Paul Vidal de la Blache
Encyclopedia
Pézenas
Pézenas is a commune in the Hérault département in Languedoc-Roussillon, southern France. At the 1999 census, its population was 7443.-Name:...
, Hérault
Hérault
Hérault is a department in the south of France named after the Hérault river.-History:Hérault is one of the original 83 departments created during the French Revolution on 4 March 1790...
, 22 January 1845 - Tamaris-sur-Mer, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur
Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur
Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur or PACA is one of the 27 regions of France.It is made up of:* the former French province of Provence* the former papal territory of Avignon, known as Comtat Venaissin...
, 5 April 1918) was a French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
geographer
Geography
Geography is the science that studies the lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena of Earth. A literal translation would be "to describe or write about the Earth". The first person to use the word "geography" was Eratosthenes...
. He is considered to be the founder of the modern French geography
Geography
Geography is the science that studies the lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena of Earth. A literal translation would be "to describe or write about the Earth". The first person to use the word "geography" was Eratosthenes...
and also the founder of the French School of Geopolitics
Geopolitics
Geopolitics, from Greek Γη and Πολιτική in broad terms, is a theory that describes the relation between politics and territory whether on local or international scale....
. He conceived the idea of genre de vie, which is the belief that the lifestyle of a particular region reflects the economic, social, ideological and psychological identities imprinted on the landscape.
Life
Paul Vidal de la Blache was the son of a professor who subsequently became an academic administrator. He was sent to boarding school at the Institution Favard at the Lycée CharlemagneLycée Charlemagne
The Lycée Charlemagne is located in the Marais quarter of the 4th arrondissement of Paris, the capital city of France.Constructed many centuries before it became a lycée, the building originally served as the home of the Order of the Jesuits...
in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
. Afterward, he attended the École Normale Supérieure
École Normale Supérieure
The École normale supérieure is one of the most prestigious French grandes écoles...
. He entered the Ecole Normale Superieure in 1863 and received the ‘’agregation’’ (certification) in history and geography in 1866. He was appointed to the Ecole francaise d’Athens, taking advantage of the opportunity to travel in Italy, Palestine, and Egypt (in the latter, being present at the inauguration of the Suez Canal). There he studied Greek
Ancient Greece
Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...
archeology for three years.
Upon returning to France, in 1870 he married Laure Marie Elizabeth Mondot, with whom he had five children. He held several teaching positions, notably at the Lycee d'Angers and at the Ecole Preparatoire de l'Enseignment Superieur des Lettres et des Sciences. La Blache received his doctorate at the Sorbonne in 1872 with a dissertation in ancient history, afterwards published as Hérode Atticus: Étude critique sur sa vie. He began working at the Nancy-Université
Nancy-Université
Nancy-Université federates the three principal institutes of higher education of Nancy, in Lorraine, France:* Henri Poincaré University : natural sciences, wrapping several faculties and engineering schools...
. Vidal de la Blache returned to the École Normale Supérieure in 1877 as a full Professor of Geography and taught there for the next 21 years. He transferred to the Université de Paris
University of Paris
The University of Paris was a university located in Paris, France and one of the earliest to be established in Europe. It was founded in the mid 12th century, and officially recognized as a university probably between 1160 and 1250...
, where he continued teaching until he retired in 1909, at the age of 64.
Vidal de la Blache founded the French school of geography and, together with Lucien Gallois
Lucien Gallois
Lucien Louis Joseph Gallois was a French geographer who was a native of Metz.He was a student at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he took classes from Paul Vidal de la Blache . In 1884 he received his agrégation, and in 1893 became a lecturer at the Sorbonne...
, the Annales de Géographie (1893), of which he was the editor until his death. The Annales de Géographie became an influential academic journal that promoted the concept of human geography as the study of man and his relationship to his environment.
Works
Vidal de la Blache produced a large number of publications; including 17 books, 107 articles, and 240 reports and reviews. Only some of these have been translated into English. His most influential works included an elementary textbook Collection de Cartes Murales Accomppagnees de Notices along with Histoire et Geographie: Atlas General and La France de l'Est. Two of his best-known writings are Tableau de la Geographie de la France (1903) and Principles of Human Geography (1918).The “Vidalian” program
The Tableau de la Geographie de la France was a summary of Vidal’s methods, a manifesto whose production required a dozen years of work. It surveyed the entire country, taking note of everything he had observed in his innumerable notebooks. He took an interest in human and political aspects, geology (an infant discipline at the time, little connected with geography), transportation, and history. He was the first to tie together all those domains in a somewhat quantitative approach, using numbers sparingly, essentially narrative, even descriptive—not far removed, in some ways from a guidebook or a manual for landscape painting.Influenced by German thought, especially by Friedrich Ratzel
Friedrich Ratzel
Friedrich Ratzel was a German geographer and ethnographer, notable for first using the term Lebensraum in the sense that the National Socialists later would.-Life:...
whom he had met in Germany, Vidal has been linked to the term “possibilism
Possibilism (geography)
Possibilism in cultural geography is the theory that the environment sets certain constraints or limitations, but culture is otherwise determined by social conditions. In Cultural ecology Marshall Sahlins used this concept in order to develop alternative approaches to the environmental determinism...
