The Natures of Nation: State-building and the Politics of Environmental Marginality in 19th and 20th Century Southern France.

Abstract

This dissertation argues that efforts to identify, improve, and, at times, preserve “marginal” environments such as moor, marshlands and alpine slopes both contributed to and complicated the broader process of state-building in modern France. It employs the concept of environmental marginality, defined broadly as a set of unequal but mutable economic, political and cultural relations between the French state and rural communities, to demonstrate how environmental claims forwarded and frustrated state power. In particular, it highlights the role of discourses of degradation, risk and the public good in the ongoing negotiation between the French state and rural peripheries over the proper use and allocation of natural resources. Three case studies frame the geographical and temporal scope of this dissertation: the creation and management of pine forests in the Landes de Gascogne south of Bordeaux; the reclamation and hydraulic engineering of the Camargue, delta of the Rhone river; and the alpine restoration campaign in the southern Alps and Pyrenees. I argue that these projects of environmental engineering, initiated by the Second Empire and extended by the Third Republic, reflected a shift in attitudes towards national territory, from a given set of geographical boundaries defined by sovereignty to a space of rationalization and improvement. Distinct in scale, scope and objectives, all three projects sought the same end: to govern nature in a way that best served the agricultural, commercial and industrial needs of the nation. At the same time, the dissertation demonstrates how environmental marginality tested the limits and coherence of state power. Marginal landscapes, I contend, did not easily submit to the demands of modernization and state-building. Rather, they proved to be stubborn sites of contestation and creative appropriation, where the conventional boundaries between state and society blur. Rural and urban groups alike vied with both the state and one another for control over the material resources and cultural meaning of local environments. Environmental marginality, this dissertation concludes, was not merely a useful fiction of administrative control but rather an ongoing dialogue of national belonging that emerged at the interstices of state, society and nature.