The balance of the world, as bequeathed by our fathers, has been shaken by a crisis of continents, itself only the result of a deeper crisis, that of the Industrial Revolution, now unleashed and beyond human control … The planet consequently changes its face and perhaps we are moving from a geological age to another? Can we still call ourselves Quaternaries [sic]?Footnote 1
At the ripe old age of eighty, looking back on five decades of international change, the French geographer André Siegfried wondered whether the world was entering a new geological age. A world once defined by European imperial hegemony was fraying rapidly under the pressure of American hegemony and other continental powers such as the Soviet Union, China, and India. This geopolitical transformation, Siegfried argued, issued from a deep and perhaps uncontrollable technological shift, laying waste to age-old societies built on Neolithic peasant–land and artisan–tool bonds. A new geography was coming of age, with air travel, synthetic industry, atomic energy, and mechanized agriculture throwing once reliable maps of power into disarray. A new age was being born, he wrote, though one “could not yet know its name.”Footnote 2 Reading Siegfried today, it may feel tempting to describe this new age as the Anthropocene.Footnote 3 An in-depth reading of his work, however, clarifies that he did not refer to the environmental crises associated with greenhouse gases. Instead, Siegfried’s concern about a new geological age came out of a lifetime of writing about agrarian revolutions and the depths of their consequences.
Ahead of detailing the argument, however, it is useful to ask who André Siegfried was and how his writing matters to contemporary historical international-relations debates. Though unfamiliar to most today, André Siegfried (1875–1959) was once a prolific and widely read author, celebrated by some as a twentieth-century Tocqueville.Footnote 4 As recounted by Sean Kennedy in his recent biography, Siegfried’s long career as a professor at Sciences Po, contributor to the Musée social research, and regular columnist at Le Figaro, saw him shape much of French elite and public opinion on international affairs. Indeed, Siegfried’s opinion was regarded highly enough for successive French governments to enlist him in delegations to the League of Nations and the 1945 San Francisco United Nations conference. Within the French intelligentsia, some of his most famed admirers included Raymond Aron, Lucien Febvre, François Goguel, Édouard Bonnefous, and Jean Gottmann.Footnote 5 Beyond France, moreover, Siegfried held privileged relations with elite British and American intellectual networks, having often lectured at Oxford, Chatham House, and Harvard. Though trained as a geographer, like a chameleon Siegfried was as often identified as an economist, sociologist, or political scientist, reflecting diverse audiences as well as wide-ranging writing. In this article, however, I argue that Siegfried presents an interesting figure for historians of international thought, given his persistent writing on French foreign interests and the materiality underpinning great-power politics.
In this article, I aim to contribute to two emerging bodies of literature renewing our vision of international history. First, alongside recent work by Lucian Ashworth, Or Rosenboim, Matthew Spectre, and others, my analysis seeks to show how geographical thinking played an important role in the early emergence of writing on international relations from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth.Footnote 6 As shown by this new literature, there is much to be learned by tracing how political geographers, such as Halford Mackinder or Owen Lattimore, participated in spatializing the language of international politics to deal with such varied problems as military defense, market access, or the availability of arable land. To expand this literature, however, it remains necessary to examine authors beyond the established canon of thinkers, dominated by Anglo-American figures.Footnote 7 Another avenue, moreover, may be found by revisiting how early twentieth-century geopolitical thinkers wrote about environmental politics. To pursue this effectively, it is useful to enter into dialogue with new international histories of environmental governance. To situate how geopolitical authors thought about planetary natures, and how these may connect to present imaginaries, it is important to trace how international ideas of the environment were constructed and contested, as can be seen through the inspiring work of Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Luc Fressoz, Libby Robin, Paul Warde, Sverker Sörlin, and many others.Footnote 8 In addition, it is also helpful to connect how environmental ideas were institutionalized through specific efforts in foreign policy, international expertise, and territorial planning, as is exemplarily shown in work by Alison Bashford, Perrin Selcer, Tom Robertson, David Ekblah, Ian Tyrell, Megan Black, and Tiago Saraiva.Footnote 9 Interestingly, across these studies, the part played by geographers in connecting matters of environmental governance with geopolitical language is often identified.Footnote 10 For a historian of international thought, this provides a useful analytical focus, presenting an opportunity to query the presence of environmental claims in past geopolitical writing.
A key interpretive opportunity here is to consider such claims as potentially more than naturalist rhetoric purposed towards legitimizing imperial worldviews or expansionist designs. By taking environmental claims as more than dissimulation, it becomes possible to scrutinize how they may have been tied to contingent technoscientific imaginaries and situated plans for material intervention. In this manner, as exemplified in Saraiva’s Fascist Pigs, it becomes possible to understand how fascist geopolitical rhetoric about agrarian autarky was also tied to active agro-engineering campaigns to alter landscapes and organisms, such as the fatter “rooted-in-the soil” pigs of the Nazi regime. These fascist pigs, as Saraiva explains, were bred to eschew reliance on imported fodder, in favor of homegrown potatoes, and to ensure national lard self-sufficiency.Footnote 11 As this example shows, the complexity of environmental transformations envisaged then far outstripped blunt rhetoric about a lack of arable lands as justifying territorial expansionism. Imbricated with geopolitical motives, such visions of environmental governance were more complex and diverse than is commonly assumed in international politics. If this was the case among interwar fascists, it seems likely that other thinkers, with different politics, may also have engaged in such complex thinking about geopolitics and environmental transformation, with other projects and concerns in mind. This aspect of the geopolitical tradition, I argue, has yet to be brought into sustained study.
Contributing to this broader agenda, in this article I trace how André Siegfried, a French liberal imperialist of the early twentieth century, entangled geopolitical and environmental concerns about the world-making consequences of mechanized monoculture farming. Having written about the industrialization of agriculture from the 1890s to the 1950s, his account of its undesirable consequences evolved through shifting political, financial, and environmental frames. First, in a liberal republican vein, he insisted that mechanized farming might threaten democracy by undermining smallholder property and national autonomy. After 1918, however, as the inter-allied debt crisis weighed on Britain and France, Siegfried underlined American-style mechanized agriculture as economically unwise. With the 1930s Dust Bowl crisis, in turn, Siegfried added a third leitmotif, presenting mechanized monocultures as environmentally unsound. In early iterations, his environmental critique focused on the dangers of soil erosion caused by intensive tillage and reckless forest and grasslands clearing. After 1945, however, Siegfried’s environmental critique of mechanized monocultures became ecological, underlining its harm to soil fertility, which was best maintained by the complex organic cycles of mixed farming. Alongside these political, economic, and ecological motifs, Siegfried also tied his agrarian polemics to broader geopolitical concern about France’s place in the world. In this way, in early iterations, Siegfried tied his positive account of smallholder agriculture to a contrast between British and French security in the event of inter-imperial war. In the interwar period, in turn, Siegfried connected his agrarian polemics with arguing that American ascendancy required counterbalancing through continent-wide economic pacts in Europe. After 1945, faced with the demise of European empires, Siegfried enlisted his apologia of French farming in debates about technical expertise and postcolonial development. He hoped, against the odds, to elevate French expertise and restore its international influence in competition with American and Soviet modernizers.
