ABSTRACT
In the early 19th century France still contained extensive stretches of land that remained uncultivated because of isolation, poor quality, steep slopes or communal status. Although the technology was simple and the scale remarkably local, the cumulative effect of such activities could be impressive, as irregular patchworks of fields won from the waste testify in the rural landscape in many parts of France. Each of the improvement schemes involved substantial conversion of waste to other forms of land use, most notably ploughland and forest, and together they made a critical contribution to refashioning the rural landscapes of many districts of France in the middle decades of the 19th century. The final decades of the 19th century and the early 1900s saw a major reversal in the national trend of land-use change, with France containing significantly more uncultivated land in 1907 than in 1879.
