| In early modern and modern France, wood constituted the nation's most important natural resource. Fundamental to agricultural and viticultural production, military defense, domestic construction, industry, and transportation on land and sea, wood was "an absolute necessity, more than bread," as one forest administrator noted in 1791. Moreover, forests themselves were essential for pasturage, berries, medicines, osiers, and tanning bark. This dissertation explores the crucial role that forest use, depletion, conflict, and control played in the formation of modern France, from the landmark 1669 Forest Ordinance through the revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848. Focusing on the Franche-Comte, a lushly sylvan, upland region that is still among the most wooded landscapes of France, it traces the emergence of a state-centered, autocratic approach to conservation, the suppression of customary and communal practices, and the rise of proprietary individualism against the backdrop of forest deterioration accelerated by economic growth and political crises. A site of pioneering policy initiatives and fearsome resistance, the Franche-Comte and its inhabitants played a decisive role in the centuries-long battle over who would master the nation's woods---and in turn, the nation itself.;Drawing on a wide range of archival and printed sources---from administrative correspondence, crime reports, and court documents, to regional newspapers, Enlightenment treatises, and grievance petitions, to the wide-ranging debates over the 1827 Forest Code--- the dissertation makes three main arguments: First, that peasant opposition to state forest policies guided the development of political allegiances and regional identities. Second, that the origins of environmental conservation had less to do with farsighted ecological protection than with extending state power, suppressing sedition, and substituting commercial exploitation for communal utility. And third, that local, community-based management of common pool resources has been unfairly maligned, both in the historiography and in policymaking. Analyzing France's woodland troubles and the conflicts they generated is not only critical to understanding the Revolution, the dissertation contends, it is also key to understanding political ecological struggles more generally, for it was in this period that the exclusionary approach to managing natural resources that holds sway in the present took shape and became dominant. |
