French School of Geographical Thought

• The French school is the tradition of geography built in France from the late 19th century, above all by Paul Vidal de la Blache and his pupils. It made geography a discipline that joins the humanities and the natural sciences.
  • Its hallmarks are the regional monograph, the study of small natural regions (pays), the concept of genre de vie (way of life) and the view, later named possibilism, that nature offers possibilities and human groups choose among them.
• The philosophical foundation came from Kant, and Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Ritter made geography a science. The main concepts and methods of the modern subject were then developed first by the Germans, followed by the French, British, American and Soviet schools.
• Unlike Germany, with its rival schools, French geography was shaped by one master and his disciples. By 1922 almost every chair in France was held by Vidal’s pupils or their pupils, a continuity known as la tradition vidalienne.

Background and Precursors

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The Deterministic Inheritance

• Since the Greek and Roman period, environmental determinism had been the usual way to explain the man–environment relationship. Aristotle, Hippocrates and Strabo linked the character of peoples to climate, and the idea persisted until the Second World War.
• French writers kept the idea alive:
  • Jean Bodin (1566) set out a cause-and-effect link between climate and the temper of nations.
  • Montesquieu, in De l’esprit des lois (1748), held that people in cold climates are vigorous and those in hot climates are timid and indolent. He also allowed religion, laws and customs a role, and so is sometimes read as an early possibilist.
  • Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, in his Histoire naturelle (44 volumes, 1749–1804), stressed the changes humans make to the face of the earth. He suggested that clearing forests and draining marshes could change the climate.
• Arab scholars (Al-Masudi, Ibn Khaldun), Kant and later Ritter and Ratzel carried determinism into the 19th century.
  • The second volume of Ratzel’s Anthropogeographie (1891), which studied human groups, migration and inherited culture, had a deep influence on Vidal.
• From the 1850s, Darwinian evolution, Newtonian cause-and-effect and Auguste Comte’s positivism shaped French social science, and geography had to define itself against them.

Natural Regions and “Pure Geography”

• Philippe Buache (1700–1773) proposed in 1752 that the earth is divided into drainage basins framed by mountain ranges, which he believed continued even under the seas.
  • He argued that geographical data should be mapped by natural regions, ideally river basins, not by administrative units. This was the French form of reine Geographie (pure geography).
• Charles-Étienne Coquebert de Montbret, of the French statistical office, proposed in 1796 to divide France into natural regions, each with a short description. This stirred lasting interest in regional divisions.
• Conrad Malte-Brun, a Danish-born Parisian, wrote a universal geography (1810–29) and refuted the idea that basins are always bounded by ranges, but Buache’s concept persisted.
• Jean-Baptiste d’Omalius d’Halloy’s geological map of France and the Low Countries (1820s) related landforms and soils to the underlying rocks. It undercut the river-basin scheme and gave natural regions a geological basis.
  • Rock-based regions such as the chalk lands of Champagne or the clay vales of the Paris Basin later became the frame for the pays.

Frédéric Le Play (1806–1882) and Social Science

• Frédéric Le Play, a mining engineer turned sociologist, studied working families across Europe by direct observation. His Les Ouvriers européens appeared in 1855.
  • He held that each habitat produces a distinct social order. His formula lieu, travail, famille (place, work, family) tied environment, occupation and social type together.
  • Patrick Geddes in Britain recast it as Place–Work–Folk and used it in regional survey and in his town-planning reports on Indian cities (1914–24).
• He identified three family types tied to three environments: the patriarchal family of the Asian steppe, the stem family (famille souche) of the fjord coasts of Scandinavia and the unstable family of the forests and cities of Europe.
• His followers pushed this to extremes. Edmond Demolins argued (1901–03) that the route a people followed created its social type, one of the strongest forms of determinism. Henri de Tourville traced self-reliance and private property to the fjord environment.
• Vidal took up Le Play’s interest in social groups in their milieu but rejected the determinism.

