H-France Review Vol. 1 (February 2001), No. 4
Peter McPhee, Revolution and Environment in Southern France:
Peasants, Lords, and Murder in the Corbičres 1780-1830. Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. xi + 272 pp. Maps, tables, figures,
notes, bibliography, and index. $75.00 US (cl). ISBN 0-19-820717-4.
Review by Denise Z. Davidson, Georgia State University.
The Corbičres, a remote region in southwestern France located between
Carcasonne, Narbonne, Perpignan, and Quillan, has consistently been and
continues to be one of France’s least populated -- and least studied --
regions. In the eighteenth century, the Corbičres housed wool and tanning
industries and an agricultural sector that included sheep and goats, grain,
and some vineyards. By the early nineteenth century, the region’s rocky
hillsides were largely denuded of their oak and other trees, which in
turn caused erosion and flooding in the valleys as the soil and stones
formerly on the mountains blocked rivers and streams. At the heart of
these changes was the deforestation of garrigues, pastures and
forests that had been used as common lands, despite their technically
belonging to local seigneurs, many of whom were absentee landlords.
The herds of sheep and goats dwindled as their food sources disappeared,
and the result was a turn to mono-agriculture with a focus on wine production
over all other crops. Peter McPhee’s study of the Corbičres during and
after the Revolution explores the causes of this environmental transformation,
and in the process provides a rich analysis of political, economic, and
social trends in the region. He also links these trends to an infamous
event: the murder of two local nobles by disgruntled villagers in August
1830.
McPhee, who has published numerous works on peasants and on southwestern
France, argues that the environmental catastrophe of the Corbičres can
only be understood by placing it within the long-term context he provides.
While many have blamed Revolutionary changes in landholdings for peasants’
ability to strip the region of its trees, McPhee makes the case that the
transformation was well on its way before 1789. A severe crisis hit the
region’s textile industry in the 1780s as Carcassonne lost its once prominent
role in international markets for cloth, particularly in the Middle East.
Further, McPhee draws attention to what he describes as a "perceptible
shift" among local lords who began "treating seigneuries and land as purely
an economic resource" (p. 34) in response to their own financial difficulties.
Land clearance resulted from both of these trends, whose effects were
felt during the pre-revolutionary decades. The confusion regarding property
ownership in the aftermath of 1789 permitted peasants, driven by misery,
to cut down trees and pull out their roots so as to sell the bark to tanneries
and to use the rest as firewood. Once the mountains lost their growth,
peasants had no option but to focus on wine production. Finally, the arrival
of the railroads in the 1850s made viticulture the most lucrative sector
of the economy.
In the process of laying out the social, economic, and political context
of these transformations, McPhee presents a meticulously researched and
engaging history of the region over five decades. The introduction does
a tremendous job of drawing the reader into the study as it describes
with tantalizingly little detail the 1830 murder of two local nobles in
one of the villages of the Corbičres, Villeseque. McPhee uses his story
of environmental degradation, along with the local reverberations of the
political upheavals since 1789, to foreshadow this gruesome murder, which
is examined fully in the final chapter of the book.
The characters in McPhee's study include local authorities, nobles, and
peasants, as well as the environment itself. The first chapter describes
"cette miserable contrée" in the 1780s, exploring the already visible
degradation of the garrigues and tensions over land use. In the
following three chapters, McPhee explores the region’s political and social
trends during the Revolution. Each of these chapters covers a brief period:
1789-1790, 1790-1792, and 1793-1795. They thus give a detailed look at
how the region experienced the Revolution, which the peasants generally
viewed positively. The inhabitants of the Corbičres demonstrated their
devotion to the Revolution by providing larger numbers of conscripts than
required, for example. Throughout McPhee does an admirable job incorporating
the peasants' perspective on land use and showing how their views often
contradicted those expressed in the National Assembly. He also emphasizes
the ways in which national legislation, local authorities, and peasants
all contributed to the transformation of the environment, while efforts
to stop the process were always too little, too late. The following three
chapters provide a longer-term view on these issues, demonstrating their
continued relevance through 1830. In a chapter on the "war on the cleavers"
from 1800-1830, for example, McPhee devotes significant attention to the
Napoleonic prefect, Charles-Joseph Trouve, an interesting character in
his own right. Despite his good intentions and constant efforts to implement
legislation meant to limit deforestation, Trouve was unable to reverse
a trend which he believed was ruining the region economically.
