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

This study examines how environmental consciousness in France develops from 1789 to the end of the entre-deux-guerres. Focusing on sanitation, deforestation, flooding, devastation in Algeria, and greening of urban space, Caroline Ford offers a prismatic history based on sensory and material data. She begins with Colbert’s ‘Ordonnance sur le fait des eaux et forêts’ of 1669 and ends in 1937 on Louis Mangin’s inauguration of réserves naturelles intégrales, areas proscribing human intervention that Mangin set aside for environmental reform. Three analytical models prevail: sensory history (for example, Alain Corbin’s Le Miasme et la jonquille (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1982)), which recovers how individuals experienced their milieus, is contrasted with that of ‘material reality’ (for example, Andrée Corvol’s Les Sources de l’histoire de l’environnement: le xix ^e siècle (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999)), followed by documentary history (including records from the École des ponts et chaussées, the Service des eaux et forêts, and the Alpine and Touring Clubs). Anxiety about the environment could not be dissociated from nostalgia, ‘a longing for an imagined wilderness’ (p. 7) free of human presence. In the nineteenth century the French reacted to environmental concerns along two axes. Preservationists sought to protect sites and monuments for reasons of historical worth; conservationists argued for utilitarian or managerial means to sustain the environment. There resulted a ‘bifurcated and dialectical vision of the relation among landscape, culture, people, [and] nature’ (p. 15), whose consequences were felt diversely. During the Ancien Régime, ‘technocrats’ attended to forests and waterways before ‘hygienists’ sought to make France aware of the effects of urban expansion and industrialization. With the growth of railways an urban bourgeoisie advocated legislation protecting landscapes deemed vital to ideas of French identity. Soon after, scientists and naturalists affiliated with the Musée d’histoire naturelle alerted the citizenry to degradations in Algeria. Haussmannization sought to bring air, light, and greenery to urban milieus. Despite (and because of) the First World War the first third of the twentieth century witnessed the origins of environmental consciousness we now know. Ford draws attention to seven phases shaping French environmental consciousness. François-Antonin Rauch, trained prior to 1789 at the École des ponts et chaussées, witnessed how the Revolution depleted forests formerly protected under Colbert’s 1669 ordinance. After 1798, rampant deforestation gave rise to a forest service programming reforestation of mountainous regions, while flooding—especially in 1856 and 1910—inspired fluvial reform. In 1909 and 1923, two international congresses for the protection of nature led to the creation of natural reserves and national parks. By contrast, in Algeria, without regard for indigenous populations, settlers aimed at recovering lost landscapes of Roman times for which they felt themselves rightful inheritors. Haussmann’s legacy of urban reform led to policies advocating aerated ‘garden cities’ informing environmental consciousness here and now. Ford argues that for good dialectical reason environmental consciousness is conflicted and that in France its roots are deep. Its writing elegant and clear, this book informs and compels on every page.