Élisée Reclus (1830–1905)

• Élisée Reclus, a pupil of Carl Ritter in Berlin (1851), was a geographer and anarchist.
  • He opposed Louis Napoleon’s coup of 1851, worked in Britain, the United States, Central America and Colombia (1852–57), and fought for the Paris Commune (1871). His sentence of deportation was commuted to banishment after appeals from scientists. He wrote in exile in Switzerland and from 1894 taught in Brussels.
• Works:
  • La Terre (2 volumes, 1867–68), a systematic physical geography.
  • Nouvelle Géographie universelle (19 volumes, 1875–94), a world regional geography described country by country, richly illustrated with thousands of maps and plans. It was clearer and more popular than Ritter’s Erdkunde, which it took as its model, and set the pattern for later encyclopaedic geographies.
  • L’Homme et la Terre (1905–08), a social geography of humanity’s history on the earth.
• Ideas: humans are part of nature, not merely its product. They can tame the earth’s energies, but abuse breaks the “harmony of nature” and impoverishes both landscape and mind.
  • He wrote on inequality and social justice, linked geography to town planning and sociology, and urged the conservation of nature. He is now read as a forerunner of radical and environmental geography.
• He never held a French chair, so his influence on the academic school was indirect, largely through Geddes in Britain.

Why Geography Took Off after 1871

• In the mid-19th century geography in France, as in Germany, was taught by historians, geologists, soldiers and engineers. The Sorbonne chair of geography, created in 1809, was held by historians in the Faculty of Letters.
• Defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine changed this.
  • Reformers blamed poor geographical knowledge for the defeat and demanded better geography teaching.
  • Geographical societies multiplied in the provinces and urged colonial expansion in Africa and South-East Asia as compensation.
• New chairs followed. Vidal’s appointment to the Sorbonne in 1898, the first professional geographer in that chair, marks the start of professional geography in France.

Vidal de la Blache and La Tradition Vidalienne

Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845–1918)

• Paul Vidal de la Blache trained in history and classics at the École Normale Supérieure and was drawn to geography while studying antiquity at the French School in Athens.
  • He taught at Nancy (1872–77), then at the École Normale Supérieure (1877–98), where he trained a generation of teachers, and at the Sorbonne until his death.
  • He met Richthofen at Leipzig in the 1870s and took from him the idea of causal interrelations among things in particular areas (chorology).
• Works:
  • With Marcel Dubois he founded the Annales de Géographie (1891) and edited it until his death.
  • Atlas général Vidal-Lablache (1894).
  • Tableau de la géographie de la France (1903), the introduction to Ernest Lavisse’s history of France.
  • La France de l’Est (1917), on two thousand years of landscape and society in Alsace and Lorraine.
  • Principes de géographie humaine (1921), completed after his death by his son-in-law Emmanuel de Martonne.
  • He planned a world regional series, the Géographie universelle, which his pupils carried out.

Key Concepts

Pays: The Small Natural Region

• In his Sorbonne teaching, Vidal stressed the link between people and their immediate surroundings (milieu), best studied in small homogeneous areas, the pays.
• A pays is a small region shaped by centuries of intimate interaction between a community and its land. Over time, people and nature adapt to each other like a snail in its shell, until the influence of one cannot be separated from that of the other.
• The Tableau described France pays by pays. Each had its own agriculture, based on soil and water supply and on the demand of nearby towns. Settlement was compact in some pays and scattered in others. Far from erasing these differences, modern trade had sharpened them through specialisation.
• He rejected the drainage basin as a unit: a region such as the Massif Central cannot be understood if it is cut into river basins that split its people and traditions.
• Small regions are the best training ground for geographers, and French doctoral work long took the form of the regional monograph. Larger regions, he argued, are useful for planning.

Genre de Vie: Way of Life

• Genre de vie is the complex of institutions, traditions, attitudes, purposes and technical skills of a group, roughly what is now called culture.
  • People relate to their environment not as individuals but through the heritage of the group to which they belong.
  • The same environment means different things to groups with different genres de vie, and the genre de vie decides which of nature’s possibilities a group selects.
• In simpler societies genres de vie show close adjustment to nature. His articles on the geographical conditions of social facts (1902) and on genres de vie (1911) developed this.
  • Indian examples are the transhumant Gaddis and Bakarwals of the western Himalaya and the pastoral and farming communities that share the same upland differently.

Terrestrial Unity

• Terrestrial unity is the idea that the earth is one coordinated whole, whose parts are connected and whose phenomena follow regular sequences.
  • He drew it from botanical geography: plant associations show how unlike species share an environment in unstable equilibrium. Animals and humans, being mobile and intelligent, adapt even more widely.
  • Human societies, like plant communities, are made of diverse elements brought together in a region that gradually puts its stamp on them.
• It follows that natural and cultural phenomena cannot be separated. Nature changes most where the community’s material culture is highest; the plants and animals of 19th-century France were very different from what they would have been without centuries of settlement.