“Un esprit terrien et potager”: The myth of French rural democracy and Britain’s crisis, c.1898–1925
Born in 1875 to a merchant Protestant family in the port city of Le Havre, André Siegfried’s early life brimmed with the confidence of living through a gilded age. Benefiting from the millionaire cotton wealth of his father, as well as his political networks, Siegfried grew up embedded among the Third Republic’s elite. In these years, his father’s center left politics became his own, and the young Siegfried became a strong defender of French colonial interests as well as of social-reform debate through institutions such as the Musée social.Footnote 12 As early as 1898, Siegfried’s relations enabled him to go on a world tour and return as an expert of sorts, publishing editorials at Le petit Havre and delivering public lectures. From these early publications, Siegfried’s most persistent concerns surrounded global imperial competition as well as social reforms in Australia, New Zealand, and Japan.Footnote 13 By 1904, these interests, combined with a failure to secure political office, led him to write a doctoral thesis under the patronage of the Sorbonne colonial geographer Marcel Dubois. By 1910, moreover, the young Siegfried had secured a lectureship in economic geography at Sciences Po, which he would hold until 1955. In parallel, he continued to write editorials on international affairs, ranging from the Boer War and the Russo-Japanese War, to the Chinese, Mexican, and Turkish revolutions, or Franco-German colonial rivalry in Morocco. Through each crisis, Siegfried sought how to defend French interests amid tumultuous international politics. Indeed, such was the age’s speed, he wrote, that one might wonder whether Europe was to “remain the aspiring and striding heart of circulation on the planet.”Footnote 14
Despite this hegemonic anxiety, however, Siegfried was optimistic about French prospects. Commercially, he believed that the opening of extra-European markets might bring about immense opportunities for French trade, not least through his hometown of Le Havre. Economically, he argued that France was blessed by a thriving agriculture, allowing it self-sufficiency, domestic stability, and rising exports. Expanding French credit and industry no doubt mattered, but for Siegfried agriculture ought to remain “the basis of French prosperity.”Footnote 15 This position contrasted with that of many contemporaries who argued that industrialization held the keys to mass wealth.
Agricultural self-sufficiency, Siegfried claimed, was a boon to states, making them “freer regarding foreign affairs, surer of tomorrow, and more confident of their own strength.” With agrarian self-reliance, he implied, neither war nor international market disruptions could deprive states of well-fed armies or bargaining power against foreign suppliers. Interestingly, this vision of agriculture as a cornerstone of France’s international power relied on a marked contrast with Great Britain. British industrialization “had almost killed its agriculture” and developed such import dependence as to risk wartime hunger. Such a situation, Siegfried noted, had accelerated after the 1870s, with falling transport costs and a rising supply of American cereals depressing prices, rendering British farming unprofitable and causing mass rural emigration. Unlike Britain, he wrote, the Third Republic had “understood its duties to the countryside populations,” creating protectionist tariffs for farmers to weather the crisis, regain confidence, and reorganize production. The Tariff Méline of 1892, he claimed, had prevented ruin and allowed farmers to benefit from the twin windfalls of rising food prices and rising consumption domestically. Beyond protectionism, he wrote, returning prosperity owed to technically savvy farmers, targeted state subsidies, and private rural syndicates. Citing an example close to home, Siegfried praised Normandy’s farms, whose specialization in small-scale poultry and dairy had found markets in England’s ever-growing cities. These farms, he wrote, benefited from land which was “naturally rich … with marvelously fertile silt” encased by “curtains of beeches or oaks, protecting them from all sides against the offshore winds” and erosion.Footnote 16 In this manner, Siegfried implied, French farming displayed as much business acumen as land management knowledge.
Beyond economy, Siegfried idealized France’s agrarian society as rooting its democratic politics.Footnote 17 Indeed, his portrayal of French rural democracy would be at the center of his famed Tableau politique de la France d’ouest (1913), an early work of electoral geography.Footnote 18 As he saw it, through its multitude of smallholders, France was unique in assembling so many men in conditions of independence and civic equality. Making up this society, in his words, had been “the earthly work of the French Revolution,” which had broken up large estates and begun a “true rural democracy.”Footnote 19 Over a hundred years later, however, this work was not yet complete, representing a legacy to protect as much as a promise to fulfill. Through the Third Republic, he wrote, small landowners had advanced this work by voting for the Moderate Republicans, a “left party, neither reactionary, nor socialist,” who alone appreciated how independent “landholding is such a powerful factor of social balance.”Footnote 20 On the right, he argued, reactionary conservatives sought to entrench the semifeudal authority of landed gentry and clergy by curtailing access to education and technology.Footnote 21 On the left, socialist agitators demagogically promised “doctrinal collectivism.”Footnote 22 Retrograde or radical, Siegfried claimed that both factions failed to grasp the republican promise of smallholding. Tellingly, he wrote, such positions held parallels in Britain, whose Tory landed aristocracy and urban liberal industrialists had failed to save the countryside. In a cautionary tale, Britain revealed the path that might lay waste to French agrarian democracy. In this conception, Siegfried discounted both large landowners and landless workers from his idyll of a republican peasant citizenry.Footnote 23 This vision of agrarian democracy, it bears noting, was not the only one in French politics, with both agrarian socialists and conservative corporatists competing with images of peasants as proletarians or the last defenders of traditional society.Footnote 24
Beyond this, Siegfried’s concern for rural democracy also drew on tropes of demographic danger. Alongside others, Siegfried regarded declining birth rates and rural emigration with alarm, penning editorials on a “worrisome … rural labor crisis in France.”Footnote 25 Poor conditions, meagre pay, and the decline of cottage industries all contributed to intensifying rural exodus and labor shortages. In such circumstances, Siegfried feared that “American-style hiring” might draw in foreign workers and promote a dangerous “industrialization of agriculture.”Footnote 26 Laced with racist anxieties, Siegfried fanned fears of “exotic” laborers from Poland, Algeria, and the Far East, whom he deemed “impossible to assimilate.”Footnote 27 Reliance on migrant workers, he wrote, might usher in social crises akin to those of the late Roman Empire and rupture “ten centuries [of] French unity.”Footnote 28 As the First World War beckoned, he furthered such racist views, claiming that Germany, like France, was “legitimate” in fearing “a pacific invasion from East to West.”Footnote 29 Thus, as argued by Carole Reynaud-Paligot, Siegfried’s racialism is beyond equivocation.Footnote 30 This imaginary color line would endure, laced into his geopolitical writing, until his death. Such a racist worldview, unfortunately, did not place Siegfried apart from many peer intellectuals across North American and European universities in the early twentieth century, as traced by Vitalis, Bell, and others.Footnote 31
In 1918, after four years of a war of unprecedented scale, Siegfried returned to France acutely aware that great changes in the world order were at hand. After working as a wartime interpreter, Siegfried joined postwar diplomacy efforts by participating in the League of Nations as an economic expert from 1920 to 1922.Footnote 32 In these years, much like John Maynard Keynes or Étienne Mantoux, he worried about the magnitude of inter-allied debt and its undermining effects on reconstruction and geopolitical stability.Footnote 33 The war, Siegfried wrote, had destroyed the delicate balance of European global hegemony. Europe’s vast savings, which had once made her “ever more colonizing” and the “creditor of other continents,” had “vanished in the smoke of battle.”Footnote 34 Her “wise” production had “run off track,” disrupted by mass fatalities and “social troubles.” Morally, this deep crisis was manifest in the rise of new nationalisms, Soviet radicalism, and popular demands for higher living standards “in the American or Australian manner.”Footnote 35 Adding to this internal disorder, the war had shown European states to be clay-footed giants dependent on imports of raw materials.Footnote 36 Thus, ironically, Germany “had been farsighted” in fearing an “industrial famine” upon the “closure of foreign supply.” Under such signs, Siegfried noted bitterly, “the dismemberment of the Empire of Europe” seemed inevitable.Footnote 37
Through the 1920s, as reconstruction hurtled through successive economic crises, Siegfried’s prognostications only grew grimmer. The first crisis followed deflationary measures taken by the United States and the United Kingdom with the aim of rebuilding savings, ensuring debt repayments, and restoring the gold standard. Deflation, however, also caused unemployment and export crises for countries with dearer currencies.Footnote 38 Examining this crisis in his first postwar book, Siegfried tracked British dilemmas across labor, imperial, and agricultural policies.Footnote 39 Britain’s woes, he thought, were those of urban democracy: excessive industrialization, agricultural insufficiency, and import dependency. To make matters worse, Britain’s parties seemed unable to offer solutions. With the Liberal Party in disarray after the fall of Lloyd George, neither the Conservatives nor Labour had been able to form stable governments and legislative consensus. For Siegfried, these failures spoke to the contradictions between rebuilding British agriculture, reforming imperial customs, and keeping food prices low. During the First World War, under submarine fire and the closure of European markets, Britain had experienced the fragility of its food supply. Under such conditions, boosting domestic agriculture seemed a matter of survival, leading to a million new acres sown and significant wheat yield increases.Footnote 40 After 1919, this wartime bonanza shattered, with returning imports halving the price of wheat and potatoes. Hoping to stymie an agricultural crisis, Parliament passed the Agricultural Act of 1920, promising price guarantees to producers and minimum wages to rural workers, which would prove impossible to enforce. British agriculture contracted.
