Articles |
Agrarian Reform and Ecological Change During the Ancien Régime: Land Clearance, Peasants and Viticulture in the Province of Languedoc
1 The author is a teaching fellow at the University of Birmingham, who will shortly be taking up a lecturing post at Newman College. She wishes to thank the editor and the anonymous readers who commented on an earlier version of this article. (nplack{at}excite.com)
The légende noire of the French Revolution has been the underlying paradigm of much modern French environmental history. This legend contends that peasants were reckless land clearers and tree cutters who disregarded the environment and unleashed an unmitigated natural disaster in the countryside. But the legend is misconceived in many ways. The purpose of this article is to investigate Ancien Régime land-clearance legislation in a non-forested region of France: Lower Languedoc. The results of this land-clearance demonstrate that far from being culpable, the rural masses were officially encouraged to clear and cultivate land on the eve of the Revolution. The French peasantry were not as destructive as the légende noire suggests; the crops they chose to plant on their newly cleared plots reflected a sensitivity towards the environment. Vines were planted on much of the new land—viticulture was not only a sound ecological choice, well-suited to the landscape, but was also attuned to the economic realities of the day.