The Great Forestry Survey of 1669-1671

Abstract

A program of forestry surveys and reform conducted in France during the 17th century has been accused of rationalizing the landscape and suppressing peasant culture; tools of cartography were said to have made rural lands both more legible to the state and alien to locals. On closer inspection, it seems that the surveys did not produce abstract rationalizations of the forests that made them ‘readable’ at a distance or more orderly on the ground; mainly the reformers developed databases or archives of misuses of the forests by nobles who were supposed to be managing them for the crown. This paper follows one reformer, Louis de Froidour, as he moved through the Midi-Pyrenees, using a set of letters he wrote while doing forest surveys for the reform. He described and explained noble opposition to his entering ‘their forests’, and how he nonetheless conducted the required surveys and acquired the necessary documents. Froidour not only did not target peasant villages, but also sometimes even protected forests that he said locals needed more than the crown. He had no romantic affection for mountain inhabitants (quite the opposite). He protected their interests because villagers rather than nobles paid taxes, and so disrupting their economies would not benefit the state. This case study, while only focusing on a small area of France, provides valuable insight into the logic of the reform, and its political consequences.