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CRAFTING THE ANTHROPOCENE: ENVIRONMENTAL ANXIETIES AND CLIMATE

REALITIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE

Andrea Elizabeth Duffy

Colorado State University

Email: [email protected]

ABSTRACT

Although ‘Anthropocene’ is a relatively new term, the idea of anthropogenic environmental

change has a long, rich, and underappreciated history. This study traces the development of a

narrative of human-caused climate change in southern France in the first half of the

nineteenth century that mirrored today’s rhetoric of the Anthropocene, and it exposes the

interplay of social and environmental forces in the establishment of this narrative. Drawing

on natural archives and instrumental data as well as traditional archival sources and

contrasting these indices with literature on Alpine flooding from the period, it maps French

intellectual environmental perceptions against the realities of climate and weather in early

nineteenth-century Provence. In this context, concerns about humans’ influence on the

climate stemmed less from actual climate change than from major social transformations,

which made inhabitants of Provence increasingly aware of and susceptible to environmental

forces, and flooding in particular. Through this case study, the paper exposes the importance

of recognizing and accounting for human perceptions in charting environmental change. It

also contributes to environmental history by identifying late Little Ice Age conditions in

Mediterranean France, and it reaffirms the value of an interdisciplinary, integrative approach

to the study of climate change.

KEYWORDS

Climate, Little Ice Age, France, Mediterranean, Floods, Anthropocene

Introduction


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In late October of 1840, the residents of France’s Rhône valley eyed the roiling river

with growing apprehension. Communities in Provence and the Basses-Alpes had been pelted

for over two weeks by heavy rains that showed no sign of stopping. By October 27, the

riverbed could no longer contain the swell, and water began to overflow onto surrounding

banks. Over the next few days, it destroyed villages, drowned fields, and swept away

livestock. The water rose to six feet above street level in downtown Lyon, where the Rhône

River meets the Saône.1 The damage was even greater downstream. Floodwaters submerged

nine-tenths of the city of Avignon and buried the Crau, a wide plain east of Arles hosting

some of Provence’s best agricultural land, in over eight feet of water.2 One witness reported

that ‘only the tops of trees are visible.’3 This single event dumped 115 mm of rain on the

lower Rhône valley in just three days, over twice the amount that region normally received in

the entire month of November.4 The 1840 flood was certainly memorable, but it was not

unique. By one count, the Rhône watershed suffered twenty-six major floods from 1800 to

1856.5 Such dramatic incidents, as well as their equally dramatic human responses, occurred

in the context of major social and environmental developments. In the first half of the

nineteenth century, Mediterranean France was experiencing the tail end of the Little Ice Age,

but this overall period of global cooling was punctuated by periodic extreme weather,

including droughts, frosts, and floods. At the same time, the French countryside was

undergoing a dynamic social upheaval. This transformation involved political turmoil,

urbanization and population growth, privatization, and the commercialization of agriculture.

These social changes intensified environmental exploitation and altered views of the

environment among officials, scientists, and members of the intellectual elite. This paper

maps the evolution of French elite environmental perceptions in the early nineteenth century

against the backdrop of such social and environmental changes. It first traces climate and

weather patterns in Mediterranean France from 1800-1860. Next, it examines the role of

regional social dynamics in shifting environmental perspectives. The final section uses

1 Auguste Baron, Histoire des inondations du Rhône et de la Saône en l’année 1840, Ouvrage composé sur les rapports officiels, procès-verbaux et les actes administratifs, précédé de l’historique des anciennes inondations (Lyon: Imprimerie Dumoulin, 1841), vii, 85, 171. 2 ‘Notice des désastres survenues au hameau du Pontet durant l'inondation de 1840’ (Avignon: Imprimerie Bonnet fils, 1840), cited in HISTRHÔNE, https://histrhone.cerege.fr/ (accessed 1 October 2019). 3 Archives départmentales des Bouches-du-Rhône 7 M 135, Second File (Tarascon, 2 novembre 1840). 4 This ratio is based on the current average monthly precipitation for Marseille in November, which is 50.6 mm. See World Meteorological Association, World Weather Information Service, accessed 1 October 2019, http://worldweather.wmo.int/en/city.html?cityId=1055. 5 Rémi Venture, ‘Arles et le Rhône,’ Le Rhône à son delta 41-42 (1993), 3.


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nineteenth-century scientific literature on flooding in Provence to explore the development

and expression of new environmental narratives. My investigation shows that French elites’

anxieties about the environment – and the climate in particular – fueled and were fueled by

the social and environmental transformation of the Mediterranean countryside. Specifically,

the social and environmental milieu of the mid-nineteenth century promoted a narrative of

negative, human-caused climate change that mirrors today’s rhetoric of the Anthropocene. In

contrast to contemporary environmental concerns, however, nineteenth-century French

environmental anxieties did not reflect climate realities.

We live on a planet that is rapidly growing hotter and less hospitable, largely due to

our own unsustainable environmental exploitation. Climate change is a necessarily hot topic,

as scientists, policy-makers, and activists attempt to raise awareness of this critical issue and

urge us to change course. Contemporary climate change is leaving a mark on history as well.

Concerns about global warming in the present and future have animated interest in past

climate change and human perceptions of the climate, fueling the development of climate

history and historical climatology.6 This issue also has stimulated innovative cross-

disciplinary collaborations and research. In this vein, scientific research on climate change is

generating new tools and resources for climate historians. Likewise, historical perspectives

are increasingly valued for their insight into human perceptions of, adaptation to, and impact

on the climate.

This study contributes to climate scholarship by highlighting the value of a historical

lens for understanding and predicting human responses to climate change. It demonstrates

how paleoclimatology can inform historians’ interpretations of the past, and it presents

history as a critical source of insight for scientists studying the implications of our warming

planet. It draws on paleoclimatological proxy data alongside more traditional, document-

based historiographic methods in order to provide a broader, more comprehensive

representation of the past environment. By focusing on specific weather events as well as

trends over time and by comparing human records with climate reconstructions and other

scientific data, it aims to measure human perceptions against the realities of the

Mediterranean climate. In addition, this study supplements scholarship on the Little Ice Age

(LIA) by elucidating the nature of its retreat. Around the globe, the nineteenth century

6 For a recent review of the development of these fields, see Mark Carey, ‘Climate and History: A Critical Review of Historical Climatology and Climate Change Historiography,’ Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 3.3 (2012): 233–49.


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witnessed the end of the LIA and the arrival of the Anthropocene. Although the climatic

conditions of the early and mid-LIA have been well documented for much of the

Mediterranean zone, scholars have paid relatively little attention to the end of the LIA. My

investigation suggests that this period also involved weather extremes that significantly

impacted Mediterranean societies.

