Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 1 (2008), p. 115

When I was an undergraduate at University College London in the early 1960s, Professor H.C.Darby stressed the importance of marshland drainage as a contributory process in making the English landscape. He placed particular emphasis on the drainage of the Fens whose ‘agricultural improvement’ from the seventeenth century onwards he had investigated during the 1930s. After exposure to British examples, we learned about marshland drainage in France, the Netherlands, Germany and Russia, adopting the same perspective of ‘improvement’ and paying little attention to the needs of local people whose livelihoods linked to fishing, fowling and grazing were destroyed in the name of progress. Now, problematic marshes have been renamed ‘wetlands’ whose resources are valued for nature conservation and tourism. As Jean-Michel Derex remarks in the present volume: ‘Today, wilderness has become desirable’ (p.15). In addition, researchers insist on incorporating palaeological evidence rather than relying on the archival record and surviving landscape features. The thirty papers contained in Les zones humides provide a splendid example of interdisciplinary progress and demonstrate how the range of research on wetlands has expanded in recent decades. They were presented at the colloquium organized by the Groupe d’histoire des zones humides and held at Le Blanc (on the margins of the Brenne wetland) in October 2005. Almost all focus on French examples, with a handful considering case studies in Belgium, Spain and northern Italy.

Wetlands as contested spaces form the key theme underlying the first cluster of essays that explore environments as diverse as Flanders, Burgundy and the valley of the Loire. Powerful landowners and monastic houses managed, indeed sometimes created, wetlands in medieval times to implant fishponds and damp pastures, sometimes sweeping away peasant landholdings and erasing traces on previously occupied landscapes. Townsfolk valued the fish, meat and firewood that wetlands provided and struggled with local farmers over their control. A second conflict revolved around the challenge of producing more cereals to feed hungry mouths that could be met by marshland drainage in the Marais Poitevin, Bas-Languedoc and countless other pays. Following the Revolution of 1789, wetlands that survived repeated attempts at ‘improvement’ were opened to hunting by the rural poor, but, after half a century, legislation was introduced to control the ensuing free-for-all by defining ‘open seasons’. This issue remains hotly contested to the present day.

A multiplicity of source materials – palaeological, archaeological and archival – serves to reveal the fluctuating fortunes of French wetlands from the Camargue and the Brière to the coastal marshes of Brittany and Normandy. Not surprisingly, pride of place is given to the environmental history of the Grande Brenne with two lengthy contributions employing palaeological techniques to complement scant written records in order to trace how landowners managed natural wetlands and created more extensive fishponds in medieval times. The reappraisal of wetlands as valued environments to be protected in the name of nature conservation or as an expression of ‘green tourism’ forms the guiding theme for the final cluster of examples, extending from coastal lagoons on the Mediterranean, through the internal wetlands of the Sologne, Brenne, Bresse, Champagne humide and Armagnac, to damp valleys in the uplands of the Massif Central where abandoned millponds now form foci for nature reserves. As in the past, the introduction of new uses for wetlands does not pass without opposition, as farmers contest the precise definition of recreational areas, huntsmen challenge controls on their traditional activity, and locals demonstrate about the impact of EU directives for environmental protection. This attractively produced volume amply demonstrates how research on the environmental history and historical geography of French wetlands has moved beyond the stories being recounted almost half a century ago.