Forests and Peasant Politics in Modern France

Forests and Peasant Politics in Modern France

by Tamara L. Whited
Forests and Peasant Politics in Modern France
Forests and Peasant Politics in Modern France

Forests and Peasant Politics in Modern France

by Tamara L. Whited

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Overview

In the Golden Age of Spanish Theater, an age of highly dramatized coronations and regal spectacles, Alban Forcione has discovered a surprising but persistent preoccupation with the disrobing of the king. In both the celebrations of majesty and the enthrallment with its unveiling, he finds the chilling recesses in which a culture struggled to reconcile the public and the private, society and the individual, the monarch and the man. In brilliantly reinterpreting two of Lope de Vega's plays, long regarded as conventional royalist propaganda, Forcione places his texts in the context of political and institutional history, philosophy, theology, and art history. In so doing he shows how Spanish theater anticipated the decisive changes in human consciousness that characterized the ascendance of the absolutist state and its threat to the cultivation of individuality, authenticity, and humanity.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780300127614
Publisher: Yale University Press
Publication date: 01/01/2000
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

Tamara L. Whited is assistant professor of history at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

Read an Excerpt

Forests and Peasant Politics in Modern France


By Tamara L. Whited

Yale University Press

Copyright © 2000 Yale University
All right reserved.

ISBN: 0-300-08227-4


Chapter One

Forests, the State, and Alpine Communes: Authority and Conflict, 1669-1860

Our oaks no longer proffer oracles, and we no longer ask of them the sacred mistletoe; we must replace this cult by care; and whatever advantage one may previously have found in the respect that one had for forests, one can expect even more success from vigilance and economy. -M. Le Roy

FROM POLICING TO PROPERTY

From the late eighteenth century through the first half of the nineteenth, the status of forests in France changed dramatically. Nowhere was the change more apparent than in alpine regions; no longer shunning the barely accessible backwaters with their threatening inhabitants, foresters began to think they could take the alpine forests in hand by formulating technical problems and setting out to solve them. Developments in law, administration, and scientific forestry all contributed to this impetus. The experience of revolution strengthened foresters' resolve and reaffirmed their assumptions about alpine populations. Conversely, peasants' experiences of revolution made them wary of state models. In tracing the background of foresters' schemes of alpine transformation, this chapter will discuss Ariege more than Savoie, the latter having been reincorporated into France only in 1860. It will focus most of all on the state: in the pursuit of longue-duree history, it is hard to find a more appropriate state structure than the Eaux et Forets. A reasonable starting point is Louis XIV's Forest Ordinance of 1669, a harbinger of later change.

The ordinance itself had many precedents-eighteen recorded edicts pertaining to forests since 1215. Philippe-Auguste instituted the special jurisdiction of Eaux et Forets in 1219; by 1364, a general staff of maitres et enqueteurs assumed the authority that local bailiffs had enjoyed over royal forests. In the early sixteenth century Francis I issued many regulations pertaining to the conservation of royal, ecclesiastical, and even private forests; in 1537, for example, he prohibited sales of high forest without prior approval of a parlement. By Louis XIV's reign, four and a half centuries of sporadic attempts to decree the uses of the forest had left a voluminous, unwieldy record that stood in need of rationalization. In a standard account, the 1669 ordinance achieved this immense juridical task; it also linked jurisdiction with administration, thereby serving as a key model for the Forest Code of 1827.

Michel Deveze has called the edict, prepared under Colbert in the course of eight years, "essentially a police ordinance," and this is correct insofar as "police" is understood broadly as a claim to jurisdiction, which in the case of forests refers to the control of specific territories. The ordinance presented panoramic claims: forests belonging to the monarchy, the church, communities, parishes, and individuals fell under its purview, as did navigable rivers and the practices of hunting and fishing anywhere in the realm. Both the civil and the criminal aspects of jurisdiction lay in the hands of the maitrises, whose officers carried both judicial and administrative authority. The fourth part of the ordinance, relating to "police and conservation of forests, waters, and rivers," best reveals the document's judicial scope: among other things, it prohibited the sale of royal forests and banished wood-dependent industries such as tanning and shoe- and charcoal-making from all forests. Other parts of the ordinance were prescriptive, detailing the appropriate ways to conduct surveys, cuts, and auctions of wood. Some of the better-known clauses established the number of mature seed-bearing trees (baliveaux) that would be left to stand after a cut, a number that differed according to property regime; others sanctioned the traditional method of exploiting deciduous forests known as tire-et-aire-the division of a forest into a certain number of areas, cut annually and consecutively, a method based on the time needed for a forest's regeneration.

