De la dégradation des rivières en France, par le déboisement et le défrichement des montagnes.

CHAP. 14: On the degradation of rivers in France, by the deforestation and clearing of mountains.

At the beginning of its revolution, France made an experiment that has shed a great light on the question to be resolved here. In this country, as in all civilized nations, the soil had been consecrated, since the most remote times, to different uses. The most fertile parts, those found at the bottom of the basins, or in the depressions situated on the plateaus of the mountains, were given over to cultivation. Those that were least fit to be cultivated, and which were found on the highest parts, or on the steepest slopes, served as pastures or were covered with forests. The former had been converted, since very distant times, into private properties; the latter had remained undivided, and were employed to satisfy a part of the needs of the communes.

Seeing, on the one hand, a part of the population that possessed no property, and, on the other hand, lands of a vast extent that remained uncultivated, some members of the national assemblies imagined that they would render an immense service to the less well-off classes, if they gave these lands over to cultivation, and if they made proprietors of the men who had only their arms to exist; they proposed, consequently, to partition, among all the inhabitants of each commune, the lands that until then had remained undivided; and their proposition was favorably received.

A law of 28 August 1792 had put the communes in possession of all the properties that had been, or were supposed to have been, taken from them by the feudal power since 1669, and which had thus fallen into the hands of the lords. A second law, passed on 10 June of the following year, decreed that all properties belonging to the communes, of whatever nature they might be, could be partitioned, if they were susceptible of partition; the only exceptions were woods, public squares, promenades, public ways, and buildings for the use of the communes. The exception established with regard to woods even ceased to exist, when it was recognized, according to the visits and official reports of the agents of the forestry administration, that these woods were not of a sufficient product to be preserved.

The partition was to be made per capita of the inhabitants domiciled, of every age and every sex, absent or present. Non-resident proprietors were excluded from it; but any person domiciled in the commune for one year before the promulgation of the law was counted among the number of inhabitants. Farmers, sharecroppers, farmhands, servants, and generally all persons having a year of residence in the commune, were therefore called to the distribution of the communal lands. The share of children under the age of fourteen was to be delivered to their fathers, who would have the use of it until the proprietors had reached their fourteenth year.

From the moment this law was promulgated, it was put into execution with an incredible activity; the more miserable the populations were, the more they rushed with ardor upon lands whose value imagination had decupled. The mountains, which until then had seemed fit only to serve as pastures or to furnish firewood, were stripped of their greenery; the trees were felled, the stumps were pulled up, the turf was turned over and burned to serve as fertilizer [^78].

Those of these lands that were situated on plateaus at first gave some harvests; but as they received no fertilizer, and as the new proprietors were ignorant of the art of varying cultivation, they were not long in being exhausted; the greatest part was soon struck with complete sterility, or gave only a meager harvest of barley or oats every ten or twelve years [^79].

The lands that were situated on the steep slopes of the mountains were still less profitable to those who, after having stripped them of trees, cleared them; the first storm rains they received carried them violently into the valleys and the rivers, and left in their place only bare rocks.

I saw, in those times of grandeur and folly, some of these torrents formed by storms fallen on newly cleared mountains, carry away, with a horrible crash, not only the soils, but the trees, the rocks, the houses that were in their path, and spread terror among the populations of the valleys, who, struck by these unheard-of disasters, imagined that hell had been unleashed to punish the impieties of the revolution [^80].

Lively and numerous complaints arose against these two laws. By another law, of 21 Prairial an IV (9 June 1796), their execution was provisionally suspended: one reads in the preamble of this latter law, that “it is urgent to stop the fatal effects of the literal execution of the law of 10 June 1793, of which several major inconveniences have already been felt.”

The provisional suspension, ordered by this second law, was made definitive by the law of 9 and 19 Ventôse an XII (29 February 1804), and by the decree of the following 9 Brumaire (31 October 1804). Article 1 of the law of Ventôse ordered the execution of the partitions already effected, and of which an act had been drawn up. The partitions of which no act had been drawn up were a transfer of property, according to Article 3, only for those who had already cleared or planted, or enclosed by walls, ditches, or living hedges, the lot that had fallen to them, and who, after having made the declaration of the land they occupied, submitted to paying the commune an annual fee fixed by estimation. It was ordered, by Article 5, that all communal lands possessed at the time of the promulgation of the law, without an act of partition, and whose possessors had not fulfilled the conditions prescribed by Article 3, would return to the hands of the communities of inhabitants.