Possibilism

• Vidal saw the weakness of environmental determinism. It was futile to set nature against society and make one dominant, and equally futile to seek universal laws of man–nature relations.
• His position: nature sets limits and offers possibilities, but how people respond depends on their genre de vie. Man “joins in nature’s game”; the environment is a partner, not a master; “nature is never more than an adviser”.
• The historian Lucien Febvre, in La Terre et l’évolution humaine (1922), named the doctrine possibilism: “there are no necessities, but everywhere possibilities”, and man, as master of the possibilities, is judge of their use.
• Mediation: Vidal steered between Émile Durkheim, who wanted to absorb geography into social morphology, and Ratzel’s environmentalism. He held that society cannot be “suspended in the air” without its milieu, yet the milieu does not command it.
• Possibilism was later qualified by Griffith Taylor’s neo-determinism and O. H. K. Spate’s probabilism. Together with determinism, it forms the core of the environmentalism debate.

History and the Region

• Vidal’s method was inductive and historical. He compared history’s shocks to a gust of wind on a shallow pond: war, epidemic or revolution disturb the surface, but the underlying contours reappear once the storm passes.
  • In La France de l’Est the French Revolution of 1789 is such a ripple: the deeper lines of regional development reasserted themselves.
• Late in life he recognised that railways, canals, roads and industry after the mid-19th century were breaking the isolation of the pays.
  • He wrote that the modern region is tied to industry and the metropolis, and urged study of the relation between a region and the city that dominates it. This anticipates the functional region.

Principles of Geography (1913) and the Principes (1921)

• In 1913 he set out the distinctive features of geography:
  1. The unity of terrestrial phenomena is the starting point.
  2. Phenomena occur in variable combinations and are modified by human action.
  3. Geography studies all phenomena of the earth’s surface in their localisation and covariation.
  4. It recognises the force of the environment in its forms, such as vegetation belts and climate.
  5. It needs scientific methods of definition and classification.
  6. It measures the part played by man in modifying the earth.
• He called geography “the science of places, not of men”. It studies things associated in areas, and its strength is its capacity not to break apart what nature has assembled.
• Principes de géographie humaine opens with terrestrial unity, milieu and man as a geographical factor. Its three parts treat population (distribution, density, agglomerations, movements), civilisations in relation to milieu, and circulation (transport and communication), with notes on races, inventions and cities.

Assessment of Vidal

• Strengths:
  • He made geography a university discipline in France and kept physical and human geography together; the German-style dualism never took hold.
  • The regional monograph became one of geography’s great literary and scientific forms and the model for regional synthesis.
  • Genre de vie anticipated the cultural and humanistic turns, and he treated nature–society as a two-way relation.
• Limitations:
  • The method fitted pre-industrial, self-sufficient rural France. E. A. Wrigley (1965) called it “a vision of things past or about to pass, not a vision of things present or to come”.
  • Genre de vie was treated empirically, with little attention to class, power or social structure. Febvre himself was uneasy that some pupils took this to mean the more primitive a group, the more geographical it was.
  • Vidal called geography a natural science, which narrowed its social analysis.

The Disciples: La Tradition Vidalienne

Jean Brunhes (1869–1930)

• Jean Brunhes studied under Vidal and held the first chair of human geography at Fribourg in Switzerland, later moving to the Collège de France (1912). He carried the tradition abroad.
• La Géographie humaine: essai de classification positive (1910), translated into English in 1920, limited human geography to the visible, tangible facts of human activity, grouped into three classes:
  1. Unproductive occupation of the soil: houses, settlements, urban agglomerations and roads.
  2. Conquest of plants and animals: cultivation and animal husbandry, including domestication, pastoral nomadism and transhumance.
  3. Destructive exploitation (robber economy): clearing forests, hunting and mining, which deplete resources and can leave poverty behind.
• Beyond these “essential facts” lay wider studies: population, economic, political, social and historical geography, and regional geography as their synthesis.
• Two principles:
  • Principle of activity: all phenomena are always changing, growing or shrinking. Mountains, sea levels, glaciers, deltas and forests must be studied in time, not as static.
  • Principle of interaction: physical and human phenomena are interrelated in endless combinations, an extension of terrestrial unity.
• He said the two basic maps of human geography are a map of water and a map of population, and urged study of the landscape as if seen from a balloon. He blended Vidal’s genre de vie with Otto Schlüter’s cultural landscape.
• Nature, for him, is “not mandatory but permissive”. With Camille Vallaux he wrote La Géographie de l’histoire (1921).
• India’s mining belts and the stripped Aravalli hills are classic cases of Brunhes’s robber economy.