My findings also shed light on the development and nature of human perceptions of

climate change. The role of early nineteenth-century actors in establishing narratives of

anthropogenic climate change remains underappreciated, and most scholarship on the history

of the Anthropocene focuses on later intellectual currents. For instance, the anxieties that

accompanied the nuclear age are relatively well covered, as are key contributions by geology

and climatology.7 But these fields were still in their infancy in the late nineteenth century,

and they initially emphasized largescale, natural processes – rather than human ones. My

investigation builds especially on the works of Mike Hulme, Fabien Locher, Jean-Baptiste

Fressoz, Christophe Bonneuil, and others who have exposed earlier evidence of

‘environmental reflexivity,’ or conceptions of the environmental consequences of human

actions, and have used this reference to inform contemporary discourse on anthropogenic

climate change.8 I also go further in highlighting similarities between these two constructions

as well as their relationship to environmental realities. The flood literature surveyed here

presents a tragic story of human-induced climate change that is intriguingly familiar. It

7 See for example G. Stanhill, ‘The Growth of Climate Change Science: A Scientometric Study,’ Climatic Change 48.2 (February 2001): 515–24; Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung 40.2 (2015), Special Issue: ‘Climate and Beyond, the Production of Knowledge about the Earth as a Signpost of Social Change;’ Spencer R. Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming, Rev. and Expanded ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Robert V. Davis, ‘Inventing The Present: Historical Roots of the Anthropocene,’ Earth Sciences History 30, no. 1 (2011): 72-3; and Philipp Nicolas Lehmann, ‘Changing Climates: Deserts, Desiccation, and the Rise of Climate Engineering 1870-1950,’ Ph.D. Diss. (Harvard University, 2014). 8 Mike Hulme, ‘The Conquering of Climate: Discourses of Fear and Their Dissolution,’ The Geographical Journal 174, no. 1 (2008): 5–16; and Fabien Locher and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, ‘Modernity’s Frail Climate: A Climate History of Environmental Reflexivity,’ Critical Inquiry 38, no. 3 (2012): 579-98; Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us (London: Verso, 2017). Other examples include Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge ; Cambridge University Press, 1995); Ibid., Ecology, Climate and Empire: Colonialism and Global Environmental History, 1400-1940 (Cambridge, UK: White Horse Press, 1997); Jan Golinski, British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, ‘Climate Change and the Retreat of the Atlantic: The Cameralist Context of Pehr Kalm’s Voyage to North America, 1748–51,’ The William and Mary Quarterly 72, no. 1 (2015): 99–126; and Hans Von Storch and Nico Stehr, ‘Anthropogenic Climate Change: A Reason for Concern since the 18th Century and Earlier,’ Geografiska Annaler. Series A, Physical Geography 88, no. 2 (2006): 107–13. ‘Environmental reflexivity’ is Locher and Fressoz’s term.


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provides one example of the ways that European elites heralded the age of the Anthropocene

over 150 years avant le mot.9

The Mediterranean Climate

Part of the challenge of tracing the development of climate-change narratives is that

nineteenth-century observers used terminology differently, and generally less precisely, than

scholars do today. The concepts of climate and weather are often confounded in literature on

flooding in Provence. Such accounts, moreover, rarely identified ‘climate change’ as such,

and they lacked the vocabulary to reference the ‘Little Ice Age’ or the ‘Anthropocene.’ Yet

nineteenth-century descriptions of natural disasters and long-term environmental trends in

Mediterranean France implicitly engage all of these concepts. Because their observations

relate to perceptions of both weather and the climate, it is essential to disentangle these terms,

even if nineteenth-century French scientists and intellectuals generally did not. ‘Weather’

generally refers to the immediate experience of atmospheric conditions, such as temperature,

precipitation, and wind. ‘Climate’ can be understood as average weather; it represents a mean

of atmospheric conditions over a certain period of time, typically several years.10 Identifying

climate change and climate regimes, such as the LIA, requires a particularly long-term

perspective because it involves distinguishing periodic weather anomalies from climate

trends over time.

The terms ‘Little Ice Age’ and ‘Anthropocene’ permeate contemporary discussions of

climate change over the past 700 years. The LIA describes a period from approximately 1500

to 1850 that brought overall colder temperatures, increased glaciation, and variable weather

to most if not all world regions. Across Europe, annual temperatures declined an average of

0.5 degrees Celsius. Glaciers in the Alps expanded, reaching their greatest extent in modern

times in the seventeenth century. The LIA also featured a higher number and concentration of

extreme weather events, including droughts, frosts, and floods, as well as periods of unusual

cold. In many cases, such occurrences proved more disruptive to human societies than long-

9 The term ‘Anthropocene’ gained currency in 2000, following the publication of Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, ‘The ‘Anthropocene,’’ Global Change Newsletter 41 (May 2000): 17–18. 10 The standard range for climate averaging is 30 years, as set by the World Meteorological Organization, though it can vary from months to thousands of years, depending on the context (‘FAQs - Climate.’ World Meteorological Organization, May 27, 2016. https://public.wmo.int/en/about-us/FAQs/faqs-climate).


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term cooling. Drawing on these qualities, some scholars prefer to characterize the LIA as a

cluster of relatively cold climatic intervals rather than a general climate regime.11

In the nineteenth century, the LIA gradually gave way to a global warming trend that

has continued to the present and that scientists ascribe at least in part to human actions. This

era, in which humans have become a major – if not the main – vehicle of environmental

change, has been dubbed the ‘Anthropocene.’ Crutzen and Stoermer, co-authors of the short

article that popularized this term in 2000, trace the onset of the Anthropocene to the latter

part of the eighteenth century, when the rise of industrialization coincided with an increase in

CO2 emissions.12 Like the LIA, however, the Anthropocene concept remains subject to

debate. Despite the terms set by Crutzen and Stoermer, there is no consensus on its

chronology. While many still locate its origins in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth

centuries, there is growing support for associating it exclusively with the nuclear age and

human’s ‘great acceleration’ in population and energy use since the mid-twentieth century.13

Meanwhile, some scholars trace the roots of the Anthropocene as far back as the beginning of

the Holocene. In addition, certain scientists and scholars have questioned the utility of this

term, particularly in view of its broad, vague, and mutable definition.14 Like the

Anthropocene epoch itself, the chronology of the Anthropocene idea – discourse on human-

caused climate change – remains somewhat murky. While few publications prior to the

twentieth century explicitly engaged the notion of ‘climate change,’ earlier scientific

11 For general descriptions of the LIA, see Dagomar Degroot, The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560–1720 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), xvi; John McNeill, ‘Can History Help Us with Global Warming?’ Climatic Cataclysm: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Climate Change, edited by Kurt M. Campbell (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 2008), 27; and Sam White, ‘The Real Little Ice Age,’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History 44, no. 3 (November 23, 2013): 327–52. For the expansion of Alpine glaciers, see Jean M. Grove, Little Ice Ages: Ancient and Modern, 2nd ed., Vol. I (London: Routledge, 2004), 124; Michael Zemp, H.J. Zumbühl, S.U. Nussbaumer, M.H. Masiokas, L.E. Espizua and P. Pitte, ‘Extending Glacier Monitoring into the Little Ice Age and Beyond,’ PAGES News 19, no. 2 (2011): 67-69. For alternate characterizations of the LIA, see John A. Matthews and Keith R. Briffa, ‘The ‘Little Ice Age’: Re-Evaluation of an Evolving Concept,’ Geografiska Annaler. Series A, Physical Geography 87.1 (2005): 17–36; and Morgan Kelly, and Cormac Ó Gráda, ‘The Waning of the Little Ice Age: Climate Change in Early Modern Europe,’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History 44, no. 3 (November 23, 2013): 301–25. 12 Crutzen and Stoermer, 17-18. 13 J.R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014). See also Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill, ‘The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?’ Ambio 36, no. 8 (2007): 614–21. 14 For recent discussions of this concept, see Amelia Moore, ‘The Anthropocene: A Critical Exploration.’ Environment and Society 6 (2015): 1–3; other articles in Environment and Society 6; Robert Emmett and Thomas Lekan, ‘Introduction,’ RCC Perspectives 2 (2016): 7–12; other articles in RCC Perspectives 2: Whose Anthropocene?; and Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses,’ Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197–222.