For Siegfried, this failed agrarian rescue betrayed a “fundamental vice—the lack … of a peasant atmosphere.”Footnote 41 This lack, he claimed, was evident in a general disinterest in smallholder farming and an unwillingness to bear sacrifices such as higher prices, lower profits, or lower wages. Adding to this, he argued, the demise of British agriculture owed to the predominance of gentlemen farmers, whose large estates, aristocratic habits, and reliance on wage labor resulted in traditionally “mediocre land use.”Footnote 42 Making matters worse, when faced with rural exodus, rather than seek productivity improvements or reduce unproductive expenditure, these landowners reverted to extensive agriculture or gave it up entirely, turning to leisure instead. In such a society, it was unsurprising that the Agricultural Act should falter. Unlike France, who could count on her “paysan civilization,” Britain remained “a quasi-feudal country.”Footnote 43 Paradoxically, the counterpart to Britain’s quasi-feudal countryside was industrial cities, where collective labor fostered socialism. For Siegfried, such city socialists were equally bereft of any “love of land in the French manner,” dreaming instead of transposing factory methods to the countryside, “industrializing farming” across large collectivized estates.Footnote 44 Such industrial farming, Siegfried believed, carried the seeds of social instability, as evident across the Atlantic.
Losing anchors: America’s industrial agrarianism and Europe’s dying “peasant spirit”
Always fond of travel, Siegfried spent 1925 traversing the United States at the behest of the Musée social.Footnote 45 The resulting book, America Comes of Age, painted a febrile postwar America, strewn with racialized conflicts, innovative industrial culture, and polarized party politics. Regarding race, Siegfried was ambiguously critical of rampant “Anglo-Saxon” nationalism, deriding its “sectarian neo-nationalism” and “fascist” obsessions with racial purity, communal conformity and illegal violence, all the while agreeing with claims that America faced a “crisis of assimilation” due to “floods” of Eastern Europeans, “unassimilable” colored citizens and a “yellow peril.”Footnote 46 In this manner, despite claiming that American racial intolerance was “at the antipodes of French laicism,” Siegfried shared in a white-supremacist worldview.Footnote 47
Beyond race, Siegfried’s account of America’s polarized ascendancy also focused on its radically new economy. Bedazzled by the roaring twenties, he argued that the postwar rise of mass production and consumption represented an emergent civilization. With fascination and fear, Siegfried waxed lyrically on Henry Ford’s model factories, Herbert Hoover’s gospel of efficiency, and the fast-paced mechanization of agriculture. Yet, while admiring American leaps in prosperity, he constantly admonished its hidden dangers. As Siegfried saw it, American industrialism was fostering a society of consumerism, standardization, automation, and collectivism, destined to lay waste to proper appreciation of frugality, quality, individual creativity, and personal freedom. Such transformation, he predicted, was bound to pressure Old World societies into a competitive adaptation endangering their own way of living. For France, Siegfried wrote, such transformation ought to provoke “the same instinctive fear … she had of the Germanic system on the eve of the War,” and make her recall the Roman maxim—beware of losing life’s purpose in the struggle to stay alive.Footnote 48
Faced with this civilizational revolution, Siegfried argued that it was necessary to seek a “dialogue, as it were, between Ford and Ghandi [sic].”Footnote 49 The advantages of a new industrial revolution had to be combined with a renewed appreciation of artisanal and peasant traditions. Triumphantly organized with labor-saving machines and short-term profits, American producers derided “the French terrien and the Chinese gardener.”Footnote 50 Thinking them retrograde, they could not see how such peasants “collaborate with the soil and the seasons, study every phase of the climate, and often have an individual grasp of the philosophy of life that reveals the meaning of what they are doing in the broadest possible aspect.”Footnote 51 This naturalist attunement was erased by American productivist simplifications. Ironically, however, for all of America’s machinery, Siegfried claimed that peasant practices still offered higher unit yields, with “four acres of French soil tilled with unremitting devotion” producing “more than forty acres exploited by the industrialized farmer whose laborers are in no way attached to the soil.”Footnote 52
Furthermore, Siegfried argued that these contrasting agricultural ethics also differed in their economic and political consequences. To his mind, America’s mechanized monocultures were a recipe for instability and polarization. Dependent on Wall Street loans to finance machinery and beholden to high railway freight rates, farmers were easily ruined by a bad harvest or a drop in commodity prices. Failing to profit, producers fell behind on repayments and had to mortgage their farms.Footnote 53 When brought low, this precarious position translated into politics, with a fresh crop of agrarian agitation emerging out of America’s “ocean of wheat.”Footnote 54 “Indignation,” Siegfried noted, was “always more violent in the area where the annual rainfall is less than twenty inches,” west of the Great Lakes.Footnote 55
In the 1920s, however, it was not drought but another sort of perfect storm that pushed American farmers into crisis. As in Britain, the global return to peacetime agriculture depressed prices. Compounding this downturn, federal deflationary policies tightened credit access, pushing farmers into financial distress and unemployment. Against this crisis, many farmers banded together into radical movements such as the Nonpartisan League and the Farmer-Labor party, demanding nationalization of railways and water, credit controls, subsidies, protectionist tariffs, and dumping provisions to enable price controls. By 1924, this new political animus had even encouraged a third-party presidential run by the Wisconsin governor Robert La Follette. For Siegfried, such radical politics echoed the political turmoil of the late 1890s, when the Nebraska democrat William Jennings Bryan had courted radical agrarian movements such the Greenbackers and the Populist Party through his Free Silver platform.Footnote 56 Across both instances, Siegfried judged such populist agrarian policies “incompatible with sound finance,” being “profoundly inflationary” and dangerous for international markets.Footnote 57 In this way, Siegfried’s portrait of the American farmers’ turbulent politics operated as a cautionary tale of how French agriculture ought to modernize without losing its smallholder traditions. French farmers, it seemed, were all that Americans were not: prudent, thrifty, patient, frugal, and in touch with natural rhythms. In Siegfried’s partisan depiction, theirs was a moral superiority, which before too long might prove superior to the New World’s material bountifulness. Years later, the scouring aftermath of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl tempted him to think he had been right.