These dispositions seemed made to stop the partitions of communal lands, but they did not forbid their clearing; they did not stop the destruction of the woods. The decree of 9 Brumaire provided for this omission: it declared that the communities of inhabitants which, not having profited from the law of 10 June 1793, relative to the partition of communal lands, had preserved, after the publication of this law, the mode of use of their communal lands, would continue to have the use of them in the same manner, and that this mode could not be changed except with the authorization of the government. The partitions already made were maintained as they had been by the law of 24 Prairial an IV.

The law of 9 Floréal an XI (29 April 1803) placed some new obstacles to deforestation, by applying to the woods of private individuals the same dispositions as to the woods of the communes. Article 1 declared that, for twenty-five years, no wood could be grubbed up and cleared until six months after the declaration thereof had been made by the proprietor before the forestry conservator of the arrondissement where the wood was situated. The forestry administration was authorized, by Article 2, to have an objection placed, without delay, to the clearing of the wood, on the condition of referring it, before the expiration of the six months, to the minister of finance, upon whose report the government would rule definitively within the same period. According to Article 3, in case of contravention of the dispositions of the preceding article, the proprietor was to be condemned, upon the requisition of the conservator of the arrondissement, to restore an equal quantity of land to the nature of woods, and to a fine that could not be below one-fiftieth nor above one-twentieth of the value of the grubbed-up wood. Should the proprietor fail to effect the planting or the sowing, within the period fixed by the judgment of condemnation, it was, according to Article 4 of the law, to be provided for at his expense by the forestry administration. Finally, Article 5 excepted from these dispositions unenclosed woods, of an extent less than two hectares, when they were not situated on the summit or the slope of a mountain, and parks or gardens enclosed by walls, hedges or ditches, adjoining the main dwelling [^81].The law that authorized the partition and clearing of communal lands was in force for only about three years, from 10 June 1793 to 9 June 1796; but, in this interval, it produced the most disastrous effects, especially in the valleys situated at the foot of the steepest mountains. The water from rains and snows, instead of infiltrating into the earth and feeding the springs, descended in torrents, filled the beds of the rivers with gravel, spread over private properties, and devastated them.

“The numerous clearings that have taken place since the revolution, and principally since the law of 10 June 1793,” said the prefect of the department of Doubs in 1804, “do not appear to be unrelated to the cause of the extraordinary and frequent floods that have occasioned, for some years, so many ravages in the department.

» The long chains of mountains put into cultivation, and which today offer nothing but arid rocks, were, before this epoch, covered with forests that were maintained on a more or less deep layer of light, vegetable earth.

» These forests maintained a coolness over the snows that protected them from the ardor of the first rays of the sun, and from the warm winds that today cause their sudden melting; and the earth, by becoming saturated with the melted snow, diminished the volume of that which flowed away through the streams and rivers.

» Today, at the first melting of the snows or after great rains, all these mountains become the source of devastating torrents that flood the valleys and the plains, carrying with them sands and stones, which, by successively raising the beds of the streams and rivers, prepare, for the future, more considerable floods, whose effect will indubitably be to change all the riparian lands into swamps [^82].”

The same observations could be made in all parts of France, and particularly in the valleys situated at the foot of the mountains, as in the valleys of the Jura: everywhere the deforestation and clearing of the upper parts of the basins has multiplied torrents and floods, and consequently diminished the number and abundance of regular and permanent springs.

The rivers have participated, to a certain degree, in the nature of the watercourses that feed them: at certain times of the year, in the time of rains and the melting of snows, they suddenly become violent, rapid, devastating like torrents; at other times, they do not have enough water for navigation or for the other needs of industry.

