H-France Review Vol. 5 (December 2005), No. 142 Joëlle Burnouf and Philippe Leveau, Eds. Fleuves et marais, une histoire au croisement de la nature et de la culture: Sociétés préindustrielles et milieux fluviaux, lacustres, et palustres: pratiques sociales et hydrosystèmes. (Archéologie et histoire de l’art, 19). Paris: Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 2004. 493 pp. Illustrations, maps. €35.00. ISBN 2-7355-0561-8. Review by Paolo Squatriti, University of Michigan. At a conference held in April 2002 outside Aix more than eighty authors and coauthors presented thirty-six papers over the course of three days. Given the stunning mass of data and ideas this transaction involved--the audience must have struggled to keep abreast of the avalanche of information--it was an act of mercy to publish the contributions and give everyone a chance to digest it all at leisure. (“All” includes a paper whose findings about the Roman quarry that supplied stone for the Pont-du-Gard were largely invalidated by flooding in October 2002 and further excavation published in 2003). Inevitably, Fleuves et marais is a hefty volume, with its 487 double-columned pages encompassing articles, bibliographies and often hilarious English abstracts. Also inevitably, it is inconsistent in tone, approach, and quality. Yet this is a deeply interesting collection that offers much to readers of different backgrounds. Perhaps ancient historians and archaeologists, particularly those concerned with the Gallic provinces, and French medievalists, will find the book most rewarding. But anyone who studies environmental history (not just of France), or likes to think about landscape change or resource management in “organic economies,” will find value in Fleuves et marais. The large section on “hydraulic risk” and how French communities coped with dangerous intersections of land and water will have a special fascination for American readers after 2005. Overall, then, Fleuves et marais should have wide appeal as the rich summation of what must have been a frantic and energizing conference. Neither the editors’ introduction nor their conclusion move much beyond recapitulating the contributions’ content, but Burnouf and Leveau’s texts do identify the themes that the organizers hoped their conference would illuminate. Thus the articles fall into three main sections, each subdivided in turn. Fleuves et marais seeks first to discuss the different methodologies available to scholars of human interactions with watery environments. Dry historical sources, mostly medieval charters with some early modern notarial documents and cadastres added, emerge as a point of entry into the subject. Archaeological surveys and excavations, instead, tend to be the preferred tools of the pre-medieval contributors. In this segment of the book the best articles are those of the omnivorous authors who integrated archaeology and palaeoecology with historical and geographical analyses. Hélène Noizet et al. brilliantly investigate the relations of late medieval Tours with the Loire. Philippe Blanchemanche et al. attain equal excellence discussing the river Lez’s delta, south of Montpellier, between prehistoric and early modern times. Here interdisciplinary work and methodological agility reveal the dialectic between hydrological processes and human enterprise in the ongoing redefinition of the territory. A second section of Fleuves et marais groups together articles about wetlands and human use of them. Despite the labeling in the section, biodiversity is much less prominent than traditional concerns like fishing practices, pasturage, milling, and water transport. Paul Benoit et al. here contribute to understanding early modern Paris’ “ecological footprint” with a paper about timber runs from the Morvan. Early modern and modern conflicts over water usages, the focus of three papers, remind us why the word “rival” derives from the Latin for “people who share a river bank”. It is noteworthy that disagreements and appeals to history in order to justify a particular usage were as likely on small erratic torrents as on major bodies of water. The third major set of papers deals with “hydraulic risk,” or how communities close to rivers, streams, swamps, and other watery places adapted to the probability of flooding (not, it seems, to drought). In this section several papers address modern landscapes, most along the Loire and lower Rhone. Pierre Palu’s essay on the Pyrenées 1750-1920 stands out for its geographical focus and anthropological bent, but also in pinpointing Pyrenean peoples’ awareness of the hydrological dangers their subsistence strategies created: technologies and social sanctions mitigated such dangers and resulted in tolerable landscape stability. Most of the other essays deploy settlement archaeology, aerial photography, and palaeoecological indicators to describe mercurial Languedocian landscapes in Roman times. Fleuves et marais is thus a heterogeneous work, oddly unbalanced in some ways. Even in the age of the TGV the environmental constraint of distance meant that most participants at the conference came from southern France. The same constraint seems to have induced