Returning from America, the question of French competitive ineptitude in an age of machinery and mass consumption weighed heavily on Siegfried. Alongside France, he felt, old Europe was at a crossroads, demanding a shared strategy to hold its own. As he put it in a 1928 editorial, it was urgent to organize an “economic defense of Europe.”Footnote 58 Europe’s political partitions prevented it from developing mass industry premised on access to a “continental Zollverein.”Footnote 59 Mired by small national scales, Europe was no longer the favored region for industrial development. Political union, he wrote, was not yet feasible, with “the United States of Europe” remaining within “the realm of utopia.”Footnote 60 Economic coordination, however, was deemed possible and urgent. Fresh from the 1927 World Economic Conference, Siegfried hoped for cartelization, beginning with high-value industries such as steel, potash, and sugar.Footnote 61 The geopolitical (com)promise of inter-European cartelization as understood then was to foster Franco-German entente, eroding national rivalries and sharing in colonial exploitation.Footnote 62
Whereas such reorganization might well enable European industrial reconstruction, the destinies of its rural economies seemed less secure. Writing on the state of France in 1930, Siegfried struggled to muster much optimism, lamenting how American competition imposed an “almost tragic adaptation” upon the country. French democracy, he claimed, was rooted in a society of smallholder farmers, self-reliant artisans, and thrifty bourgeois.Footnote 63 French modernity had been built on “the doctrine of individualism,” which while rendering “inefficient material achievement[s],” was unburdened by unreasonable wage demands, overconsumption, and industrialist collectivism.Footnote 64 France remained inhabited by a “peasant spirit,” well captured in the poetry of Paul Morand and François Mauriac. Echoing Mauriac, Siegfried claimed that France was pervaded by a “religion of the soil” which had long “anchored” a part of humanity “destined to nourish the rest.”Footnote 65 Citing Morand, Siegfried romanticized the persistence of a peasant spirit even among cities and distant colonies, where despite the “age of machinery,” Frenchmen remained drawn to the soil, eager to re-create homeliness by growing vegetable gardens.Footnote 66 Never innocently, this horticultural trope aestheticized the paysan habitus and depicted colonial settlers as virtuous gardeners.
Thus Siegfried presented France’s peasant spirit in contrast to “the American plan” for humanity’s future.Footnote 67 Instead of material comfort, vast machinery and Hooverian efficiency, France offered an alternative modernity, determined “to safeguard the individual.”Footnote 68 These two civilizations, he argued, held radically different relations to nature. America’s was “the traditional country of waste,” whereas Europe was conscious of limited natural resources and compelled to frugality.Footnote 69 In building this ideological divide, Siegfried pursued a slippage between France and Europe as antipodes to American civilization, as well as reinforcing France’s need for a European continental alliance and ambition to lead it. In this context, Siegfried equated the survival of France with reconciling Europe and confronting America in a “clash of continents.”Footnote 70
The Dust Bowl as revenge: The pitfalls of monoculture and Mediterranean myths
In the autumn of 1936, as he was visiting vineyards south of Cévennes, Siegfried was haunted by a vision of America, feeling “struck by the resemblances” between this landscape and those of American monoculture.Footnote 71 Across the Atlantic, he noted, it was usual to find entire regions specializing in just one cash crop, such as northwestern wheat or southern cotton. Be it for the vine, wheat, or cotton, however, the “consequences [of monoculture] were similar”: farmers eliminated any “annex crops” and conquered every possible plot of land for monoculture. In western Canada, he noted, wheat farmers did not even care to keep homestead henhouses and vegetable gardens. If their wheat harvest came short, they “starved upon their farm.” In the Midi vineyards, he wrote, the same madness was taking root, with producers “cutting down an olive tree to gain two meters” and destroying their own “lines of retreat.” When crisis hit, only those “practicing some degree of polyculture” weathered the storm.Footnote 72 All others, no longer true peasants, had to abandon their lands and immigrate to the city. And so perished the industrial countryside. Such admonitions, however, were not only incidental on visiting Cévennes; they also echoed the Dust Bowl’s devastation of American and Canadian prairies.Footnote 73
Traveling from Quebec to British Columbia in 1935, Siegfried had witnessed the devastating effects of successive droughts, dust storms, and financial crisis affecting the Canadian wheat belt. In this journey, Siegfried contrasted Quebec and Midwest farmers, highlighting the unexpected advantages of the Old World’s “peasant conception.”Footnote 74 In Quebec, he claimed, farmers resisted the crisis due to diversified polyculture and peasant traditions.Footnote 75 To the west, however, “agricultural industrialists” had found no such defenses.Footnote 76 Peasant farming, he wrote, had the advantage of a greater “sense of nature,” showing restraint when sowing and clearing.Footnote 77 Moreover, driven by “an attachment to the soil,” peasant farming prioritized homesteading over profiteering, reinforcing a restrained land use to preserve the long-term value of land. In his words, such smallholders understood not “to ask too much and too quickly.”Footnote 78 In this manner, he wrote, paysan culture recalled the myth of Antaeus, where the giant’s strength came from keeping in touch with the soil.Footnote 79
In the Midwest, by contrast, profit eagerness had led wheat farmers to ignore natural limits, having “mined the land,” deploying loans and machinery with “lavish imprudence.”Footnote 80 These “land miners,” Siegfried wrote, behaved as though they could “break the bonds … to Nature,” in a “divorce from the soil.”Footnote 81 Such disregard, he noted, was apparent in how Midwest farmers had relentlessly cleared buffalo grass and cultivated all accessible land, regardless of meagre rainfall and topsoil thinness. Such reckless expansion prepared disasters by intensifying soil erosion. As he put it, “after a few years of cultivation, if the crop is a failure, the soil pulverizes and is carried away by the wind in a storm of dust.”Footnote 82 After excessive ploughing, droughts had worse effects on vegetation cover, and topsoils were left exposed to severe wind erosion, with a lack of windbreakers, such as forests, worsening this vulnerability. If enough topsoil was lost thus, arable land became barren.
Alongside denouncing land miners, Siegfried was also critical of the governmental responses associated with the FDR administration. Writing in 1936, he deemed Roosevelt’s agrarian policies “profligate demagogy,” a “remedy worse than the disease.”Footnote 83 For Siegfried, the New Deal’s credit relief and public works mistakenly expanded subsidies for imprudent farmers. Such policies, he claimed, were akin to socialist panaceas, endangering monetary and fiscal stability.Footnote 84 The New Deal, he worried, might make way for social credit schemes advocated by the likes of the British economist Clifford H. Douglas, the Alberta premier William Aberhart, or the Californian campaigner Francis Townsend. Such concerns echoed Siegfried’s earlier critiques of the William Jennings Bryan and Robert La Follette campaigns courting agrarian populism. In this regard, Roosevelt’s suspension of the gold standard in 1933 cemented this prejudice. In later years, Siegfried’s skepticism concerning the New Deal would continue, with special derision of mass infrastructure investment modeled on the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).
