Grieving with the Forest: La Fontaine’s La Forêt et le Bûcheron

Medieval and early-modern authorities had a keen understanding of the far-reaching consequences of deforestation, the result of demographic expansion and the need for that most basic of raw materials, wood.1 From the fourteenth century on, the French Crown made repeated attempts to protect French woodlands—among other things by establishing a network of Maîtres des Eaux et Forêts to monitor forest use—but it was never able to find a lasting solution. Warfare, overgrazing, official malfeasance, and the need for revenue all had devastating effects on forests. In the early seventeenth century, between the ravages resulting from the Wars of Religion and the revitalization of economic activity thereafter, anxiety about wood shortages and deforestation were particularly acute. Indeed, by mid-century, the situation had become so dire that Superintendent of Finances Jean-Baptiste Colbert made forest management one of his earliest and most pressing priorities, commissioning a survey of France’s forests in 1661, followed by an Edict in 1667, and finally the influential Ordonnance sur le fait des eaux et forêts in 1669. The model for forest management in France for well over a century, the Ordonnance notably covered all the woodlands of the kingdom and instituted the principle of the “quarter in reserve” (quart en réserve), the portion of forests that were to be set aside for the growth of tall timber (haute futaie), which Colbert needed to build a navy able to compete with those of England and the Netherlands. Expanding central state authority over land use, the Ordonnance set out to reform the Maîtres des Eaux et Forêts, many of whom were accused of neglect or corruption, and to control even more strictly access to woodlands. If the stated motivation for the Ordonnance was conservation (“la conservation des forests” and “le bien des forests,” as the text of the decree states [155]), its ultimate objective was economic and political exploitation. In the end, after initial successes, the revenue to be gained from the sale of wood overrode attempts to control the agents of deforestation with the result that, by 1700, the state of France’s forests was worse than it had been in 1661.

It was in this context that Jean de La Fontaine, one of the Maître des Eaux et Forêts whom Colbert’s Ordonnance sought to reign in, wrote his fable, “La Forêt et le Bûcheron” (“The Forest and the Woodcutter,” book [End Page 76] XII, fable 16). By virtue of his office, La Fontaine was intimately familiar with the problems of forest management, even if his responsibilities as Maître des Eaux et Forêts were coming to an end by the time the Ordonnance went into effect.