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literature did exist identifying long-term atmospheric changes and linking them to human

actions. The literature on flooding in Provence presented here provides context for this

discussion by showing that nineteenth-century French scientists, scholars, and engineers

expressed concern about humans’ impact on the climate and sought to address it.

Provence describes a former administrative district in southern France that roughly

aligns with the contemporary administrative region of Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur. Its

capital and largest city is Marseille. Provence is bounded by the Mediterranean Sea in the

south, the Rhône River in the west, and the Italian border in the east. It includes the Southern

Alps to the northeast and the Durance River, which has its source in the Southern Alps and

joins the Rhône in Avignon (see Image 1).

Image 1: Map of Provence (1914).15

In the period 1800-1860, this region was experiencing the final stages of the LIA,

along with other parts of Europe and the world. In Provence, the LIA manifested in lower

average temperatures, overall wetter conditions, as well as an uptick in extreme weather.

15 Karl Baedeker, Southern France Including Corsica; Handbook for Travellers, Sixth Revised Edition (Leipzig, New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1914), presented in Perry-Castañeda Map Collection, University of Texas, Austin (accessed 1 Oct. 2019), http://legacy.lib.utexas.edu/maps/historical/baedeker_s_france_1914/provence_1914.jpg Please confirm this is public domain


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From the mid-fifteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, the Rhône and Durance Rivers froze

over with relative frequency, allowing inhabitants, livestock, and even carriages to pass from

bank to bank. Local records indicate the occurrence of thirteen freezes in the eighteenth

century alone, including three consecutive freezes in the years 1766, 1767, and 1768, as well

as freezes in 1795, 1796, 1798, and 1799 (see Image 2). To the northeast, glaciation on the

Mont Blanc massif, the highest point in the Alps, peaked in the early seventeenth and mid-

eighteenth centuries, and to a lesser extent around 1850, before beginning a general retreat.16

Image 2: Freezing of the Rhône.17

The advance of Alpine glaciers and colder temperatures in Provence often coincided

with high annual precipitation and flooding.18 Increased flood frequency was recorded for the

16 For precipitation patterns of the LIA, see Jürg Luterbacher et al., ‘European Seasonal and Annual Temperature Variability, Trends, and Extremes since 1500,’ Science 303, no. 5663 (2004): 1499–1503; and Jürg Luterbacher et al., ‘A Review of 2000 Years of Paleoclimatic Evidence in the Mediterranean,’ in The Climate of the Mediterranean Region, edited by Piero Lionello, 87–185 (Oxford: Elsevier, 2012), 107. For freezing and flooding events, see HISTRHÔNE, https://histrhone.cerege.fr/ (accessed 1 October 2019). HISTRHÔNE is an online searchable database of recorded events of flooding and freezing of the Rhône River from the fourteenth to twentieth centuries, based on archival data. See also Maurice Jorda and Jean-Christophe Roditis, ‘Les épisodes de gel du Rhône depuis l’an mil: Périodisation, fréquence, interprétation paléoclimatique,’ Méditerranée 78.3 (1993): 21. By contrast, Jorda and Roditis documented only three episodes of freezing during the entire twentieth century (1900-1993), in the years 1929, 1956, and 1963. For changes in glaciation, see Grove, Little Ice Ages, 124. 17 Chart based on data from HISTRHÔNE (accessed 1 Oct. 2019), https://histrhone.cerege.fr/. 18 Mark Macklin and Jamie Woodward, ‘Rivers and Environmental Change,’ in The Physical Geography of the Mediterranean, 344; A. T. Grove and Oliver Rackham, The Nature of Mediterranean Europe: An Ecological History (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2001), 130-131; Pierre Claude Reynard, ‘Explaining an Unstable Landscape: Claiming the Islands of the Early-Modern Rhône,’ Environment and History 19.1 (2013): 41; Fatima Abrantes et al., ‘Paleoclimate Variability in the Mediterranean Region,’ in The Climate of the Mediterranean Region, edited by Piero Lionello, 1–86 (Oxford: Elsevier, 2012), 57; Luterbacher et al., ‘A Review of 2000 Years of Paleoclimatic Evidence in the Mediterranean,’ 110. For flooding of the Durance River


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Durance River in the periods 1550–1610 and 1750–1810. During the periods 1651-1720 and

1751-1860, the community of Arles, a regional center on the banks of the Rhône, was hit by

unusually frequent, intense floods (see Image 3). Major floods heralded the new century in

1795 and 1802. In August of 1806, a monstrous storm rained hail the size of eggs, drowning

riverbeds, fields and pastures, and battering forests, vineyards, and olive trees throughout the

Bouches-du-Rhône department.19 In October of 1841, Arles, while still reeling from the

devastating flood of November 1840 described above, was hit by another major flood.

Following a one-year respite, November 1843 brought another ‘tragic’ flood to the Durance

and Rhône valleys.20 An even more catastrophic event occurred in late spring of 1856.

Communities across Provence received their normal annual rainfall in first few months of

that year. As a result, the Rhône valley was again submerged and the Camargue, a coastal

marshland west of Marseille, transformed into a great lake. This flood, which ravaged much

of eastern and southern France, is often considered the worst of the nineteenth century.21