By 1937, however, feeling vindicated by the Dust Bowl, Siegfried argued that American civilization was at odds with natural balance. In America, he claimed, the “apparent conquest of Nature, brilliant and rapid thought it may be, is deceptive.”Footnote 85 Yielding fantastically for a time, America’s conquest undermined itself by failing to “recognize obstacles” and in its “attacks” on Nature.Footnote 86 By contrast, Europe’s conquest of Nature was allegedly built upon a balanced adaptation between peoples and environments, supposedly enabled by a unique Mediterranean context. This geographical exceptionalism, Siegfried claimed, had been identified by Paul Valéry’s reading of Mediterranean reality as an exceptional space where Nature was proportionate to Man.Footnote 87 Only Europe, Siegfried claimed, was a “continent on a human scale,” where humanity had adapted Nature and adapted to her, becoming attuned to the “necessities of nature.”Footnote 88 By contrast, amid America’s grandiose natures, no “adaptation to the soil” was akin to “the millennial type of the European peasant.”Footnote 89 Across American culture, although the “laws of biology were known,” all believed that humanity could escape them, “to live, produce, and develop outside the natural environment.”Footnote 90 America, he wrote, was “apt to boast too soon” that it had “overcome the elements,” forgetting that time “always has its revenge.”Footnote 91 For Siegfried, the 1930s Dust Bowl implied that revenge had come, though perhaps not for the last time.
Beyond Siegfried, it bears noting, this turn to environmental anxiety traveled widely across interwar international thought, with many British and Americans defending the need for better national and global governance against reckless agriculture and its crop of ecological disasters, with the loss of fertile soils foremost in mind. Within the British Empire, leading agronomists such as Graham Vernon Jacks and Robert Orr Whyte warned of a global “rape of the earth,” while pro-imperial journals worried about coming “dust bowls of empire” caused by imprudent cash crop farming.Footnote 92 Connectedly, internationalists at the FAO and UNESCO, such as John Boyd Orr and Julian Huxley, promoted the idea that global peace depended on governments taking “the need for conservation” seriously, protecting forests and soils against wanton farming.Footnote 93 Across these anglophone examples, however, French or Mediterranean farming were hardly ever mentioned as exemplars of sustainable intensive agriculture.
Early in 1938, Siegfried again took to the transatlantic air, this time to travel through Morocco, Brazil, and Colombia.Footnote 94 Across these journeys, alongside civilizational canvases, Siegfried wrote of an impending world war. After the Anschluss, he worried that a Central Europe dominated “by a totalitarian Germany would be the end of all European liberty … and threaten liberalism throughout the world.”Footnote 95 To prevent this, he called for a renewal of a liberal coalition between Britain, France, and the United States.Footnote 96 Moreover, Siegfried also began to think strategically about what might happen to global supply lines, especially around critical choke points such as Suez, Gibraltar, and Panama. Wary of Mussolini’s Mediterranean ambitions, he imagined that war would suspend French supply lines through Marseille and Algeria under threat of Italian, and perhaps Spanish, submarine and aerial ambushes.Footnote 97 In this scenario, he imagined that Morocco would become strategically vital for France’s empire, allowing inland railway connections to Algeria and protecting Atlantic sea routes to Dakar and beyond, adapting to the Mediterranean’s becoming “the hotbed of new struggles.”Footnote 98 As war dawned, Siegfried continued to write alarmingly about its global stakes. Writing for Foreign Affairs, he framed the war as a contest over which great power should lead “white civilization the globe over,” claiming that German victory over Britain would render global “white supremacy … a thing of the past.”Footnote 99 Chillingly, Siegfried aligned a racist vision of world order with a defense of liberal empires. Elsewhere, in defense of French democracy, Siegfried warned that fascist victory would unleash totalitarian urges “to dominate Nature, with an invincible technique, overriding her if necessary by violence.”Footnote 100 A totalitarian triumph, in this view, would normalize the industrialist brutalization of Nature, in time yielding disastrous outcomes worldwide. Thus Siegfried did not sympathize with fascist agrarian politics, and its combinations of techno-scientific modernization and ruralist patriarchal nostalgia.Footnote 101 Instead, he remained attached to his ideal vision of French rural democracy, where liberalism was rooted in smallholders’ independence from the state.
In 1940, however, the fall of France silenced Siegfried’s antifascist polemics. After defeat, he remained in occupied Paris and continued teaching at Sciences Po.Footnote 102 During the occupation, he wrote less but still significantly, including a study of the Mediterranean. By the summer of 1941, he also returned to political journalism, penning editorials on the geography of wartime supply lines, British foreign policy, and the future of Western civilization in the age of machinery. For the present article, his study of the Mediterranean bears the most interest. In this book, Siegfried returned to his interwar contrasts of paysan and industrialist relations to Nature, finessing his claims of Mediterranean environmental exceptionalism, marked by allegedly human-scaled proportions and virtue-inducing adversities. In a paradoxical providence, Mediterranean natural conditions were “at once favorable and difficult.”Footnote 103
Opening with Morand’s poetry, Siegfried noted that the Mediterranean could be “accurately described as … an antidesert [sic].”Footnote 104 Geologically, the region was encircled by mountains to the north and deserts to the south. Beyond its north lay “Hercynian Europe,” an area geologically blessed with coal, iron, and extensive fertile plains.Footnote 105 By contrast, the Mediterranean was marked by steep topographies and “the curse of limestone soils.”Footnote 106 Good soils existed, but only rarely and discontinuously. Most often, rocks and hardpans made ploughing difficult, and topsoils were thin and lacked organic matter. Poor soil conditions, moreover, were worsened by runoff erosion, caused by dry seasons and heavy rains. Constitutionally threatened by “terrible erosion,” he argued, Mediterranean farmers had long understood soils as “precarious” and needing “continuous conservation care.”Footnote 107 Carrying out conservation, he wrote, presupposed “an accumulation of capital—terraces, watering channels, drainage trenches—taking time to be set up, difficult to upkeep, and which must be defended constantly.”Footnote 108 If interrupted by war and civil disorder, such built capital was liable to be run down beyond repair.
In contrast to erosion, Siegfried deemed dry-season water scarcity a lesser problem. Water scarcity, he claimed, was manageable because “mountains were always nearby, playing the role of water towers.”Footnote 109 Irrigation was topographically “compartmentalized,” fostering “small democratic communities.”Footnote 110 The long-standing huertas of Valencia and farmlands of Hyères, he claimed, displayed the prodigious productivity of small-scale customary irrigation.Footnote 111 These irrigation democracies, he argued, contrasted to the “massive public works of ancient Egypt—the planned economy of the Nile—of the United States and our own North Africa.”Footnote 112 Geographically, Siegfried claimed that the Mediterranean’s uneven and steep topography had forestalled great irrigation works. Notwithstanding, he noted, the twentieth-century turn to industrial farming was enabling Mediterranean experiments in draining swamps and transforming terrain to grow cash crops, such as in French North Africa, where “the spirit of the settler” sought “a new California.”Footnote 113 This trend, he argued, was manifest not only in the pursuit of wheat monoculture, but also across the endless vineyards of the Languedoc and Mitijda, or the olive tree expanses of Sfax. Profitable and productive as they might be, such monocultures had “serious drawbacks,” ranging from lowering quality, exposure to market crises, and “the temptation … to resort to a planned economy.”Footnote 114 In this way, such monocultures resembled America’s and might soon displace the “ancient individualism” of Mediterranean peasants, fulfilling the dreams of “American technocrats.”Footnote 115 Curiously, we might note, Siegfried was conspicuously silent about fascist agrarian campaigns such as Mussolini’s Bataglia del Grano and much propagandized experiments in Libya.
