Plus ça change - 'Genre de Vie'

Paul Vidal de la Blache, 1845 - 1918

Paul Vidal de la Blache was a 19th Century French human geographer, who melded his interests in archaeology, history and geography.

He was the dominant figure in Human Geography in France at the turn of the twentieth century, and was still widely quoted when I read Geography at Cambridge 1962-65.

He suggested that a deep but mutual relationship could develop over time between the natural environment and man's activities. In that sense, Vidal would have had some sympathy with the concept of solastalgia. But he was also emphatic that our responses to the environment were optional and dynamic.

His views were shaped largely by dissatisfaction with the environmental Determinism that dominated nineteenth-century geography, particularly as argued by the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel.

For Ratzel, for example, the 'mediteranean' climates of southern Europe, California, Chile, the Cape and southern Australia would impose shared responses to land-use - and that in turn would shape culture. Well - he was right about one thing - they all produce good wine.

In contrast, Vidal de la Blache proposed the doctrine of Possibilism, which holds that a set of environmental conditions can give rise to different cultural responses.

This, he argued, necessitated much closer attention to history and a narrower focus on 'places' than was usual in the human geography of the day, which often drew its comparisons across countries and major regions.

He conceived the concept 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.

This led to studies of natural regions and their matching rural cultures, as distinct 'pays' from which, I was once kindly reminded by a French friend in Manila, one can all too easily become 'depaysané'.

La Blache received his doctorate in 1872 and began working at the Nancy-Université. Vidal de la Blache returned to the Ecole Normale Superieure in 1877 as a full Professor of Geography and taught there the next twenty-one years. He transferred to the Université de Paris, where he continued teaching until he retired in 1909 at the age of sixty-four.

Vidal de la Blache's interests strongly marked the next generation of French geographers, who not only inherited many of the theoretical and methodological preoccupations of his work but also finished projects that he had sketched or left incomplete at his death.

Vidal de la Blache's major works include Etats et nations de l'Europe ( 1889 ), Tableau de la géographie de la France ( 1903 ), and La France de l'est ( 1917 ).