Frequent flooding along the deltas of the Rhône and Durance persisted into the 1850s, fueled

by wet annual conditions, periodic violent storms, and human practices. These periods of

colder, wetter weather in Provence correspond to major global fluctuations during the LIA,

including the ‘Grindelwald Fluctuation’ (1560-1630), the ‘Maunder Minimum’ (1645-1720),

and the ‘Dalton Minimum’ (1780-1820), which have been associated with low sun spot

activity and, in some cases, volcanic activity.22 When Provence was not inundated by floods,

valley, see X. Guilbert, ‘Les crues de la Durance depuis le XIVème siècle. Fréquence, périodicité et interprétation paléo-climatique,’ Mémoire de maîtrise de Géographie (Université d’Aix-Marseille I, Aix-en-Provence, 1994), 350, cited in Luterbacher et al., ‘A Review of 2000 Years of Paleoclimatic Evidence in the Mediterranean,’ 110. For scholarship on flooding in nineteenth-century France, see Tamara Whited, Forests and Peasant Politics in Modern France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 56-58; Ibid., ‘Extinguishing Disaster in Alpine France: The Fate of Reforestation as Technocratic Debacle,’ GeoJournal 51, no. 3 (2000): 263–70; Corvol 1987, 291; and F. Fesquet, ‘La lutte contre les inondations au XIXème siècle. Aménagement des cours d'eau ou reboisement des montagnes: entre complémentarité et opposition des démarches,’ communication au colloque international: La rivière aménagée entre héritage et modernité: Formes, techniques et mise en oeuvre, Orléans, 15 et 16 octobre 2004, printed in AESTUARIA, cultures et développement durable 7 (2005): 299-314. 19 Archives Départementales des Bouches-du-Rhône (hereafter BDR) 7 M 135: Agricultural Calamities, 1802-1896, First File. 20 L. Duhamel, ‘Les grandes inondations à Avignon’, in Annuaire administratif, historique et statistique de Vaucluse’ (1887), cited in HISTRHÔNE; E. Imbeaux ‘La Durance: régime, crues et inondations,’ in Annales des Ponts et Chaussées, cited in HISTRHÔNE. 21 Caroline Ford, Natural Interests (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 72; Pierre de la Gorce, Histoire du second empire (New York: AMS Press, 1969), II: 40-41, cited in Whited, Forests and Peasant Politics, 58. 22 Dagomar Degroot, ‘Climate Change and Society in the 15th to 18th Centuries,’ Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 9.3 (2018), 2; V. M. Mendoza, B. Mendoza, R. Garduño, and J. Adem, ‘Simulation of the Surface Temperature Anomalies in the Northern Hemisphere during the Last 300 Years of the Little Ice Age Using a Thermodynamic Model,’ Climate Research 43, no. 3 (2010): 263–73. In terms of volcanic activity, the


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it seems to have been parched by drought. Human records as well as proxy data suggest that a

particularly wet period around 1700 was complemented by drier spells in the mid-

seventeenth century, the late eighteenth century, and the middle decades of the early

nineteenth century. In particular, researchers have identified a period of prolonged drought

from 1814 to 1825 for neighboring regions, which likely affected Provence as well.23

Image 3: Flooding of the Rhône.24

The trademarks of the LIA, including colder annual temperatures and extreme

weather, remained manifest in Provence through the mid-nineteenth century. In the second

half of the century, the region generally grew warmer and dryer, and glaciers in the adjacent

Alps and the Pyrenees retreated. There also may have been an overall decline in rainfall and

temperature variability from year to year (See Images 4-6). Yet climatic oscillations and

climate-related natural disasters such as droughts, floods, frosts, famine, fires, and epidemics

continued to plague Provence and other Mediterranean societies through the late nineteenth

century. In many ways, these developments mirrored climate patterns in other parts of Europe

cooling effect of the eruption of the tropical volcano Tambora in 1815 on temperatures in the northern hemisphere has received most scholarly attention. For this and other past atmospheric-scale eruptions, see S. Brewer, S. Alleaume, J. Guiot, and A. Nicault, ‘Historical Droughts in Mediterranean Regions during the Last 500 Years: A Data/Model Approach,’ Climate of the Past 3, no. 2 (2007), 355–66. 23 Brewer et al., 358; Ernesto Tejedor, Martín de Luis, Mariano Barriendos, José María Cuadrat, Jürg Luterbacher, and Miguel Ángel Saz, ‘Rogation Ceremonies: Key to Understand Past Drought Variability in Northeastern Spain since 1650,’ Climate of the Past Discussions (June 18, 2018): 9; Paul Dostal and Katrin Bürger, ‘L’évolution Climatique de La Haute Vallée du Rhin,’ Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine (1954-) 57, no. 3 (2010): 123. Scholars have linked this drought to the eruption of the tropical volcano Tambora, in 1815. See for example Locher and Fressoz, 580. 24 Chart based on data from HISTRHÔNE, https://histrhone.cerege.fr/ (accessed 1 Oct. 2019).


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and the world, and they precipitated the dramatic rise in carbon emissions and global

warming of the twentieth century.25

Image 4: Temperature Variability in Paris, 1800-1850.26

25 Fagan, 50, 202; Jürg Luterbacher et al., ‘European Seasonal and Annual Temperature Variability, Trends, and Extremes since 1500,’ Science 303.5663 (2004): 1499–1503; Le Roy Ladurie 1971, 82-127; Thomas H. Painter et al., ‘End of the Little Ice Age in the Alps Forced by Industrial Black Carbon,’ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 110.38 (2013): 15216–21; and V. M. Mendoza et al., ‘Simulation of the Surface Temperature Anomalies in the Northern Hemisphere during the Last 300 Years of the Little Ice Age Using a Thermodynamic Model,’ Climate Research 43, no. 3 (2010): 263–73. For descriptions of extreme weather in other parts of the world in the late nineteenth century, see Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (Verso: London; New York, 2001). 26 Graph based on data from (accessed 1 Oct. 2019), https://www.echdb.unibe.ch/selection/series/en/. Euro-Climhist Database cites Rousseau, Temp_Paris. This graph is based on descriptive data, instrumental data, and proxy data, as available. It shows the variation in annual average temperatures in Paris, in degrees Celsius, for the period 1800-1850. It indicates a range of 4 degrees Celsius in annual average temperatures (8.7-12.7) during this period. It also suggests a general downward trend in annual average temperatures.


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Image 5: Temperature Variability in Paris, 1850-1900.27

Image 6: Annual Temperature Variation across Europe, 1850-1900.28

27 Graph based on data from Euro-Climhist Database (accessed 1 Oct. 2019), https://www.echdb.unibe.ch/selection/series/en/. Euro-Climhist Database cites Rousseau, Temp_Paris. This graph is based on descriptive data, instrumental data, and proxy data, as available. It shows the variation in annual average temperatures in Paris, in degrees Celsius, for the period 1850-1900. It indicates a range of 2.4 degrees Celsius in annual average temperatures (9.4-11.8) during this period. It also suggests a general upward trend in annual average temperatures. 28 Graph based on data visualization resource ‘European Average Temperatures over Land Areas Relative to the Pre-Industrial Period,’ Data Visualization. European Environment Agency (accessed 1 Oct. 2019), https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/daviz/european-average-air-temperature-anomalies-9. This graph also indicates less temperature variation across Europe in the late nineteenth century.


