Ecology and Artifice: Shifting Perceptions of Nature and High Technology in Postwar France

Abstract

Ecology and Artifice: Shifting Perceptions of Nature and High Technology in Postwar France MICHAEL D. BESS The French do not enjoy a very positive image in the eyes of the world’s green activists. During the early 1980s, when the German Green Party was clamorously making headlines in the Bundestag, the French environmentalists remained relatively weak and divided.1 While the Italians, British, Dutch, and Germans were taking to the streets, launching huge demonstrations against nuclear weapons, the French Left kept noticeably aloof.2 Indeed, to a foreign observer, the primary association between the Socialist government of François Dr. Bess is assistant professor of history at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches 20th-century European history. He finished his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1989, under the supervision of Susanna Barrows and Martin Jay, and is the author of Realism, Utopia, and the Mushroom Cloud: Four Activist Intellectuals and Their Strategiesfor Peace, 1945-1989: Louise VVras (France); Leo Szilard (USA); E. P. Thompson (England); Danilo Dolci (Italy) (Chicago, 1993). He would like to thank the Vanderbilt University Research Council and the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt for funding his research for this project, as well as the following, whose kind assistance and advice have proved invaluable: Susanna Barrows, Mark Cioc, David Coe, Andrée Corvol, James Epstein, Carole Fink, Paul Freedman, Robert Frost, Roger Hahn, Joel Harrington, Gabrielle Hecht, Thomas Hughes, Paul Israel, Martin Jay, Brice Lalonde, Bruno Latour, Laurence Mermet, Théodore Monod, John Opie, David Pace, Matthew Ramsey, Mark Rose, Helmut Smith, Arleen Tuchman, Meredith Veldman , Antoine Waechter, Spencer Weart, and the reviewers for Technology and Culture. The author owes a special debt to Alain Beltran, Jean Carlier, Jean-Pierre Raffin, and Pierre Samuel, both for their insights and comments and for generously allowing him access to their rich personal archives on environmental issues in French history. 'On the history of the French environmentalist movement in the early 1980s, see, for instance, Jean-Luc Bennahmias and Agnès Roche, Des verts de toutes les couleurs: Histoire et sociologie du mouvement écolo (Paris, 1992); Guillaume Sainteny, Les verts (Paris, 1991); Dominique Simonnet, L'écologisme, 2d ed. (Paris, 1982); and Marc Abélès, ed., Le défi écologiste (Paris, 1993). 2See Diana Johnstone, The Politics of Euromissiles (London, 1984); and Jolyon Howorth , France: The Politics ofPeace (London, 1984). See also Jolyon Howorth, “Consensus and Mythology: Security Alternatives in Post-Gaullist France,” in France in World Poli­ tics, ed. Robert Aldrich and John Connell (London, 1989).© 1995 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/95/3604-0003$01.00 830 Perceptions ofNature and High Technology in Postwar France 831 Mitterrand and the ecological movement occurred in 1985, when French secret agents blew up the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior— and the Socialists’ response amounted to little more than a lame at­ tempt at a cover-up.3 After the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, the French once again stood out among the nations of Europe: day after day, while the Italians, British, Belgians, Swiss, and Germans were issuing iodine to children or banning the sale of lettuce, the French government insisted that its neighbors were overreacting, that the radioactive cloud posed no threat, and that France, which possessed the world’s most concen­ trated network of nuclear reactors, remained fundamentally safe. The French government’s chief scientist in charge of emergency pub­ lic health measures went so far as to tell the French people in a press conference on May 2, 1986 (six days after the reactor meltdown in Ukraine): “I personally am ready to go and stand, without protection, a few kilometers away from the Chernobyl reactor, just to show you how small the danger is.” Ten days later the same official admitted that the government had deceived the people of France, deliberately concealing the fact that the radioactive cloud from Chernobyl had passed over significant parts of French territory.4 Nevertheless, despite these “un-green” images, I will argue in this article that the French are by no means less green than the citizens of other industrialized countries. Rather, their favorable attitudes toward certain forms of...