Emmanuel de Martonne (1873–1955)

• Emmanuel de Martonne, Vidal’s pupil and son-in-law, was the first French geographer to specialise in physical geography and the leader of French geography between the wars.
  • He taught at Rennes (1899) and Lyon (1905), then at the Sorbonne from 1909, and was president of the International Geographical Union (1938–52).
• Traité de géographie physique (1909, later enlarged to three volumes) unified geomorphology, climatology, hydrology and biogeography. It spread William Morris Davis’s cycle of erosion in France, after he met Davis in 1904.
• His aridity index (1926) relates precipitation to temperature to identify dry regions, and is still used.
• Regional work on Wallachia and the Carpathians, Les Alpes (1926) and the two volumes on Central Europe in the Géographie universelle (1930–31) joined physical and human geography.
• At the Paris Peace Conference (1919) he advised on the new boundaries of Romania and the Balkans, an early case of applied political geography.

Lucien Gallois (1857–1941)

• Lucien Gallois, one of Vidal’s first pupils, succeeded him at the Sorbonne and co-directed the Annales. His thesis (1890) studied the German geographers of the Renaissance.
• Régions naturelles et noms de pays (1908) traced how the idea of the natural region arose with the first geological maps and argued that the term should be kept for physical units. The facts in which human activity and nature interact form the field of human geography.
• He edited the Géographie universelle (from 1927) to completion before the Second World War, a monument of the regional tradition.

Albert Demangeon (1872–1940)

• Albert Demangeon wrote the model regional monograph La Picardie (1905), based on walking every lane of the region and on archives. He taught at Lille and from 1911 at the Sorbonne.
• He pioneered the study of rural settlement, classifying farmsteads by their plan and farm function and settlements by their degree of concentration or dispersion. He showed that the mode of agriculture shapes settlement form.
• L’Empire britannique (1923) and volumes on the British Isles and the Low Countries in the Géographie universelle broadened the tradition to colonial and economic geography.
• Problèmes de géographie humaine (1942) defined human geography as the study of human groups in relation to their milieu, under four themes:
  1. The influence of the milieu on modes of life.
  2. Changes in genres de vie under human influences.
  3. The distribution of human groups, as the result of milieu and level of civilisation.
  4. Human establishments in the landscape.
• His guiding rules were possibilities rather than determinants, an inductive regional base and a historical perspective.

Camille Vallaux, Raoul Blanchard and Maximilien Sorre

• Camille Vallaux (1870–1945), in Le Sol et l’État (1911) and Les Sciences géographiques (1925), described geography as both a unitary, autonomous field and an auxiliary of many sciences, “almost in itself a philosophy of the world of man”. He also doubted whether regional synthesis was more than a teaching device.
• Raoul Blanchard founded the Grenoble school and its Institut de géographie alpine. He wrote on Flanders (1906), on Grenoble as a pioneering urban study, on many French cities and on Les Alpes occidentales (12 volumes, completed 1956). His view of Alpine relief, which stressed structure and glaciation, clashed with de Martonne’s Davisian reading.
• Maximilien Sorre gave human geography an ecological basis in Les Fondements de la géographie humaine (1943–52), on its biological, technical and habitat foundations. His idea of pathogenic complexes (host, vector and pathogen in their milieu) founded French medical geography.

Disciplinary Trends in French Geography

Regional Geography

• Regional geography was the core of the French school. Merging the geological and historical traditions, it produced a regional synthesis admired across the world for its depth and literary quality.
• A region was treated as a unique functional whole, more than the sum of its parts.
• Landmark monographs: Vidal’s Tableau (1903), Demangeon’s La Picardie (1905), Blanchard’s La Flandre (1906), de Martonne’s Les Alpes (1926) and Europe centrale (1930–31), and Roger Dion’s Le Val de Loire (1934).
• Each described landforms, climate, vegetation, settlement and society to bring out the personality of the region and its man–environment relationship.
• The same synthesis shaped regional writing in India, from O. H. K. Spate’s India and Pakistan (1954) to R. L. Singh’s India: A Regional Geography (1971), with its hierarchy of macro, meso and micro regions.

