ABSTRACT
Nineteenth-century observers expressed strongly contrasting views on the extent and condition of woodlands in France. Many rural industries continued to rely on charcoal until well into the Third Republic, but localised rural depopulation brought charcoal burning to an end in some upland districts, enabling new systems of woodland conservation to be pursued. Woodcutters were poorly trained and failed to protect trees from casual devastation by local inhabitants, who not only cleared vegetation to obtain kindling but also removed rotting leaves and top soil to use as compost on their fields. Gironde, Dordogne and Var represented important but isolated foci of net afforestation, in which land-use transformation was rather different from that in the north-east, since vineyards, ploughland and waste were all undergoing substantial decline in the land-use mosaics of the departements. Afforestation and drainage of moors and marshes in Aquitaine had been set on a new footing in 1842, when a young Ponts-et-Chaussees engineer named Chambrelent was appointed to Gironde.