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Social changes in Southern France, 1800-1860

The atmospheric conditions of Provence in first half of the nineteenth century

furnished a backdrop to various social developments that also impacted the region’s

landscape and French environmental perceptions. One major change was demographic. In

Provence, the onset of the LIA in the sixteenth century had coincided with population

contraction and outmigration. In particular, the endemic flooding it brought to the

Mediterranean region in the mid-sixteenth century created mosquito-ridden swamps that

deterred or drove out many agriculturalists and other sedentary inhabitants due to the threat

of malaria. As a result, transhumant pastoralism dominated the regional economy through the

eighteenth century. In this system, shepherds made use of marshy coastlands, such as the

Crau and the Camargue, in the winter. When these plains became breeding grounds for

mosquitos in the spring, they retreated to the neighboring Alps with their flocks.29

This socio-economic order shifted significantly in the nineteenth century, as

irrigation, the draining of marshlands, and the discovery and increasing use of quinine

mitigated the threat of malaria. The early nineteenth century, moreover, represented a period

of dramatic population growth, industrialization, and urbanization across Europe, and

southern France was no exception. A relatively rural, sparsely populated region at the dawn

of the century, Provence represented for many a region with vast potential for economic

growth. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the population in various parts of Provence

increased by 30 to 50 percent, even as other rural areas of France suffered from

depopulation.30 As population density intensified, environmental phenomena became more

observable and more likely to affect human inhabitants, while new technologies and

communication networks informed a wider audience of their occurrence.

29 Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Peasants of Languedoc (University of Illinois Press, 1976), 242; Faruk Tabak, The Waning of the Mediterranean, 1550-1870: A Geohistorical Approach (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 195-196; Andrea Duffy, Nomad’s Land: Pastoralism and French environmental Policy in the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean World (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2019), 3-32. 30 Charles H. Pouthas, La population française pendant la première moitié du XIXe siècle (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1956), 33; Paul Hohenberg, ‘Migrations et Fluctuations Démographiques Dans La France Rurale, 1836-1901,’ Annales, Histoire, Sciences Sociales 29.2 (1974), 461–97: 463. See also Lucien-Albert Fabre, L’exode montagneux en France (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1909). Peter McPhee has documented a similar trend for southwestern France. See McPhee, Revolution and Environment in Southern France, 1780-1830: Peasants, Lords, and Murder in the Corbières (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 2-4.


14

The political turmoil of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries also left its

mark on environmental perceptions and realities in Provence. Across France, the nineteenth

century opened with the end of a devastating and monumental revolution and the beginning

of the Napoleonic era. Mary Ashburn Miller has demonstrated how leaders of the Terror

recast nature as a necessarily violent process, deeming France ‘revolutionary like nature.’31

Such imagery also promoted a natural order that included humans and that integrated

environmental, social, and political elements. In addition, Revolutionary-era land use and

management greatly taxed French forest resources. Despite some efforts at forestry reform,

the Revolutionary government proved largely unsuccessful in stemming widespread forest

cutting and clearing.32 The environmental impact of such activities was exacerbated by

decades of intense timber exploitation in the series of Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.

As a result, French forests probably reached their nadir in the 1820s, when they declined to

6.3 million hectares, roughly half of their extent in the mid-seventeenth century.33 This

situation led a growing chorus of French scientists, intellectuals, and officials to call for

better forest protection. The passage of a comprehensive national forest code in 1827 quieted

some voices, but it did not quell the sense of environmental anxiety pervading Provence. On

the contrary, environmental concerns mounted steadily in the wake of persistent natural

disasters and extreme weather, which many French elites considered evidence of an upset

natural order and associated with human-caused deforestation.

The Revolution of 1789 also altered the French countryside by recasting land

ownership and property rights. Previously, France’s landed property regime had revolved

around feudalism, and the Catholic Church had been the largest landowner in France. In the

upheaval of the late eighteenth century, feudal rights were abolished, and nobles and clergy

31 Mary Ashburn Miller, A Natural History of Revolution: Violence and Nature in the French Revolutionary Imagination, 1789-1794 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 14. Miller quotes Bertrand Barère, Rapport sure les crimes de l’Angleterre envers le Peuple Français, et sur ses attentats contre la liberté des nations, fait au nom du Comité du Salut Public (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1794), 35-6. 32 McPhee, 121, 123-4, 176; Whited, Forests and Peasant Politics, 25-6. 33 See Kieko Matteson, Forests in Revolutionary France: Conservation, Community, and Conflict 1669-1848 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 282. Matteson cites Louis Bourgenot, ‘L’histoire des forêts feuillues en France,’ Revue Forestière Française no. spécial: Éléments d’histoire forestière (1977): 15; P. Chevallier and M.J. Couailhac, ‘Sauvegarde des forêts de montagne en France au XIXe siècle (l’exemple du Dauphine),’ Paper presented at La Forêt: Actes du 113e congrès national des sociétés savantes (Strasbourg 1988): 333; Jean Gadant, L’atlas des forêts de France (Paris: J.-P. de Monza, 1991), 14-17; and figures cited by le Comte Roy in Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860. Recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des chambres françaises, Deuxième série (1800 à 1860), 127 vols., edited by J. Mavidal and E. Laurent (Paris, 1862-1913), 51: 647 (8 May 1827). Xavier de Planhol locates the nadir of French forests slightly later, in 1840. See Planhol, An historical geography of France, translated by Janet Lloyd (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press; Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1994), 359.


15

fled France. Much of their land was auctioned to private buyers, while other parcels became

communal land.34 Provence was acutely affected by this trend, emerging from the

Revolutionary era’s jumble of property with an excess of private fields and forests and less

than its share of commons.35

At the same time, the system of communal property was subject to increasing

scrutiny. In the mid-eighteenth century, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, had

argued that forests would be better safeguarded if they were owned privately, rather than

communally.36 Others took up his call, and in the late eighteenth century a few Provençal

communities began to experiment with privatization by divvying up communal lands among

inhabitants.37 This point of view gained ground in France following the Revolution of 1789.

Many nineteenth-century observers looked back on the environmental exploitation of the

Revolutionary era as an irresponsible pillaging of the land and suggested that private

ownership would encourage better environmental stewardship.38 Moreover, France’s northern

rival, Great Britain, had methodically eliminated its commons by the early nineteenth century

through parliamentary acts of enclosure, and other European states had begun to follow suit.

Many in France began to link British privatization to its prosperity and industrial success,

associating privatization with progress and modernity. As one mid-nineteenth-century study

explained, ‘Every undivided property is doomed to indifference’ because ‘the collective

being, in its relations with the land, envisages no improvement, responsibility, or future.’39

The national shift toward private land ownership gained speed in the nineteenth

century. In 1802, Napoleon initiated an extensive reform of the traditional Rural Code aimed

to reduce customary rights, which targeted pastoralists’ access to communal land. Two years

34 McPhee, 113, 128-133; Whited, Forests and Peasant Politics, 24-5. 35 Forêts perdues, forêts retrouvées, Série: de mémoire d’archives (Archives départementales des Bouches-du-Rhône, 1997), 20-21. On the eve of the passage of the French Forest Code in 1827, the Bouches-du-Rhône department included only 190 square kilometers of communal forest, compared to over 414 square kilometers of private forest. Much of the latter was owned by a single family, the Albertas (BDR 6 M 25). 36 Ibid., 114-115. 37 John F. Freeman, ‘Forest Conservancy in the Alps of Dauphiné, 1287-1870,’ Forest & Conservation History 38: 4 (1994): 173-174. 38 See for example Jules Michelet, Histoire de France, second edition, vol. 2 (Paris : Librairie Classique de L. Hachette, 1835), 53. 39 Joseph Ferrand, De la propriété communale en France et de sa mise en valeur, étude historique et administrative (Paris: P. Dupont, 1859), 20. The process of enclosure and commercialization of agriculture occurred more slowly in France than in other European contexts such as England and Denmark, but it still significantly altered the landscape and economy of rural France over the course of the nineteenth century. See Peter M. Jones, ‘The Challenge of Land Reform in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century France,’ Past & Present 216 (2012), 107-42: 121.