Human and Historical Geography

• Vidal is regarded as the founder of human geography, and his pupils built the branch: Brunhes’s classification, Demangeon’s rural settlement studies, Sorre’s human ecology.
• Pierre Deffontaines extended Brunhes’s work to the geography of religion, forests and winter, and founded Géographie humaine et ethnologie (1948).
• Roger Dion used archives to explain the rural landscapes of France (1934), the contrast of open fields in the north and enclosed fields in the south, and the history of viticulture (1959). He warned against reading strict environmental controls into historical change.

Urban Geography

• Demangeon and Gallois studied the growth of Paris, and J. Levainville studied Rouen.
• Raoul Blanchard’s Grenoble was among the first full urban monographs. It treated site, situation, historical growth and present structure, a scheme widely copied, and he also wrote on Lille, Nancy, Lyon, Marseille, Nice, Bordeaux and the cities of Quebec.
• Jean Gottmann (1915–1994) coined Megalopolis (1961) for the urbanised seaboard of the north-eastern United States from Boston to Washington. The term is now applied to corridors such as Delhi–NCR and Mumbai–Pune.

Political Geography

• André Siegfried, in Tableau politique de la France de l’Ouest (1913), founded electoral geography. He related voting patterns to soils, settlement and land tenure, and wrote widely on Britain, the United States, Canada, Latin America and the Suez and Panama canals.
• Jacques Ancel, author of Géopolitique (1936) and Géographie des frontières (1938), tried to rescue geopolitics from Haushofer’s German Geopolitik. He held that language is not a sure guide to nationhood. He died in 1943 after internment by the Nazis.
• Jean Gottmann explained the partitioning of political space by two forces: circulation, the movement that drives change, and iconography, the symbols and beliefs that bind a territory and resist change.

Colonial and Tropical Geography

• After 1871, colonial expansion in Africa and South-East Asia required knowledge of the new territories, and colonial geography emerged as a field.
  • Marcel Dubois held the first chair of colonial geography at the Sorbonne (1893), and centres of colonial study opened in Lyon, Bordeaux, Caen and Lille.
  • Demangeon’s L’Empire britannique (1923) compared the British Empire with France’s.
• Pierre Gourou’s Les Pays tropicaux (1947) turned colonial geography into tropical geography, focused on peasant societies, soils and disease.
• This tradition continues in India through the French Institute of Pondicherry (1955), whose ecology department maps the forests and vegetation of the Western Ghats and South India.

Physical Geography

• De Martonne made physical geography a full partner in the French school. Henri Baulig at Strasbourg brought Davisian geomorphology and eustatic explanations of erosion surfaces in the Massif Central.
• Emmanuel de Margerie pioneered landform study (Les Formes du terrain, 1888) and translated Eduard Suess’s Face of the Earth into French. André Cholley extended rational morphology in the Paris Basin.
• Jean Tricart and André Cailleux developed climatic geomorphology, relating landform systems to past and present climates.

Current Trends

• Post-war change (1945–1970):
  • The Vidalian tradition weakened as geography drew closer to geomorphology on one side and sociology and economics on the other. Systematic work, especially urban and economic geography, expanded.
  • Pierre George, a Marxist-influenced geographer, argued that geography is a human science of societies and their spaces. With Raymond Guglielmo, Bernard Kayser and Yves Lacoste he called for an applied géographie active (1964) in planning.
  • Quantitative methods arrived late, slowed by the literary regional tradition, but became standard from the 1970s.
• Theoretical renewal (1970s–1990s):
  • Roger Brunet founded L’Espace géographique (1972), proposed chorèmes, a grammar of elementary spatial models, and led the RECLUS group and a new Géographie universelle (1990–96).
  • Yves Lacoste’s journal Hérodote (1976) and his book La géographie, ça sert, d’abord, à faire la guerre revived geopolitics as a critical study of power over territory.
  • Armand Frémont’s La Région, espace vécu (1976) introduced lived space, a French counterpart of humanistic geography.
  • The philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s La Production de l’espace (1974) became a foundation of the socio-spatial dialectic.
• Today: French geography is plural. It includes spatial analysis and GIS, cultural geography (Paul Claval), geopolitics, environment and risk and critical theory drawing on phenomenology and hermeneutics.
  • Regional studies remain significant, but they now study the organisation of space: networks, metropolitan regions and territorial planning (aménagement du territoire).