Rivers and streams that experience only slight variations, that always have a sufficient quantity of water for the needs of agriculture, navigation, and all branches of industry, but that never have enough violence to be dangerous, give to the lands they traverse an immense value; they are the most active agents of the prosperity and growth of the populations that possess their banks.

Modifications made to the soil, whose result is to render them irregular, to leave them almost dry in certain seasons of the year, and to convert them, at other times, into devastating torrents, are veritable infringements upon property, commerce, industry, in a word, upon the existence of all the populations that have developed under the salutary influence of their waters.

Now, if the populations that occupy the valleys and the plains situated in the basin of a river have, as has already been seen, the property of this river, it necessarily follows that they are justified in demanding that the plateaus and the highest slopes of the mountains that carry their waters to it undergo no change that could deprive them of their property or degrade it.

These plateaus and slopes, which form the edges of the basins of rivers and streams, generally have little value in themselves; it is there that one finds vast expanses of uncultivated lands, which are fit only to produce wood or to serve as pastures.

But these same lands from which agriculture can draw almost no immediate product are of immense utility, by the waters they receive and which they carry, by means of gradual infiltrations, to the bottom of the basins where the most fertile lands and the great masses of population are found.

One of the first and greatest interests of a people is therefore to see to it that the soil upon which fall the waters that feed its springs and form its rivers is not denatured; for on this depend, in large part, both its riches and its duration; and it is quite evident that it can exercise this surveillance and act in the interest of the conservation of all its members only insofar as it is united as a body politic, and the various fractions of which it is composed are subject to a common law.

The action that a government exercises for the conservation of springs and rivers is not an infringement upon the properties of the persons who possess the plateaus and the slopes of mountains; it is, on the contrary, a guarantee for the infinitely more precious properties that are found at the bottom of the basins, and for the populations that have developed there.

The most fertile lands, those that give the most abundant harvests and require the least labor, being put into a state of cultivation and transformed into individual properties long before one thinks of appropriating and cultivating those that demand great labors to give only weak products, as has already been seen; and the valleys and plains situated in the basins of rivers and streams being, consequently, cultivated and populated before the plateaus and the highest slopes of the mountains, it follows that the changes made in the soil of these plateaus and slopes, if they have the effect of drying up the springs or forming torrents, strike at the means of existence of the populations formed in the valleys and the lower plains; whereas the prohibition against stripping the highest lands of wood or clearing them, in order to preserve these same populations, condemns no one to destruction, nor even to that kind of misery that necessarily results from a suppression of means of existence.

It is rare that the deforestation and clearing of the summit and the steepest slopes of mountains, instead of increasing their value, do not destroy it; but, even in the cases where they might increase it, the increase would be infinitely small; lands situated in very high places, and of difficult cultivation, are never very productive; a vast extent of them is needed to enjoy a very mediocre revenue [^83].

In the valleys or in the plains traversed by streams or by rivers, cultivation gives, on the contrary, a great value to the lands; there, a small space often suffices to support a great number of persons in abundance; considerable capitals that furnish means of existence to thousands of workers are gathered on a small number of points; a mill that does not occupy, on the banks of a river, the space that would be necessary on a mountain to ensure, throughout the course of the year, fodder for the least expensive of our animals, sometimes suffices to support several hundred families in comfort.

To compromise the numerous properties that the valleys and plains traversed by watercourses contain, in the hope of creating some meager means of existence on the summit or on the slope of the mountains, is therefore at once the most false and the worst of calculations.

What is the interest of men who can live only by means of their labor? It is to have the greatest possible share in the goods that are annually produced and consumed in the nation to which they belong. Now, it is incontestable that those who are obliged to wrest their subsistence from ungrateful lands give themselves more trouble and are more poorly provided for than those who contribute to production on fertile lands. There is not a worker, on a good farm, who would wish to be housed, clothed, and fed like the people who cultivate, for their own profit, the poorest lands of our mountains. When the title of proprietor produces no other advantage for him who bears it than to condemn him to very hard labor, and to living on a little milk and oat bread, it is purchased too dearly [^84].