While providing a fascinating narrative and many entertaining and at
times astounding anecdotes, McPhee’s study makes several important historiographical
and methodological contributions. First, his research on the region disproves
the thesis that only vestiges of feudalism existed by 1789. Feudalism
was alive and well in the Corbičres in the 1780s; the Revolution intensified
and permitted expression of a long-felt sense of injustice among the peasantry.
Second, McPhee’s work on rural responses to the Revolution, on peasants’
roles in local politics during and after the Revolution, and on economic
transformations and debates about the Revolution’s effects on emerging
capitalism all represent significant contributions to issues of current
debate. In a chapter on the transformation of the rural economy from 1789
to 1830, McPhee makes use of extensive quantitative research on landholding
patterns in the region to disprove the argument that the wealthy most
benefited from the end of "feudalism." In the Corbičres, peasants, not
large landholders, were most motivated to put an end to communal landholding.
Referring to this process as the "'peasant route’" to capitalism" (p.
199), McPhee argues that "it was smallholders who were the motive force
of the Revolution and those who were in the forefront of significant economic
change" (p. 238). His findings thus demonstrate weaknesses in both Marxist
and revisionist interpretations of the Revolution and its effects in rural
settings.
McPhee also makes an important point about the long-term political and
environmental effects of Revolution, which would be felt in the region
for many years. For example, he notes that the 1821 birth and baptism
of the duke de Bordeaux was largely ignored in the communes of the Corbičres:
"Twenty-five years of Revolution and Empire had wrought a fundamental
change in popular assumptions about social authority" (p. 168). Claiming
that "the full consequences of the Revolution took decades to be resolved"
(p. 240), McPhee demonstrates the longevity of Revolutionary issues in
his exploration of the causes of the brutal murder. By 1830 when the murders
took place, "Villeseque was a village where land hunger was a constant,
nagging imperative, irritated by the constant reminder of two large estates
with their absentee but intrusive proprietors. For forty years the peasants
of Villeseque ... had continued to insist that the consequences of a revolution
they had made and defended included the control and exploitation of their
immediate environment" (p.229). McPhee’s long-term approach allows him
to trace the roots of this event, which revolved around issues of land
use and social authority that had remained unresolved since 1789.
In his analysis of the killings themselves, McPhee presents three interpretations
of the murder and its form, which included mutilation of the bodies. First
is the social reading, namely that demographic and economic realities
explain the peasants’ anger. Second is the cultural reading, where, as
in historian Alain Corbin’s study of an 1870 murder in the Dordogne, Village
of Cannibals, peasant mentalities explain the violence. Third is the
political explanation, and this is the one that McPhee puts the most weight
behind even though he argues that none of the three excludes the others.
Here McPhee interprets the murder of the Letreilles as the Villesequois
version of the July 1830 Revolution in Paris. Villagers' shouts of "Vive
la liberté" and "Vive l’empereur" during the confrontation
give added weight to this interpretation. For Corbin, the peasantry’s
constant exposure to violence and the butchering of animals permitted
them to view their repeated blows to a noble’s body as less than shocking.
McPhee, however, sees "such possibilities -- for which it must be said,
there is no direct evidence -- [as] complementary rather than alternatives
to a political reading of the mutilation" (p. 218). McPhee’s analysis
of the murder in the Corbičres thus provides an alternative reading of
peasants’ sense of politics and their relationship to national issues.
This is an excellent local study whose depth of research and broad implications
make it an important contribution to the historiography of the French
Revolution. But it is also much more than that. The book contributes to
debates within rural history, environmental history, social history, and
economic history. In addition, this multifaceted account is accessible
and engagingly written thanks to the rich details McPhee incorporates
to illustrate his argument. My only criticism is that the maps at the
beginning of the book could have been more usefully designed. An additional
map should have been included to permit the reader to situate the Corbičres
within southwestern France. The two maps which do appear, one of the communes
of the Corbičres and the other showing the region’s physical characteristics,
include few of the same towns and are difficult to make overlap. Aside
from this minor flaw, the book is a model of thorough research, good writing,
and balanced argumentation.
Denise Z. Davidson
Georgia State University
hisdzd@langate.gsu.edu
Copyright © 2001 by the Society for French Historical Studies, all rights reserved. The Society for French Historical Studies permits the electronic distribution for nonprofit educational purposes, provided that full and accurate credit is given to the author, the date of publication, and its location on the H-France website. No republication or distribution by print media will be permitted without permission. For any other proposed uses, contact the Editor-in-Chief of H-France.
H-France Review Vol. 1 (February 2001), No. 4
ISSN 1553-9172