16

later, he passed the Civil Code, which accorded private landowners an unprecedented amount

of independence by granting them the right to dispose of their landed property as they saw fit.

While the law scratched many initiatives of the French Revolution, including the requirement

that inheritance be divided equally among one’s children, it continued to encourage the

division of land parcels by placing this decision in the hands of landowners and by upholding

the Revolutionary ban on primogeniture.40 Finally, Napoleon encouraged privatization and

the fragmentation of French property through his creation of a new nobility, which involved

gifting generous land grants to his loyal followers. At the same time, aristocratic émigrés,

reassured by the emperor’s overtures and social conservatism, began to return to France to

reclaim their former possessions.41 These disparate members of the new French elite worked

together to reverse the tide of popular exploitation that had taken hold of French territories in

the previous decades, which they uniformly condemned as a destructive free-for-all.

Privatization proceeded even more swiftly during the Restoration, when it was recognized as

a valuable source of profit for starving state coffers. Indeed, from the time of the French

monarchy’s return in 1814 to the establishment of the Third Republic in 1870, France

surrendered over one fourth of its woodlands, approximately 3530 square kilometers, to

private owners.42

The privatization of the French countryside deeply impacted French environmental

perceptions. Indeed, interpretations of and responses to flooding along the Rhône delta

crystalized largely along public-private property divides. Whereas inhabitants typically

understood commons to have been reshaped in the wake of a flood, the owners of private

holdings were more likely to identify their land as having disappeared entirely.43 This latter,

more dramatic perspective gained currency over the course of the nineteenth century in

tandem with the gradual elimination of common lands, favoring the ascendancy of a more

extreme and negative view of floods. More broadly, the wave of privatization in Provence

and throughout France fueled French environmental anxieties by producing its own brand of

rhetoric about human-driven deforestation and other anthropogenic environmental impacts

and by placing new and intense demands on the environment.

40 For the impact of the Rural Code, see Jacques Léon Godechot, Les institutions de la France sous la Révolution et l’Empire (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1985), 663. For the impact of the Civil Code, see Code civil (1804), Book II, Chapter 3, Article 537; Matteson, 173-4; McPhee, 150. 41 Napoleon authorized the massive return of emigrants through an act of 6 floreal an X (April 26, 1802). See Godechot, 570. 42 Matteson, 256. 43 Reynard, 57.


17

As Provence’s population increased in the first half of the nineteenth century,

industries began to dot the countryside, and urban centers expanded. Meanwhile, the French

government, motivated in part by the conviction that centuries of pastoralism had negatively

impacted the Mediterranean landscape, promoted largescale, commercial agriculture

throughout southern France, supporting the conversion of pasturelands into fields for

cultivation.44 Likewise, the forest and agricultural administrations, both governed by the

profit-oriented Ministry of Finance, encouraged cultivation in these areas through the

expansion of irrigation and drainage systems. The nineteenth-century evolution of property

had liberated Provençal land from many of the bureaucratic constraints contained in the pre-

Revolutionary system of privilege and commons, in which the conflicting interests of

neighboring villages had impeded the establishment of regional water transport systems.45

Hence, such networks spread swiftly throughout Provence in the period 1820-1860, driving

the growth of commercial agriculture in their wake. By mid-century, the construction of

canals had added over 16,000 hectares of irrigated land from the Durance River alone,

increasing Provence’s agricultural output by approximately eight percent.46

The privatization and commercialization of agriculture in Provence, together with the

attendant expansion of irrigation and drainage systems, may have been a boon for largescale

agriculturalists, but it placed new and weighty demands on the environment. As the

nineteenth century progressed, the region’s principal natural watercourses, the Durance and

the Rhône, were reengineered to serve an expanding agricultural population. As these rivers

snaked through Basse-Provence, farmers bled them with an ever-increasing number of dams,

ditches, and irrigation canals, so that the rivers themselves began to look more like riverbeds.

In this way, Provence’s agricultural engineering sometimes contributed to the incidence of

droughts, which taxed the region’s growing agricultural population as well as its remaining

pastoralists.47 Artificial waterways, moreover, proved less capable of containing the sudden

44 For negative French perceptions of Mediterranean pastoralism, see Diana K. Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007); and Duffy 2019. For another example of this economic shift from pastoralism to agriculture, see McPhee, 176-85. 45 Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, The Fruits of Revolution: Property Rights, Litigation, and French Agriculture, 1700-1860 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 100-125; Sara Pritchard, Confluence: The Nature of Technology and the Remaking of the Rhône (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 46 Rosenthal, 191. 47 For the description of a particularly devastating drought in 1896, caused by the drying up of the Durance River, see P. Carrière, ‘Prosper Demontzey, Conservateur des Forêts,’ Revue des Eaux et Forêts 37 (1898), 22. Carrière describes this drought as an isolated event, but he also attributes it and other environmental crises to the


18

swells occasioned by heavy rainfall, especially when they were adjacent to roads and human

habitations. As a result, Provence’s expanding nineteenth-century population was much more

susceptible to floods than residents had been in preceding centuries. Notably, while the

incidence of floods probably did not increase in the first half of the nineteenth century, the

number of floods considered ‘extreme’ – as well as the damage these events caused – rose

substantially (see Image 7).

Period Number of C4 Floods Flood Years

1600-1649 0 N/A

1650-1699 2 1674, 1694

1700-1749 4 1705, 1706, 1711, 1745

1750-1799 1 1755

1800-1849 5 1801, 1810, 1827, 1840, 1843

1850-1899 5 1856, 1872, 1882, 1886 (October & November)

Image 7: Floods identified as category 4 (C4) or extreme, recorded in the Rhône valley

during the period 1600-1900.48

The Evolution of Flood Literature, 1800-1860

The floods and other natural disasters racking Provence in the early nineteenth

century fueled a sense of environmental anxiety among French elites as scientists, engineers,

officials, and intellectuals scrambled to record, explain, and ultimately prevent them. Since

the publication of Richard Grove’s Green Imperialism in 1995 and, more recently, James

Beattie’s Empire and Environmental Anxiety in 2011, the term ‘environmental anxiety’ has

been associated primarily with colonial contexts where ‘environments did not conform to

propagation of irrigation canals. Peter McPhee has identified similar environmental consequences of irrigation in the Corbières (McPhee, 243). 48 Chart based on data from HISTRHÔNE, https://histrhone.cerege.fr/ (accessed 1 Oct. 2019). This chart includes only floods documented during the period that were categorized as extreme (C4). These data are based on human observation. Because greater documentation typically exists for later periods, the number of floods reported in the nineteenth century may well be out of proportion. Thus, the incidence of floods actually may have decreased in the period 1700-1850.