most researchers to work on waterscapes close to home. In consequence, north and west French waters receive much less attention than central and especially southern ones. This in turn means that classical sites and problematiques get disproportionate space, as northern France has far fewer Roman vestiges. The classical focus might explain why the immediate post-Roman period gets short shrift. Uneven in its geographical and chronological distribution, Fleuves et marais nevertheless reveals how quickly and well French scholarship has learned to think environmentally about the past. In American universities environmental history is a monopoly of Americanists, whose chronologies are foreshortened by the assumption that little happened in the Edenic times before 1492 and whose master narrative requires pristine nature to be destroyed by westward moving rapacious settlers. Fleuves et marais tells a story of much longer and more fluctuating interactions: the longue durée is a French invention after all. Humans in France have been modifying hydrologies and aquatic ecosystems at least since the Neolithic, it turns out. Yet even in periods of intensified human activity, like the first or thirteenth centuries or early modern era, water regimens, soils, vegetation, and different kinds of animals were agents in human history, not passive backdrops to be demolished. Fleuves et marais imparts the valuable lesson that the environmental history of Old Europe is possible, and that it has important implications for the practice of environmental history elsewhere, especially in North America. American environmental historians could benefit from familiarity with such concepts as “anthropisation” or the Latourian “hybrid object” the editors call an “anthroposystème” (p. 486). They permit an escape from the nature/culture dichotomy and the dubious, Romantic notion of “unspoiled nature” dear to modern American environmentalism. (The idea of nature as a humanized entity need not sanction unbridled exploitation of resources: the conference came out of a CNRS research program that seeks “sustainable” relations between people and natural resources). Further, the main finding of Fleuves et marais, namely the ongoing dynamism of human-water relations and the constancy of change, is a good antidote to conceptions of ecology and environmental history for which utter stability is the optimal, indeed the natural, condition. This collection also has some blind spots. Water transport is neglected, perhaps because in dynamic water regimens it leaves few archaeological traces. So is water-borne disease, including malaria, one of the greater “risks” in waterlogged environments. Some topics that do receive attention, like fishing, are not well contextualized. Indeed many of the tightly focused case studies that constitute Fleuves et marais seem narrow and provincial, and would have benefited from comparison with other cases, places, and (why not?) countries. Even Elisabeth Zadora-Rio’s breezy gallop through central Asian, Mesopotamian, and other exotic comparative data cannot dispel the sense that too many contributors never peered beyond their micro-region. If Fleuves et marais has surprising omissions, if it is too focused on rivers close to Provence and on water excess (rather than dearth), if it grants excessive coverage to the old debate about state- and community-organized hydraulics (based on Karl Wittfogel’s 1957 Oriental Despotism which posited that without massive governmental organization major waterworks were impossible), it is still a valuable book. Its editors strove at an imaginative mixing of disciplinary approaches, with “hard” and “soft” science interwoven in some superbly textured reconstructions of the past. Even the more “disciplinary” papers add to the picture of varied encounters between people and water over the past 4000 years of French history. Fleuves et marais works both as a general methodological suggestion about how French (and other) histories of landscape and resource use might look, and as a compendium of specialized, microregional studies that take water seriously as a dynamic historical force. LIST OF ESSAYS Tatiana Muxart, “Préface” Joëlle Bumouf, Philippe Leveau, “Présentation” Marie Casset, “Approche historique de l'action de l'homme dans un milieu fluvio-marin au Moyen Âge: la présence de l'évêque de Bayeux dans l'estuaire de la Vire (XIe-XVe siècles)” Philippe Calmettes, “L'estey et le port en Bordelais à la fin du Moyen Âge (XIIIe-XVe siècles)” Brigitte Maillard, “Pour une histoire des fleuves et des rapports hommes/fleuves: les sources écrites de la période moderne (XVIe-XVIIIe siècles)” Nathalie Achard-Corompt, Annie Dumont, Willy Tegel, Jean-Michel Treffort, Julian Wiethold, “Archéologie préventive et sites de milieux humides: les exemples de Hattstatt (protohistoire) et de Vrigne-aux-Bois (époque gallo-romaine)” Hervé Cubizolle, Vincent Georges, Catherine Latour, Karen Serieyssol, “Sociétés humaines pré-industrielles et hydrosystèmes palustres dans le Massif Central oriental au cours des quatre derniers millénaires: le rôle de la mise en place des aménagements hydrauliques dans le démarrage de la turfigenèse” Vincent