environmentalism.