Instead, Siegfried returned to dichotomizing French peasant farming and American industrial agriculture, contraposing Mediterranean and Midwestern attitudes to soil erosion, irrigation, and political economy. In this account, American farmers could long deplete soils before tragedy struck, while Mediterranean peasants had to zealously preserve theirs at all times. Furthermore, while Mediterranean farmers relied on democratic small-scale irrigation, American farmers expected major hydro-engineering public works to ensure water supply to distant dry lands. By dissociating from America’s “formidable modern dams,” such as the Tennessee Valley Authority’s, Siegfried renewed old liberal concerns about ballooning state spending.Footnote 116 Thus, through his wartime writing on the Mediterranean, Siegfried added to his long-held anxieties about the political, fiscal, and environmental recklessness encouraged by the industrialization of agriculture. Adding to these leitmotifs, his treatment of Mediterranean farming featured a new emphasis on irrigation politics and framing soil conservation practices as building up natural capital. After 1945, with the emergence of a new world order, his recourse to environmentalist framings of agrarian politics gained even greater latitude, taking an unexpected role amid anti-decolonization polemics.
Farewell to empire: Late colonial erosions, “paysan philosophy,” and organic farming
As the Allies liberated France, Siegfried found a new lease of life. Once again, Siegfried editorialized prolifically, weighing in on debates about France’s reconstruction and its place in a new world order. Indeed, Siegfried even integrated the 1945 San Francisco UN conference as a journalist, offering commentary consistently querying the geopolitical consequences of technological change and the future of European empires. The war, he wrote, had accelerated the age of machinery, ushering in new “geographical circumstances” and a “conception of politics … in the sense of the continent, ocean, empire, and group of states.”Footnote 117 A “new industrial map of the planet” was emerging, driven by oil and hydropower at present, and solar and tidal energy tomorrow. Air travel, in turn, was collapsing distance and redistributing proximity meridionally, enabling transit over former barriers such as the Arctic and the Sahara. Amid these new geographies, Siegfried claimed that the foresight of French colonialists seemed confirmed, as only expansive states could “hold their place in the world.” At the same time, however, European empires seemed more fragile than ever. In San Francisco, Siegfried complained of “an anticolonial demagogy which risks breaking the unity of western civilization.”Footnote 118 In years to come, as imperial defeats accumulated, this complaint grew louder, culminating in the 1956 Suez crisis. Fascinatingly, as he tried to restore French world power and delegitimize anticolonialism, Siegfried once more marshaled agrarian polemics towards geopolitical purposes. Across the world, he now argued, France’s paysan philosophy offered valuable counsel to temper the reckless modernizations of the Soviets and the United States.
Traveling through North America in 1945, Siegfried had renewed his convictions as to the follies of mechanized monoculture. Writing for France’s Ministry of Agriculture, he trenchantly described Great Plains farms as the “equivalent of a wheat factory,” with high outputs per unit of labor but low yields per unit of surface.Footnote 119 These low yields, he now claimed, reflected a sustained lack of manure, gradually exhausting soil fertility. Midwestern farming, he wrote, betrayed an industrial attitude “dangerous to the earth” and “the equilibrium of the system.”Footnote 120
Supporting these claims, he now drew on writing by Michel Cépède, a French agronomist, maquisard, and expert at the Food and Agriculture Organization.Footnote 121 In his book, Cépède contrasted two agricultures, one “destructive of soil” and another “able to ensure constant, or even growing, production.” This contrast, Cépède wrote, had dawned upon him upon visiting interwar Quebec, where the perennial agriculture of French Canadian peasants carried on alongside “Anglo-Saxon farmers” exhausting soils. Beyond Canada, Cépède noted how common destructive farming was across colonial agriculture, across “the coffee lands of Brazil, the banana lands of Africa, the rubber lands of Indochina, and the peanut lands of Senegal.”Footnote 122 Such farming, he argued, was destructive not only in exhausting soil fertility, but also in upsetting ecological balance. Evidence of costly ecological disruption, Cépède claimed, could be seen in how wanton destruction of bird habitats was followed by intensified insect pests.Footnote 123 Another such instance, he noted, could be witnessed when excluding livestock from farms and substituting manure with synthetic fertilizers.Footnote 124 In his words, substituting animals for “inanimate motors,” and confining them to meat factories, led to a “rupture of biological equilibrium.”Footnote 125 Ultimately, Cépède argued, such examples showed how agriculture should not lower production costs by undermining the reproduction of natural wealth.
Instead, it was urgent to pursue new forms of “ameliorative agriculture,” where conservationist practices paved the way towards perennial farming and improved ecological productivity. Moreover, Cépède argued that ideas of limitless growth should be jettisoned and disruptions to carbon cycles avoided due to their potential atmospheric warming effects.Footnote 126 Taking this farther, Cépède called not only for an end to the industrialization of agriculture, but also for a turn towards “agricolizing [sic] industry” to limit extractivism and ecological devastation. For Siegfried, such arguments resonated with his paysan apologias and may explain why, after 1946, he consistently emphasized how mechanized monocultures were destructive not only in terms of tillage-driven erosion, but also by excluding livestock and manure from soil fertility cycles. This addition, as we will see, was tactically employed by Siegfried to represent French agricultural traditions as holding a distinctive expertise amid a new world order wrangled between the modernisms of the United States and the Soviet Union.
In the postwar years, refracting imperial anxieties, Siegfried transposed his agrarian polemics beyond America and Europe to Africa and India. First, in 1948, while traveling through South Africa, Siegfried connected its troubled politics to acute soil erosion.Footnote 127 In his account, South Africa was a country with limited fertile lands, whose meagre soils were “recklessly overtaxed by extensive tilling and stock-breeding.”Footnote 128 This, he argued, was the fault of Boer farmers, who, like “nomads,” cared little for soil conservation. Stereotyping, Siegfried claimed that these farmers expected “wide spaces” where soils might be grazed to exhaustion and abandoned.Footnote 129 Moreover, he added, Boer livestock was underfed, thus limiting manure-based soil restoration. Turning to remedies, Siegfried advised a “systemic irrigation to conserve water” and a “collective policy to defend the soil” against wind erosion. Such policies, however, were near unfeasible due to their “financial magnitude.” The best solution, Siegfried wrote, would be to have “Mediterranean folk” who were experienced in the “ceaseless labor” of soil care. Quaintly, he suggested that South Africa’s agrarian problems boiled down to a lack of paysan settlers, or at least their practices. By contrast, when commenting on the continent’s future, Siegfried made much of white racist anxieties about Indians “pacifically invading East Africa.” Connecting Indian independence to imperial defeats across Asia and American “anticolonial demagogy,” Siegfried lamented how the “occupation of Africa by the white race” had “no guarantee of a future.”Footnote 130
Two years later, traveling through independent India, Siegfried again entwined agricultural and geopolitical prognoses. In Voyage aux Indes (1951), Siegfried depicted a country at a crossroads, threatened by famine and in need of agrarian modernization.Footnote 131 The immediate threat of famine, he argued, arose from the Partition, depriving India of access to surplus Pakistani wheat and Burmese rice. Moreover, Siegfried argued, India’s fertile lands were limited and insufficient for its vast rural populations, except in Punjab, whose irrigation networks made it a “tropical Lombardy.” And yet, he argued, “like in France,” India possessed an enduring village civilization, with peasants “tied to the soil” by an “affective” bond. It was among the smallholder ryot farmers, he recalled, that Gandhi, the “antithesis of Ford,” had awakened a democratic movement. However democratic, Siegfried deemed Gandhi’s village politics economically “reactionary” for allegedly rejecting modernization wholesale. If “eternal India” was to survive, he argued, it had to adapt to “the mechanic necessities of the twentieth century.”Footnote 132
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Siegfried was skeptical of India’s adaptive capacities. Indeed, writing for the French Ministry of Agriculture, he was scathing of Indian farming and its prospects. The country, he claimed, had a “pathological” share of its population reliant on subsistence farming.Footnote 133 Therefore, he noted, India ought to reindustrialize to reduce its rural population, as well as modernize agriculture though irrigation, land reform, and mechanization.Footnote 134 Yet, even with such policies, Siegfried claimed, India might still face difficulties improving yields. Indian soils, he wrote, were “worn out by generations” and had not been restored by quality manure deposition, despite India’s enormous herds of over 140 million cows.Footnote 135 Good manure was missing because cattle were severely underfed.Footnote 136 This insistence on manure ecology and soil conservation echoed Cépède.