It results from what precedes that things, like persons, have between them relations of dependence that one does not break with impunity; there exists between them a chain of effects and causes that it is not possible to neglect, without exposing oneself to falling into the most deplorable errors. The strength and resources of a nation depend on its agriculture, its manufactures, its commerce; its agriculture, its manufactures, its commerce, depend, in large part, on the rivers and streams that traverse its territory; its rivers and streams depend on the springs that feed them, and the springs depend on the nature and disposition of the soil that receives the waters of rain or snow.

We spend, in France, enormous sums to make canals, and to render our rivers and streams navigable in all seasons, and thus far our efforts have not produced great results. If one finally took it into one's head to act upon the soil that receives the waters of which our rivers are formed, to oblige it to retain them better, and to distribute them in a less irregular manner, one would obtain more advantageous results. At the same time that one would permanently improve all the watercourses, and thus give a stimulant to all kinds of industry, one would avoid the danger of lacking fuel.

After having demonstrated that a river and the streams that form it are the common property of the populations that occupy their basins, it is almost useless to add that seaports are also national properties: this is a truth that all peoples have agreed to recognize, and which has little need of being developed.

The shores, alluvion and dereliction of the sea are also placed in the rank of public properties, as I will show further on; thus, when communes have wished to seize goods of this nature, as forming part of their communal properties, their attempts have been repressed [^85].

There are other parts of the national territory that remain in the public domain; vast forests or other lands are often left there.

Having expounded in the preceding chapters what is the nature of certain national properties, it remains to make known how one can regulate their enjoyment in the most advantageous manner for the public and for private individuals; but I must first make known the measures that have been taken, at various times, to stop or prevent the deforestation of mountains.

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Notes

[^78]: "A deplorable vandalism caused the destruction, during the course of the revolution, of almost all the countryside trees that adorned our hillsides, and a large part of those that bordered the main roads." Statistique générale de la France. Department of Meurthe, p. 19. [^79]: "Harvests that barely compensated for the costs of cultivation soon disillusioned the unfortunate, seduced by false hopes, and already a large part of these lands remains uncultivated." Ibid., p. 167. [^80]: The proprietors whose property was threatened by the land clearing carried out on the slopes of the mountains would certainly have been justified in opposing this clearing, by virtue of the general principles of law. [^81]: The Forestry Code of May 21, 1827 renewed these prohibitions for twenty years. See art. 219-225. [^82]: Statistique générale de la France. Department of Doubs, ch. 1, p. 5. [^83]: In France, lands situated at the summit or on the highest slopes of mountains, when they are susceptible to cultivation, do not yield a harvest every year; in some departments, they are cultivated once every three or four years; in others, once every six or seven years; in others, at even more distant intervals. In the department of Deux-Sèvres, there are lands that are cultivated only once every seven or nine years. Statistique générale de la France, p. 158 and 250. On the mountains that formerly formed part of the department of Rhin-et-Moselle, the harvests succeed each other even more slowly. "On the mountains and in the heaths," said the prefect of this department in 1802, "a large part of the land is sown only every ten, twelve, fifteen, and even twenty years; during this long period of time, the field rests, and offers only a meager pasture to the cattle; so that the arable lands are, in these regions, distributed much like the managed cuts of wood. When one has made the tour of the territory, one returns to the soil from which one started; one finds there a turf of moss, lichen, sedge, spurge, heather, and broom, with plenty of thyme and wild savory. One lifts the turf with a mattock, dries it, burns it; and the ashes or the residue of these vegetable matters serve as fertilizer for the earth; one sows it with rye, oats, or buckwheat." Statistique générale de la France. Department of Rhin-et-Moselle, p. 137. << This long rest that one leaves to an ungrateful soil, with the intention of improving it, seems to make it more lazy and more wild. >> Ibid. [^84]: "Their food," said the prefect of Doubs, speaking of the inhabitants of the mountains of this department, "consists of oat bread, mixed with barley and a little wheat, vegetables, milk, and skim cheese; twice a week, they eat bacon." Statistique générale de la France. Department of Doubs, p. 67 and 68. [^85]: See the decrees of the National Convention of 11 Nivôse, year II (December 31, 1793), and the following 21 Prairial (June 9, 1794).