Inevitably, questions concerning who could do what in the forests and what could be taken out of them implicated the status of use rights. In the two major categories of forest rights, pasturing and wood-gathering, the ordinance again made sweeping claims. It confirmed the principle of refusing new use rights in the royal forests (established in the thirteenth century) and suppressed existing rights to firewood in return for indemnities-given only if possession of such rights could be proved to have existed since at least 1560. Regarding forests belonging to communities and parishes, the ordinance allowed partition between a seigneur and a community if the latter possessed the forest by virtue of the seigneur's gratuitous concession; this mechanism, called tiercement (also triage; one-third to the seigneur, two-thirds to the community) foreshadowed cantonnement, the widely practiced nineteenth-century method of clearly demarcating property bereft of use rights. Finally, Colbert's redactors took the bold step of forbidding the pasturing of sheep and goats in all forests, and pasturing of cattle and pigs was to be tightly regulated.

The Ordinance of 1669 far overstepped the limits of the possible. In defining a global jurisdiction over French forests, it had neglected the monarchy's escalating needs for revenue as well as the entrenchment of local custom. For example, the plan to reimburse holders of newly banned use rights foundered on the treasury's financial straits at the end of Louis XIV's reign; throughout the eighteenth century the monarchy even continued to sell its forests in order to raise money, despite the emphatic prohibition of royal alienations in Colbert's ordinance. Special commissioners, hired to verify titles to use rights, effectively secured the rights of those who managed to get their names on the proper lists. Most famously, the forester Louis de Froidour, who carried the grand title of Commissaire General Reformateur for the grande maitrise of Toulouse, did not enforce the ordinance in the Pyrenees following his observation that severe penury necessitated use rights in the mountains. Until 1684, Froidour issued reforms that maintained the use rights of Pyrenean communities; confirmed by the Conseil d'Etat, the derogations applied to both seigneurial and royal forests.

Froidour had also noted the blurred distinctions between use rights and property in the Pyrenees: inhabitants seemed to enjoy rights to the forest "as masters," an observation based as much on the confusion inherent in written titles as on the practices of the people themselves. Beyond its failure to establish the state's jurisdiction in the mountains, the Ordinance of 1669 did not effectively substitute a single concept of jurisdiction for these overlapping meanings. After more than a century of intense pressures on the forests paralleled by growing scientific interest in them, Revolutionary legislators again confronted the problem of communities' jurisdiction and its merely theoretical basis in property. But first came reform at the top.

By the end of 1790, the Constituent Assembly (1789-91) had terminated the criminal jurisdiction of the Eaux et Forets, abolishing the maitrises and assigning the prosecution of forest crimes to normal district courts. The assembly toyed with the idea of local control over all forests but in the context of vast new acquisitions of forested lands: the nationalization of ecclesiastical forests in 1790 added close to 800,000 hectares to the state's domain. In 1793 the National Convention (1792-95) confiscated an additional 640,000 hectares of forest from emigres. Two crucial laws of 1790 had already restricted the alienation of state forests. Although somewhat loosened under the Directory (1795-99), and decried throughout the Revolution by would-be purchasers, the laws placed state forests in a separate category from other nationalized property, effectively preventing their privatization. As early as 1791, the assembly dropped the notion of local management by formally integrating forests confiscated from the church into the newly defined realm of the state's regime forestier. The Conservation Generale des Forets also came into being; though short-lived, it served as the model for the forest service of the nineteenth century. Far from constituting a break with the Colbertian system, the reforms of the Revolution created an enlarged state domain under even firmer jurisdiction.

Still, the state did not own all public forests, for communes had gained recognition of their property rights. They had won significant protections for collective rights in the Rural Code of 1792 and recognition of property by the law of 28 August-14 September 1792. This measure gave legal favor to communes rather than seigneurs in questions of ownership of common lands, adopting as national principle the legal tradition of southern France-nul seigneur sans titre, no lord without title. The victory for communes came in the wake of intense debates over the origins of communal property: one theory posited the feudal origins of use rights, allegedly granted by the nobility in the interests of keeping land productive and retaining labor; another put forth the idea of "native property," a communal patrimony that had preceded and been degraded by use rights. What is most clear from these debates is that national legislators were moving toward rigid distinctions between use rights and property rights, a distinction alien to the people of alpine France.

