Forests and Peasant Politics in Modern France. By Tamara L. Whited. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2000. Pp. xii, 274.

Extract

Tamara Whited's carefully researched study of the conflicts over reforestation and changing land use in the alpine départments of Savoie and the Ariège represents a welcome addition to a growing, but still relatively undeveloped, literature on the history of the environment in modern France. While much of the work focusing on forests has tended to trace the evolution of state management practices, Whited examines local, grassroots responses to government policy, and the political, social, and ecological assumptions that were imbedded in struggles between the state and the French peasantry. Whited pays subtle attention to the ambiguities and paradoxes inherent in responses to environmental change at both the national and local levels. She shows, for example, that antagonisms between peasants and state officials were not always immutable. Peasants sometimes adopted the state's language to press their claims, and forest officials sometimes repudiated aspects of state policy. The breadth of this study—which spans a period from the seventeenth to the mid-twentieth centuries—reveals, in a larger sense, the changing and often conflicting ways in which the natural world was used, managed, and imagined in a specific historical context.