19

European preconceptions.’49 Yet while imperialism played a critical role in shifting European

perspectives on the environment and paving the way for modern conservation, nineteenth-

century Europeans also suffered from severe environmental anxieties at home.50 In southern

France, such concerns stemmed not only from exposure to foreign environments but also

from a sense that the domestic Mediterranean environment, once familiar and fertile, was

changing for the worse. Environmental anxieties in Provence focused on two principle

environmental phenomena, deforestation and natural disasters, which their publicists

frequently connected. French literature on flooding matured in this milieu, and it reflects both

the nature and evolution of nineteenth-century French environmental perceptions. As the

century progressed, flood studies increasingly implied that such occurrences were

intensifying and that human actions were to blame. By the mid-nineteenth century,

contributors to this genre had crafted a mature narrative of anthropogenic climate change.

Growing intellectual attention to environmental phenomena in nineteenth-century

France owed much to scientific developments of the eighteenth century. During the Age of

Enlightenment, environmental disturbances were increasingly subjected to the scrutiny of a

scientific community seeking to explain through reason events that had previously been

attributed to God’s will.51 The period’s lumières tended to connect society and nature, and

they sought to identify and describe humans’ role in maintaining the natural order. In this

vein, Buffon described humans on a continuum with other animals, and his colleague Paul-

Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach, proclaimed, ‘Man is the work of nature, he exists in nature, he

is subject to its laws and cannot escape them.’52 This perspective differed sharply from the

view of humans as separate from nature, which dominated Western scientific thought in the

second half of the nineteenth century.53 In addition, Enlightenment-era geological theories

49 James Beattie, Empire and Environmental Anxiety: Health, Science, Art and Conservation in South Asia and Australasia, 1800-1920 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 1. 50 For the broader context of French environmental concerns in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see Locher and Fressoz. 51 Grégory Quenet, ‘Des sociétés sans risques?’ In Les sociétés méditerranéennes face au risque: disciplines, temps, espaces, edited by Gérard Chastagnaret (Cairo: Institut français d'archéologie orientale, 2008), 140; Robert V. Davis, ‘Inventing The Present: Historical Roots Of The Anthropocene,’ Earth Sciences History 30, no. 1 (2011): 68-70. 52 Miller, 6. Miller quotes Baron d’Holbach, Système de la nature ou des loix du monde physique et du monde moral (London, 1771), 1. 53 Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980); Mark Stoll, ‘The Other Scientific Revolution: Calvinist Scientists and the Origins of Ecology,’ in After the Death of Nature: Carolyn Merchant and the Future of Human-Nature Relations, edited by Kenneth Worthy, Elizabeth Allison, and Whitney A. Bauman (New York, NY: Routledge, 2019), 173; Locher and Fressoz, ‘Modernity’s Frail Climate,’ 592-3.


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represented the Earth’s development in terms of a series of violent catastrophes, such as

earthquakes and floods. By the early nineteenth century, geologists had begun to represent

environmental change as a more incremental and invisible process, but the idea of

catastrophism remained popular in intellectual and political spheres.54 Not only was it less

threatening to strict interpretations of the Bible, but it also appealed to the dictates of human

experience. To anyone who had witnessed the ravages of a flood, the formation of torrents,

the movement of silt, rocks, and trees, or the radical transformation of a landscape,

catastrophism made sense.

Early flood literature embraced this archeology of knowledge. Jean-Antoine Fabre’s

Essai sur la théorie des torrens et des rivières (Essay on the theory of mountain streams and

rivers), published in 1797, represents an early and influential attempt to tackle the issue of

flooding in southern France.55 Fabre served as chief engineer for the Var, a department within

Provence, and his study is based on 20 years of observations in the region. His Essai focuses

on the ‘ravages’ of Alpine floods and how engineering technologies might remedy them.56

Fabre firmly laid the blame for floods’ devastations on mountain clearing and deforestation,

maintaining that such practices reduced the stability of the soil and the ability of mountain

hillsides to retain rainwater.57 He also acknowledged the incidence of environmental change.

At the same time, he assumed a static, stable climate and viewed the formation and evolution

of mountain streams exclusively as a result of natural processes. Drawing heavily on

catastrophism, he claimed, ‘It is evident through daily experience that these degradations are

normally caused by rain, avalanches, hail, thaws, etc.,’ processes in operation ‘since the time

of creation.’58

54 Whited, Forests and Peasant Politics, 54. 55 Jean-Antoine Fabre, Essai sur la théorie des torrens et des rivières, contenant les moyens les plus simples d’en arrêter les ravages (Paris: Bidault, 1797), https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6388055k. Fabre’s work is based on a report titled ‘Essai sur la théorie des torrens & des rivières des pays de montagnes,’ which he presented to the Academy of Sciences in 1780 (Fabre, xi). There were very few French-language publications on flooding prior to the 1800s. Examples include M. Lieutaud, Seigneur d’Aiglun, Mémoire sur les dégradations des terres, occasionnées par les torrens et par les inondations ; moyens de les prévenir & d’augmenter considérablement les productions de la terre & de l’industrie (Chez la Veuve Hérissant: Amsterdam; Paris, 1782), accessed 3 Oct. 2019, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k98022217; and M. Béraud, Mémoire sur la manière de resserrer le lit des torrens & des rivières (1791), cited in Fabre, xxx. The French word torrents (torrens in Old French) can be translated either as ‘mountain streams’ or as ‘floods.’ Although I have translated it as ‘mountain streams,’ all of the works referenced here address the role of Alpine streams in flooding. 56 Fabre 1797, i. 57 Ibid., 64-5. 58 Ibid., 5.


21

Four years after the appearance of Fabre’s Essai, Jean Baptiste Joseph Gamon de

Montval published a short book titled Coup d’oeil rapide sur les causes qui amènent le

ravage des torrents et rivières (A glance at the causes behind the ravages of mountain

streams and rivers), which expanded on Fabre’s recommendations for mitigating flood

damage. Montval agreed with Fabre’s assessment of forest health, affirming that ‘the cause of

[torrents’] ravages is mountain deforestation.’59 He also suggested that timber extraction in

the Basses-Alpes had exacerbated flooding in Provence, in contrast to northern regions where

flooding was less pronounced. Like Fabre, Montval accepted the role of a divine hand in

nature and viewed the climate as static, claiming that ‘storms had supplied the same amount

of water over the same area’ prior to deforestation.60 Another early contributor to this genre

was François-Michel Lecreulx, who served as an inspector-general of bridges and roads

(ponts et chaussées) in various parts of France for nearly 50 years. In 1804, he published

Recherches sur la formation et l’existence des ruisseaux, rivières et torrents (Study of the

formation and existence of brooks, rivers, and mountain streams). While Lecreulx presented

his treatise largely as a refutation of Fabre’s work, he tacitly perpetuated catastrophism,

accepting his predecessor’s explanation of environmental change through dramatic natural

processes.61 In addition, Lecreulx downplayed the impact of deforestation and made no

suggestion that floods or the damage they caused was intensifying.