In the process of revolution, however, communes appropriated vast tracts of land, in particular state forests, rationalizing these acquisitions through the existence of use rights. Though the movement paralleled the many individual appropriations that were part of the great revolutionary property shuffle, the state began to retaliate under Bonaparte in Year Nine, winning back forested lands in countless legal operations. In Ariege and Haute-Garonne alone, the state stripped communes of 50,862 hectares of forest, cementing a frustration in many districts that would be recalled in the nineteenth century. Communal forests, that is, those recognized by the state, did largely remain intact, for they had been exempt from the decree of 10 June 1793 that allowed partition of the commons at the request of one-third of a commune's inhabitants. In any case, partitioning the commons, rarely hailed with enthusiasm outside the Paris basin and the eastern plains, was especially ill-viewed in alpine areas dependent on extensive grazing lands.

The Revolution changed the status of forests in another important way besides legal reforms of property codes. Leaving thick traces in popular and official memory, the Revolution bequeathed an image of "devastation" to the nineteenth century: peasants had ravaged the forests as they had chateaux, for state control of forests had long symbolized Old Regime authority in general. The highly evocative term devastation appeared in many official reports from the period as a code word for several different activities. The most common forest crime of the Revolution was stealing wood, referred to as "pillage," an act hardly unknown in rural France but rendered thoroughly banal by the events of 1789 and after. Second, peasants took to pasturing their sheep in the younger stands of forest officially off limits to them. But most worrisome to authorities was the extension of defrichement, clearing the forest for agricultural purposes, much of which took place on fragile mountain slopes. These clearings often followed the usurpation of property, and they had been effectively decriminalized by a reform of September 1791 that legalized the clearing of privately owned woods.

Devastation was limited largely to the Midi and to the years 1789-90, the winters of 1794 and 1795, and the end of the Directory-times of acute political tension and subsistence pressures. But many contemporaries did not know of or did not heed these specificities in time and place, and devastation became coequal with Revolution in the administrative analysis of rural, especially alpine, France. What is more, the legacy of "devastation" had far-reaching consequences for nineteenth-century forestry. In the conservative Administration des Forets of the mid-nineteenth century, reforestation found its historical justification in deforestation, whose origins foresters attributed time and again to the Revolution, occasionally including the last few decades of the Old Regime. It is one thing to evoke the great clearings of the late Middle Ages, which Marc Bloch established as the high years of forest clearance in France, or to emphasize the accelerating degradation of forests during the whole eighteenth century, constantly at the mercy of an expanding royal navy, flagrant sales of royal forests, growing cities built of wood, and famines and other population pressures. But this longue-duree history of the forest has become conventional only in the twentieth century; many foresters and politicians in the nineteenth took a markedly short-term view, one fraught with consequences for forests and peasants alike.

The Revolution was thus two-sided in its effects on the forest. A dark legacy of destruction with impunity paralleled an enlightened legacy of privileging property and enacting reform. In that respect, the Revolution accomplished what the Ordinance of 1669 had stood for in theory-jurisdictional clarity. Now state, communal, and private property would structure the uses of the forest Yet in spite of its Old Regime taint, in spite of the abolition of the maitrises and the practical work of "pillagers," the 1669 document was never abrogated. It remained the basis of forest law and the point of departure for its reform. The postrevolutionary imperative lay in correcting and filling gaps in Louis XIV's edict from the new, seemingly secure basis of property.

GERMAN SILVICULTURE

The gaps were actually more akin to a vacuum of authority; private property did not, in itself, compensate for the power invested in the Eaux et Forets before the Revolution. Instead, the state's foresters began to elaborate a new system of referents for authority based on technical knowledge. Silviculture and amenagement had acquired sufficient prestige during the Revolution to provide those referents. Amenagement is quite close in meaning to "forest management," an aspect of forestry concerned with organizing a forest for a specific purpose, taking into consideration economic and financial factors. The defined purpose of a forest-firewood, lumber, or soil protection-helps determine the location, extent, and periodization of cuts. In American forestry, the two broad types of forest management are even-aged and uneven-aged, the creation, as the terms suggest, of large stands of homogeneously or heterogeneously aged trees.

Continues...


Excerpted from Forests and Peasant Politics in Modern France by Tamara L. Whited Copyright © 2000 by Yale University. Excerpted by permission.
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