Peat Bogs, Marshes and Fen as Disputed Landscapes
87
more milk which reduced waterborne disease and gave local children
a much improved chance of surviving their first decade, the period in
which mortality rates were highest. That the English model was dominant would appear to be proven by the fact that in 1800, at the height
of hostilities between Britain and France, the revolutionary Directoire
commissioned an eighteen-volume translation of selected agronomic
works by Young, published under the title, Le Cultivateur anglois.
Their author was suitably triumphalist in 1799, writing on the ubiquitous benefits brought to Lincolnshire by the drainage and reclamation
of its fens: by this act the local population could boast “health improved, morals corrected and the community enriched”.
49
There is, of course, a more ambivalent post-script to this singularly progressive vision of eighteenth-century wetland “improvement”. After all, it is not with impunity that man modifies such fine,
natural “autoregulatory” ecosystems. Two points seem most salient in
conclusion. Firstly, the technical advances which had initially facilitated wetland draining and enclosure were the prelude to yet greater
technical advances in land management which ultimately deterred
farmers from reclaiming marsh and fen; instead they opted for less
expensive, less labour-intensive means of increasing productivity,
such as buying into the bourgeoning nineteenth-century fertilizer industry. Combined with more frequent, cheaper foreign imports of
foodstuffs, this second wave of the agricultural revolution left a lot of
reclaimed wetland derelict, although it took a long time, if ever, to return to its former state of natural equilibrium. Secondly, and conversely, industrialization, with all its concomitant political and
economic crises, far from sounding the death knell of peat farming,
actually intensified interest in it as a low-grade fossil fuel source. By
1869 France was actually exporting 321,000 tonnes of peat a year at a
price of more than ten francs per tonne. Peat farming remained a persistent, albeit embattled, staple of rural life in certain regions of
France into the twentieth century, to the extent that the right-wing
blood-and-soil novelist, Alphonse de Chateaubriant chose to set his
extremely successful 1923 work, La Brière, among a community of
peat-cutters in the Loire. Yet, more happily, the twentieth century also
saw towards its end a belated recognition that wetlands were to be
valued and conserved as unique natural wildernesses – ironically in
___________________________
49 Young, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Lincoln, p. 246.
87
more milk which reduced waterborne disease and gave local children
a much improved chance of surviving their first decade, the period in
which mortality rates were highest. That the English model was dominant would appear to be proven by the fact that in 1800, at the height
of hostilities between Britain and France, the revolutionary Directoire
commissioned an eighteen-volume translation of selected agronomic
works by Young, published under the title, Le Cultivateur anglois.
Their author was suitably triumphalist in 1799, writing on the ubiquitous benefits brought to Lincolnshire by the drainage and reclamation
of its fens: by this act the local population could boast “health improved, morals corrected and the community enriched”.
49
There is, of course, a more ambivalent post-script to this singularly progressive vision of eighteenth-century wetland “improvement”. After all, it is not with impunity that man modifies such fine,
natural “autoregulatory” ecosystems. Two points seem most salient in
conclusion. Firstly, the technical advances which had initially facilitated wetland draining and enclosure were the prelude to yet greater
technical advances in land management which ultimately deterred
farmers from reclaiming marsh and fen; instead they opted for less
expensive, less labour-intensive means of increasing productivity,
such as buying into the bourgeoning nineteenth-century fertilizer industry. Combined with more frequent, cheaper foreign imports of
foodstuffs, this second wave of the agricultural revolution left a lot of
reclaimed wetland derelict, although it took a long time, if ever, to return to its former state of natural equilibrium. Secondly, and conversely, industrialization, with all its concomitant political and
economic crises, far from sounding the death knell of peat farming,
actually intensified interest in it as a low-grade fossil fuel source. By
1869 France was actually exporting 321,000 tonnes of peat a year at a
price of more than ten francs per tonne. Peat farming remained a persistent, albeit embattled, staple of rural life in certain regions of
France into the twentieth century, to the extent that the right-wing
blood-and-soil novelist, Alphonse de Chateaubriant chose to set his
extremely successful 1923 work, La Brière, among a community of
peat-cutters in the Loire. Yet, more happily, the twentieth century also
saw towards its end a belated recognition that wetlands were to be
valued and conserved as unique natural wildernesses – ironically in
___________________________
49 Young, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Lincoln, p. 246.