Alongside South Africa and India, Siegfried continued to worry about French smallholders, not least amid the Marshall Plan’s financing of tractors and agrochemicals. Indeed, from 1948 to 1951, he participated in debates between agronomists and farmers regarding these transformations. Here, as argued by Céline Pessis, Siegfried was but one voice amid a contentious dialogue about soil degradation and the destruction of smallholder traditional farming.Footnote 137 Sidestepping scientific detail, Siegfried played into these debates by offering a geopolitical narrative centering the advantages of traditional French farming. The threat of soil erosion, he claimed, was “everywhere” but “most of all outside Europe.”Footnote 138 Global erosion was allegedly tied to “the conquest, the improvement of the world, by the white race,” which had unwittingly endangered “the irreplaceable capital that is soil.”Footnote 139 Such colonial erosions, he claimed, emerged out of two types of poor land use, one associated with nomadic settlers who farmed to exhaustion and moved onto new empty land, another with excessive mechanization and monoculture. The latter, he wrote, was most dangerous in forgetting how “soil is a living thing.” After all, throughout the early twentieth century, several crises had revealed to what extent mechanized farming was prone to destructive excesses. Against it, Siegfried argued, a “revalorization” of French “paysan philosophy” was needed, renewing appreciation of its economic virtues and conservationist practices, now vindicated by new scientific explanations.Footnote 140 Paysan tradition, he claimed, had anticipated the “law of plant association,” which Charles Flahaut and later botanists employed to describe forest ecosystems. Making an ecological analogy, Siegfried wondered whether polyculture, with its associations between animals and crops, should not be regarded as holding the same sort of “complex unity” as a “tropical forest, which once destroyed does not regrow with equal strength.”Footnote 141 Though scientific understanding of traditional farming associations remained limited, Siegfried claimed, their value was likely high, as evidenced by yield, diversity, and resilience.
Where science wavered, however, prose found its footing, such as in Louis Bromfield’s Pleasant Valley (1943).Footnote 142 Bromfield, an American novelist of the Lost Generation, was famed for writing about his farming experiments, and as shown by Randal Beeman, catalyzed postwar environmentalism towards ideas of permanent agriculture, organic farming, and ecological land use.Footnote 143 In his efforts, curiously, Bromfield’s work built on earlier work by the British botanist Albert Howard (1873–1947), who had been inspired by Indian traditional farming as a resource to develop organic farming and soil conservation across the British Empire. For Siegfried, Pleasant Valley supplied the rhetorical pearl of an American extolling French traditional farming as antipodal to mechanized monocultures. Quoting Bromfield, Siegfried relayed a canvas of American farmers as a “plague of locusts” ravaging the land by “negligence, ignorance or cupidity.”Footnote 144 Recklessly clearing forests and prairies, these farmers brought a harvest of erosion, floods, dust bowls, and declining yields. Amid such devastation, Siegfried claimed, it was natural for Americans such as Bromfield to seek French “paysan wisdom.”Footnote 145 The mainsprings of this wisdom rested upon a “complex notion of the farm” as made up of associations between “solidary crops,” animal fertilizer and erosion defenses. Interestingly, reflecting his organic turn, Siegfried insisted on the importance of keeping animals, even for mechanized cereal monocultures, claiming that “experience” showed that “organic fertilizer” was “irreplaceable.”Footnote 146 Intensifying use of synthetic fertilizers, in other words, ought to be resisted, as argued by Bromfield and others.Footnote 147 Instead, what was required was “a new species of pioneers” able to “restore the sources of natural wealth.”Footnote 148
Unchecked mechanization, Siegfried wrote, yielded “sterility and death.”Footnote 149 Unlike America, he claimed, mainland France had been exemplary in conserving and restoring its forests and soils, turning the tides of erosion with “jealous prudence.”Footnote 150 To prosper sustainably, Siegfried concluded, modernized farming must embrace the Baconian maxim that “one commands nature by obeying her.”Footnote 151 Thus, while postwar France had to modernize to compete abroad and feed herself, it was equally vital for modernist schemes to learn from traditional mixed farming. As he put it, one should never forget how American farming had “dilapidated its natural resources,” whereas the French peasant, a “son of nature, had known how to better preserve the fertility of the European soil.”Footnote 152 This vision placed French peasant farming as having a vocation for sustainable agriculture, which ought to serve Europe at large.
Through the late 1950s, alongside agriculture, Siegfried despaired of decolonization, peaking with the Suez crisis. Finding no shortage of derogatory tags, he accused postcolonial states of immaturity and irrationality, abusing their sovereignty in allegedly harmful oil nationalizations.Footnote 153 Paternalistic as they were, such remarks betrayed as much bitterness as confusion. A year before Suez, Siegfried had still dreamed of Algerian oil prospecting as opening a new pioneering destiny to France.Footnote 154 By 1956, however, he conceded that “the colonial age [was] at an end” and pondered how “the West” might reinvent its role in global economic development.Footnote 155 At this farewell to empire, the only saving grace Siegfried could see was European unity, soon manifest in the 1957 Treaties of Rome.Footnote 156 Yet, when faced with such geopolitical transformations, Siegfried also returned to his admonitions against the age of technology and its break with natural bounds.
The rise of technology, he wrote, had first ensured Europe’s “irresistible preeminence,” only to then “awaken ancient civilizations,” ensuring that an “era of economic planetary unity” was supplanted by an “era of compartments.”Footnote 157 Tied to machinery, this new era had come about through “the birth of a new geography,” loose from peasant–land bonds and confident about the human capacity to “modify its environment.” With such transformed geographies, Siegfried wrote, one might wonder whether the planet was not entering a “new geological age.”Footnote 158 And yet this new age warranted continuous concern for its boundless “intervention into Nature’s empire.”Footnote 159 Echoing Victor Hugo, he wrote that we might do well to remember that “the freest bird has the climate for its cage.”Footnote 160 For all triumphs of technology, “it remained to be seen” whether Nature would not “have the last word.”Footnote 161
Conclusion: Siegfried’s international thought, geopolitics, and the Anthropocene
Like an optical illusion, André Siegfried’s writings offer at once a familiar and a confounding site for historians of international thought. On the familiar side, Siegfried stands amid a cohort of liberal imperialists who tried to legitimate a Eurocentric world order, often leaning on deeply racist and xenophobic worldviews. As such, Siegfried might be cast as a francophone counterpart to anglophone imperialists studied by Duncan Bell or Robert Vitalis.Footnote 162 In the same manner, Siegfried’s recurring contrast of continental powers and dispersed sea-based empires speaks to well-established themes in the history of international thought, as could be seen in the geopolitical writings of Isaiah Bowman, Nicholas Spykman, Owen Lattimore, and others.Footnote 163 Like these authors, Siegfried connected this geopolitical dichotomy to questions of resource access, logistical security, and technological advantage (such as through air power). Furthermore, Siegfried’s notion that the rise of “continental powers” might be countered through European unity or inter-imperial cartelization also speaks to established historiography on international thought, such as articulated by Antony Pagden, or Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonson.Footnote 164 All such imperialist geopolitical themes, in short, cast Siegfried’s thought through a familiar lens. The same, however, might not be said of his international thought on geopolitics and agriculture.
