The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960-2000 (review)

Michael Bess acquits himself brilliantly of a tempting but risky task—making sense of popular wisdom—in this case, the belief that France is "less green" than other nations. He coins the epithet "light-green" to more accurately reflect how environmental concerns eventually merged with chronic doubts about modernization to temper half a century of rapid economic growth driven by imperatives of national independence. In the process, he exposes the analytical power of the recognition of all "entities in our world as an infinitely variegated continuum of natural-cultural hybrids" (p. 270), rejecting a rigid distinction between the natural and the social. Modern historians will welcome the new light that an environmental approach sheds upon familiar territory and the conceptual tools offered to assess an on-going transformation of modern societies.

Bess first re-visits the post-war decades of economic expansion that radically transformed France. He reaches back to the traumas of defeats, demographic decline, and other dark landmarks of modern French history to explain the public's faith in a succession of "grands projets"—from the Concorde to a massive investment in nuclear energy, all shaped by the dirigiste hand of a state that remained gaulliste well after the general's retirement. Similarly, he digs deep into French ambivalence towards modernity to justify a surprising embrace of environmental ideas, once the 1960s had opened up the political arena. A potent attachment to an agrarian past only partly shaken by industrialization and latent concerns about Parisian hypertrophy facilitated a reassessment of the costs and benefits of the productivist agenda. This amounts to a convincing sketch, even if social tensions are perhaps given less attention than they deserve. Although aware that none of these mutations went uncontested, Bess cannot fully avoid giving an overly consensual image of several decades marked by social strife.

The author then turns to the history of the environmental movement. His fine "working definitions" of key terms are naturally applicable beyond France, just as the environmental movement grew in a broad Atlantic context. However, more uniquely French factors take precedence after the 1960s, particularly after the 1971 creation of the first Ministère de la protection de la nature et de l'environnement. This section goes beyond a survey of the changing legal or administrative context within which environmental battle were fought. The key personalities of the environmental camp and their electoral fortunes are linked to the fundamental divisions of the movement. If the temptation of "direct action" quickly collided with the might of the state at the gates of the Malville nuclear plant, the French Greens still had to work out classic tensions between their pragmatic or doctrinaire wings, as well as intrinsic strains between a nature-centered agenda and one giving primacy to social issues. Soon enough, the possibility of a political alliance with the Socialists made such questions more urgent. In a few central pages worthy of a longer development, Bess argues that the most vital dimension of these formative decades was the consolidation of the "most unabashedly integrative conceptions of the human relationship with nature" (p. 132). French environmentalists remained attached to a humanist environmentalism, squarely within the camp of modernity and eager to accept the benefits of science. They remained free of the authoritarian tinges associated with more radical ecologists, even if they quickly recognized the virtues of state initiatives and at times echoed some of Vichy's nostalgic calls. For these choices, at the heart of the advances and compromises that made the light-green society, Bess credits the very humanized nature of France's landscape, a Latin culture more familiar with an urban and rural heritage than any myth of primeval forest, and a Cartesian tradition of detached reasoning. The mention of a fourth root, France's Catholic history, in a footnote may perhaps be taken as an illustration of the quick treatment given to these fundamental matters. Even if the...