,” which he never used but which summed up conveniently his opposition to the determinism
Environmental determinism
Environmental determinism, also known as climatic determinism or geographical determinism, is the view that the physical environment, rather than social conditions, determines culture...
of the sort that was defended by some nineteenth century geographers. The concept of possibilism has been used by historians to evoke the epistemological fuzziness that, according to them, characterized the approach of Vidal’s school. Described as “idiographic
Nomothetic and idiographic
Nomothetic and idiographic are terms used by Kantian philosopher Wilhelm Windelband to describe two distinct approaches to knowledge, each one corresponding to a different intellectual tendency, and each one corresponding to a different branch of academe....
,” this approach was seen as blocking the evolution of the discipline in a “monothetic
Nomothetic and idiographic
Nomothetic and idiographic are terms used by Kantian philosopher Wilhelm Windelband to describe two distinct approaches to knowledge, each one corresponding to a different intellectual tendency, and each one corresponding to a different branch of academe....
” direction that would be the result of experimentation, making it possible to unlock laws or make scientific demonstrations.
Vidal published a visionary article on the regions of France in 1910. He had been requested by the Prime Minister, Aristide Briand
Aristide Briand
Aristide Briand was a French statesman who served eleven terms as Prime Minister of France during the French Third Republic and received the 1926 Nobel Peace Prize.- Early life :...
, to create some regional groupings with representative organs. Vidal proposed to cut France into regions organized around a metropolis. The economic realities of the modern world, with worldwide competition and the shrinking of the planet due to accelerated communications, made him think that less centralized, less static modes of organization ought to be promoted.
“Vidalian” geography is based on varied forms of cartography, on monographs, and on several notable concepts, including “landscapes” (paysages), “settings” (milieux), “regions,” “lifeways” (genres de vie), and “density.” Many of the master’s students, particularly in their dissertations, produced regional geographies that were both physical and human (even economic). The context chosen for these descriptions was a region, whose contours were not always very firmly fixed scientifically. Undoubtedly because this approach was more structured, many of Vidal’s successors, and still more those of Martonne, specialized in a geomorphology that became gradually stronger, but that also, by its narrowness, weakened French geography.
Between the two world wars, “classical geography” stayed in the mold established by the Vidalian tradition. It was defended by an establishment that marginalized all attempts at epistemological renewal, to such an extent that after World War II the discipline was at the same stage where it had been left at Vidal’s death. Arguably, his disciples were bound to a particular aspect of the master’s thought and did not know how to deal with complexity and growth, and as a consequence the field of the discipline shrank. An immutable triad imposed itself on research and university studies: physical geography (Martonne, Baulig), regional geography (Blanchard, Cholley), and human geography (Brunhes, Demangeon, Sorre); in descending order of frequency and importance geomorphology, then rural geography, regional geography, and finally tropical geography.
This classical geography—naturalistic, monographic, morphological, literary, and didactic—would experience a rapid renewal and a radical transformation into a social science with the revolution of the 1960s and 1970s and the rise of urban and industrial studies.
Criticism of Vidalian geography
Some adherents to modern geography as the science of the social dimension of space have criticized Vidal’s geography as the natural science of lifeways. According to this view, Vidal’s ideas made nature the external force that drove societies. They served to validate the equation of nation, territory, and sovereignty, and the fundamental idea of the French Third Republic that patriotism was the supreme value. The reasoning that made nature the driving force for societies was only tenable in regard to rural and seemingly static societies. Vidal avoided looking at industrialization, colonialism, and urbanization. He called those concepts “historical winds,” like gusts on the surface of a pond. As he himself wrote at the end of his Tableau de la géographie de la France, “Close study of what is fixed and permanent in the geographical conditions of France ought to be or to become more than ever our guide.”Why was Vidalian geography so triumphant in France up to 1950? A notable explanation is that French thought during the Third Republic was dominated by nationalism, which was, arguably, a means of controlling the populations. History saw itself as being given the role of showing the emergence of the nation, and geography’s role was not to refer to politics. A nearly static society could be explained by a static nature. Vidal’s ideas formed the main paradigm
Paradigm
The word paradigm has been used in science to describe distinct concepts. It comes from Greek "παράδειγμα" , "pattern, example, sample" from the verb "παραδείκνυμι" , "exhibit, represent, expose" and that from "παρά" , "beside, beyond" + "δείκνυμι" , "to show, to point out".The original Greek...
for the geographical science of the epoch, controlling the universities, the research centers, and the granting of degrees. Urban thinkers had no place in France until 1950, which explains why geographers such as Jean Gottmann
Jean Gottmann
Jean Gottmann FRS was a French geographer who was most widely known for his seminal study on the urban region of the Northeast Megalopolis. His main contributions to human geography were in the sub-fields of urban, political, economic, historical and regional geography...
left France to make their careers in the United States.