Georges, Hervé Cubizolle, Jacqueline Argant, avec la collaboration de P. Bet, P. Valette, J. Verrier, “Détection, détermination et interprétation des témoins archéologiques de la Loire en Forez (Massif Central, France) : vers une histoire du peuplement” Philippe Leveau, “Le Rhône et les Romains, « terrassiers infatigables, hydrauliciens habiles ». La géoarchéologie et le renouvellement d'un paradigme” Frédéric Trément, Christèle Ballut, Bertrand Dousteyssier, Vincent Guichard, Maxence Segard, “Habitat et milieu humide en Grande Limagne de l'âge du Fer au Moyen Âge. Essai de spatialisation dynamique des relations sociétés-milieux” Daniel Pichot, Dominique Marguerie, “Approche pluridisciplinaire sur l'aménagement des petits cours d'eau par les sociétés médiévales dans l'ouest de la France (VIIe-XIIe siècle)” Henri Galinié, Xavier Rodier, Jacques Seigne, Nathalie Carcaud, Manuel Garcin, Olivier Marlet, “Quelques aspects documentés des relations entretenues par les habitants de Tours avec la Loire du Ier au XIIe siècle” Hélène Noizet, Nathalie Carcaud, Manuel Garcin, “Rive droite rive gauche : la Loire et Tours (XIIe-XVe siècles)” Philippe Blanchemanche, Lucie Chabal, Christophe Jorda, Cécile Jung, “Le delta du Lez dans tous ses états: quels langages pour quel dialogue?” Corinne Beck, Marie-Christine Marinval, “Pour une approche de la « biodiversité historique » : l'exemple mediévale” Myriam Sternberg, “Le rôle des fleuves dans la pêche du Ier au VIe siècle : état des connaissances” Benoît Clavel, Christophe Cloquier, “Contribution des sources documentaires et archéologiques à l'étude des pratiques halieutiques fluviales médiévales et modernes dans le bassin de la Somme” Pierre Excoffon, Corinne Landuré, Michel Pasqualini, “Habitat et risque fluvial dans le delta du Rhône au Ier siècle av. J.-C. Les habitats de la Capelière et du Grand Parc en Camargue” Paul Benoit, Karine Berthier, Gilles Billen, Josette Garnier, “Agriculture et aménagement du paysage hydrologique dans le bassin de la Seine aux XIVe et XVe siècles” Émeline Roucaute, “Gestion et exploitation du marais arlésien au Moyen Âge” Robert Royet, Jean-François Berger, Nicolas Bernigaud, Elvyre Royet, avec la collaboration de Jacqueline Argant, Antonio Lopez-Saez, Vianney Forest, Bui Thi Maï, Laurent Bouby, Maheul Ploton, “La gestion d'un milieu humide : le site du Vernai et le marais du Grand-Plan à Saint-Romain-de-Jalionas (Isère), de La Tène au haut Moyen Âge” Chloé Deligne, “Histoire longue et prospective environnementale. Le cas d'une rivière périurbaine (Maelbeek, région bruxelloise)” Emmanuel Grélois, “Les logiques concurrentes des populations riveraines des zones humides : rivières, lacs et marais de Basse-Auvergne d'après les sources écrites (XIIIe-XVIe siècles)” Jean-Michel Derex, “Conflits d'usages sur une rivière non navigable, l'École (milieu du XVIIIe-fin du XIXe siècle)” Paul Benoit, Karine Berthier, Charles Rezé, “Les aménagements hydrauliques liés au flottage du bois, leur impact sur le milieu fluvial (XVIe-XVIIIe siècles)” Karine Berthier, Paul Benoit, “Les aménagements hydrauliques au Moyen Âge et au XVIe siècle à Corbeil-Essonnes” Bernard Le Sueur, “Spécificité et modes de gestion des espaces fluviaux aux temps des batelleries traditionnelles de bassins” Nathalie Lewis, Emmanuèle Gautier, “Le domaine public fluvial, un héritage du passé qui module aujourd'hui la réflexion sur la gestion de la biodiversité - Les zones humides de la Loire sous observation” Paul Allard, Leslie Maurice Corsand, “La gestion des espaces humides, d'un mode à l'autre: changements et continuité dans le bas Rhône” Patrick Fournier, “La gestion d'un milieu fragile : les créments et les iscles du bas Rhône et de la basse Durance à l'époque moderne” Pascal Palu, “Les eaux courantes entre aléa et risque : l'adaptabilité de sociétés pastorales pyrénéennes pour une exploitation soutenable de la biodiversité de milieux anthropisés de montagne” Elisabeth Zadora-Rio, “Aménagements hydrauliques et inférences socio-politiques : études de cas au Moyen Âge” Jean-Paul Bravard, “Le risque d'inondation dans le bassin du Haut Rhône. Quelques concepts revisités dans une perspective géohistorique” Cécile Allinne, Florence Verdin, “Ernaginum (Saint-Gabriel, Tarascon), une agglomération antique et son cours d'eau” Jean-François Berger, Jean-Luc Fiches, Michiel Gazenbeek, “La gestion du risque fluvial à Ambrussum durant l’Antiquité par les riverains du Vidourle” Olivier Colas, “Les aménagements de berge et la protection contre les inondations à l'époque romaine à Lyon. Exemples et perspectives” Mireille Vacca-Goutoulli, Hélène Bruneton, “La gestion du risque fluvial par les carriers romains. La carrière de l'Estel (Pont-du-Gard)” Catherine Lonchambon, “Habitats médiévaux installés dans des zones « à risques ». L'exemple de Caderousse, un bourg sur le Rhône” Joëlle Burnouf, Philippe Leveau, “Conclusions et perspectives” Paolo Squatriti University of Michigan pasqua@umich.edu Copyright © 2005 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. 5 (December 2005), No. 142 ISSN 1553-9172 For earlier reviews, please see H-Net's Review Archive Maintained by the H-France Web Editorial Team