To be sure, it is not the entanglement of agriculture and geopolitics per se that seems unusual. Established narratives of interwar geopolitical thought have often dwelt on how agriculture came to the fore of strategic–spatial imaginations, with Malthusian-themed concerns for food sufficiency in either autocratic or internationalist molds. At their most infamous, such Malthusian visions fueled demands for territorial expansion by fascist geopoliticians, claiming a greater Lebensraum (living space) as a vital necessity for their allegedly constricted nations.Footnote 165 Beyond fascist quarters, however, liberal international thinkers, such as Isaiah Bowman, also popularized Malthusian geopolitical imaginaries, where overpopulation and insufficient agricultures would cause international strife. Bowman’s proposed solution was to encourage settler colonial policies, transferring “surplus” populations into underexploited agricultural regions.Footnote 166 In such geopolitical visions, the enduring equations balanced demographic excesses and underproductive agricultures. In Siegfried’s agrarian geopolitics, however, a different logic was at play. Rather than overpopulation or land hunger, Siegfried was haunted by the ghost of mechanized monoculture and its unwelcome harvests.
For Siegfried, as I have argued, the geopolitical blight of mechanized monoculture was first expressed in political and economic terms. As early as 1898, Siegfried had reflected on the threats posed by cheap North American wheat imports into Europe. Food import dependency, he wagered, was unwise, exposing countries to disrupted supply in the event of war or market crises. Neighbored by import-dependent Britain and war-ready Germany, Siegfried believed, France could ill afford to risk disruption to its food supplies. Yet, as we have seen, Siegfried’s motives to defend French agriculture were also tied to a political vision of France’s “rural democracy,” where most citizens could remain in the countryside and enjoy independence and prosperity through smallholder quality farming. This society of petty farmers, Siegfried believed, fostered sounder economics and politics than those of either Britain or America, given a more distributed property, greater rates of savings, and greater resilience to market crises. Protecting France’s smallholders, in this view, was a matter of defending a democratic social order. The aftermath of the First World War, moreover, would further entrench Siegfried in these arguments, as he witnessed Britain’s failed postwar agrarian reforms and the United States’ turbulent agrarian politics. In his eyes, while American agriculture was capable of mass production and exports, it was intensely unstable due to excessive farm indebtedness and agrarian populism, demanding a raft of state subsidies, protectionist tariffs, dumping provisions, and expansionary monetary policies. These agrarian politics, Siegfried believed, were a threat to international peace, as they cast the spectre of market crises due to price drops and currency value shifts, which might well undermine postwar reconstruction and debt repayment efforts.
After 1936, however, Siegfried’s critique of industrialized agriculture shifted from economic to environmental themes. In a first sketch, this critique gathered around a contrast of French farmers as frugal and in touch with natural rhythms, as opposed to Americans obsessed with short-term profits and unfazed by the waste of natural resources. This dichotomy remained tied to an economic concern with contrasting consumption and savings, chiding American agriculturalists for being “lavishly imprudent.” The aftermath of the Dust Bowl in the Canadian wheat belt, however, pressed Siegfried toward more explicitly environmental critiques, contrasting mechanized monocultures and homestead mixed farming in terms of soil erosion. The reckless clearing and ploughing driven by monocultures, he argued, precipitated worse droughts, soil pulverization, and wind erosion. These dire consequences, Siegfried moralized, were something like Nature’s revenge against industrial farmers contemptuous of natural rhythms and limits. Such lessons, he argued, ought to be brought back to Europe, and most of all the Mediterranean, where some dreamed of creating “new Californias” through endless cash crop plantations. Such dreams, Siegfried warned, threatened natural disasters and the loss of traditions enabling soil conservation, democratic water rights, and high surface yields despite adverse conditions. Beyond this, he argued, mass monocultures also risked fostering unsustainable state intervention, not least through technocratic dreams of river-based planned economies modeled on the New Deal’s TVA.
After Liberation, Siegfried’s defense of French-modeled smallholder farming adopted new logics. Inspired by the agronomist Michel Cépède, Siegfried critiqued mechanized monoculture for undermining soil fertility by excluding livestock and organic fertilizer. Traditional mixed farming, he claimed, ought to be understood as something akin to a tropical forest, made up of complex organic associations bolstering biological productivity. Such organic links, Siegfried claimed, were irreplaceable by synthetic alternatives. These new logics, as I showed, were mobilized to contest the modernization of French farming through Marshall Plan funding, and to cast doubt on the agricultural prospects of postcolonial states. Regarding France, Siegfried’s use of the tropes of organic farming was intended to defend the natural wisdom of smallholder farming against the onslaught of industrialized agriculture. Turning to South Africa and India, however, Siegfried’s use of the tropes of organic farming was aimed at casting low agricultural yields and soil degradation as caused by the lack of good soil fertility practices, which he associated with sustained reposition of quality manure modeled on French farming. Through this apparently technical narration, Siegfried furnished a geopolitical narrative positioning French paysan expertise as superior to American and Soviet modernist panaceas of mass irrigation, mechanization, and monoculture. French rural democracy, he wanted to believe, could remain a viable source of international power. Its gift, he hoped, was that of a sustainable modernity, truly adapted to nature and better protected against the unintended ravages of industrialist excesses.
Looking back upon Siegfried’s intellectual journey today, it may be tempting for some to ascribe to him a degree of foresight, not least given his suggestive writing about humanity entering a new geological age, or his recurring insistence on the environmental dangers of monoculture-associated practices such as excessive clearing, ploughing, or synthetic-fertilizer use. Such ascription, however, would be somewhat misplaced, as Siegfried’s recourse to these arguments refracted a broader set of environmentally conscious debates between biologists, geographers, agronomists, farmers, economists, and others. Instead, what makes an examination of Siegfried interesting is understanding how he drew such arguments into his geopolitical visions.
As I have argued, Siegfried’s environmental appeals followed from a lifelong commitment to an ideal of French rural democracy, made up of a mass of independent and resilient small farm owners. Furthermore, such appeals were also nested in Siegfried’s imperialism, committed to ideas of France’s civilizational superiority and world influence. In this light, the alleged superiority of French smallholder farming participated in efforts to set French settler colonialism, and later postimperial technical assistance, apart from its competitors. In a third geopolitical direction, Siegfried’s defense of French smallholder farming was also tied to a turn towards European unity, with representation of its Mediterranean especially tied to framing shared dilemmas of resource scarcity and embracing American-styled agricultural modernization. This later connection places Siegfried alongside a younger cohort of French and European thinkers facing postwar agricultural policies amid the construction of the European community, the collapse of European empires, and the invention of international development expertise.Footnote 167 Through these three approaches, it becomes clear that Siegfried’s international thought presents an early example of environmental and geopolitical thinking becoming entangled with claims of fashioning a sustainable modernity wrought between great-power politics and new forms of scientific awareness. In this way, at last, Siegfried stands as a telling example for contemporary reflection, inviting us to appreciate a deeper intellectual history where environmental concern has long featured within geopolitical fears and calculations, whose echo lingers among us.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks the archivists at Sciences Po for their help navigating the Siegfried fonds. Gratitude is also owed to colleagues for their thoughtful comments on early drafts of this article presented at the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies conference on Environmental Concepts in the Global Age of Revolutions, and in the Groningen History and Theory of International Relations colloquium in 2022. Special thanks also to Guilherme Ribeiro for his comments and encouragement.
Financial support
Archival research for this article was financed by a grant for Downing College’s Senior Fellows Research Fund.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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