After a metaphorical – and literal – dry spell of several decades, Alexandre Surell

revived and significantly revamped the genre of mountain flood literature with his seminal

work, Étude sur les Torrents des Hautes Alpes, published in 1841 in the wake of a

devastating flood. While Surell stated dismissively that he had ‘nothing to gain’ from

Lecreulx’s study, his Étude cites Fabre frequently, crediting him with laying the foundation

for Surell’s own work.62 Like Fabre, Surell was an engineer, and he served extensively both

in the Alps and on the plains of Provence. His Étude, however, takes a markedly novel

approach to the issue of Alpine flooding. First, it paints a more vivid and dire image than

59 Jean Baptiste Joseph Gamon de Montval, Coup d’oeil rapide sur les causes qui amènent le ravage des torrents et rivières, et sur la manière simple et peu dispendieuse de s’en garantir (Paris: Chez Magimel, 1801), 9. 60 Montval, 4, 9-10. 61 François-Michel Lecreulx, Recherches sur la formation et l’existence des ruisseaux, rivières et torrens qui circulent sur le globe terrestre , avec des observations sur les principaux fleuves qui traversent la France (Paris: Chez Bernard, 1804), https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1041883m, 2. 62 Alexandre Surell, Étude sur les torrents des Hautes-Alpes (Paris: Carilian-Goeury, 1841), xv-xvi.


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previous works, explaining how floodwaters in the Hautes-Alpes ravage the surrounding

terrain and the land downstream:

Attached like a leper to the surfaces of mountains, [streams] erode their flanks,

spewing them up on the plains in the form of debris. In this way, they create,

through a long process of accumulation, these monstrous riverbeds, which

grow constantly and threaten to wipe out everything.63

Driving this point home, Surell’s Étude describes floods as ‘the most cruel scourge’ of the

Hautes-Alpes and claims that they are speeding this department ‘to its ruin.’64 In addition, it

introduces a discussion of the climate, implying that atmospheric as well as geologic forces

traditionally played a more central role in the formation of Alpine torrents than

deforestation.65 It also trends away from catastrophism by presenting a much longer, more

incremental timeline for these changes and making no reference to a divine hand. Finally,

Surell’s account suggests that deforestation has altered this age-old, natural order of

environmental change. Surell echoed his predecessors in denigrating mountain deforestation

as ‘the most disastrous of disturbances.’66 But he also took a step further in claiming that

forest clearing was actually creating new mountain torrents and promoting a volatile

environmental regime. In his view, mountain deforestation ‘disrupts the equilibrium of the

earth and revives the disorder of ancient chaos.’67 Surell linked human activities directly to

environmental change and implied that, as a result of human actions, Alpine flooding was

getting worse.68

Surell’s innovative perspective won him immediate acclaim from the Academy of

Sciences and profoundly influenced his field.69 As Andrée Corvol has observed, his work

helped establish floods as France’s “scourge par excellence.”70 Sixteen years later, following

an even more catastrophic flood, Charles de Ribbe published La Provence au point de vue

des bois, des torrents, et des inondations avant et après 1789 (Provence from the point of

63 Ibid., xiii. 64 Ibid., xiii, xvii. 65 Ibid., 104-5. 66 Ibid., 229. 67 Ibid., 128-9, 229. 68 Ibid., 108-10, 130. 69 Whited, Forests and Peasant Politics, 56. 70 Andrée Corvol, L’homme aux bois: histoire des relations de l’homme et de la forêt, XVIIe-XXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1987), 291; quoted in Whited, Forests and Peasant Politics, 57.


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view of forests, mountain streams, and floods before and after 1789). Ribbe’s study draws

heavily on Surell’s, reinforcing its sense of gravity and urgency and adopting many of

Surell’s claims. Like the Étude, Ribbe’s work seriously engages climate change, constating

both atmospheric impacts on the earth as well as trees’ beneficent effect on the climate.71 La

Provence also reaffirms Surell’s account of past environmental change and a natural order

disrupted, stating, ‘All has combined in Provence to change the normal conditions of

existence.’72 As the title suggests, Ribbe viewed the Revolution of 1789 as a watershed in

human environmental exploitation and destruction. Additionally, he accepted as a premise

Surell’s assertion that deforestation fuels the formation of mountain streams and the

appearance of floods.73 But while Ribbe made his debt to Surell clear, he took a more direct

and radical approach in identifying human contributions to environmental decline, decrying

alpine deforestation and demanding administrative reform. As his introduction explains, the

work was written ‘in a state of mourning produced by the latest floods,’ and its purpose is as

much political as scientific.74 In this vein, La Provence highlights the ‘necessity of modifying

many aspects of the Forest Code’ and aims to put the administration of forests ‘back on the

path to a solution.’75 For Ribbe, mountain deforestation, and hence human environmental

exploitation, was driving Provence into an abyss of environmental ruin that encompassed

everything from soil quality to the climate. He even suggested that deforestation had created

the mistral, the violent wind that batters Provence in spring and fall. Quoting a prominent

economist, he dramatically recast this phenomenon as ‘the child of men, the result of their

devastations.’76

Conclusion

Much more than previous flood literature, Ribbe’s study reflected the same core

characteristics that pervade current discourse on climate change and the Anthropocene.

Namely, he acknowledged a history of environmental and atmospheric transformation, and he

identified humans as principle agents of environmental change in the recent past. Likewise,

71 Charles de Ribbe, La Provence au point de vue des bois, des torrents, et des inondations avant et après 1789 (Paris: Guillaumin et Cie, 1857), 19. 72 Ibid., 12. 73 Ibid., 2, 7. 74 Ibid., 6. 75 Ibid., 9. 76 M. Dussard, Le Journal des Économistes, juillet 1842, cited in Ribbe, 19.


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his treatise appeared in the context of environmental concerns that it aimed urgently to

address. The publication of this popular account thus represented the crystallization of a

narrative of anthropogenic climate change that pre-dated both the perception and the reality

of global warming. Indeed, French flood literature of the early to mid-nineteenth century

exposes the potentially vast gulf between environmental perceptions and realities. During this

period, the climate remained relatively static and the incidence of floods did not markedly

increase. Yet people’s assessments of atmospheric conditions shifted dramatically as did their

explanations for environmental change. In the case of nineteenth-century Provence, the

evolution of environmental perceptions was driven largely by social factors, including

population growth, political turmoil, privatization, and the commercialization of agriculture.

Together, these developments made French intellectual elites more aware of their

environment and invested in its preservation.

The distinction between human perceptions and environmental realities remains

relevant today but in a very different sense. In contrast to the historical figures surveyed here,

who promoted environmental awareness in the absence of clear indications of environmental

change, many people currently deny the existence of human-caused climate change, despite

overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary. As in nineteenth-century Provence, this

state of affairs also owes much to contemporary social, economic, and political factors. In

order to address global warming, it is critical that we as a global community understand such

social dynamics and recognize their impact on human environmental perceptions.

Furthermore, we need to be aware of the distance between our own environmental views and

the realities of our warming planet, and we need to learn to navigate that space. By exposing

and tracing human dimensions of climate change in the past, history has much to offer the

Anthropocene.

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