In the winter storms of 1999, one of the first items of news to be widely reported by the French media was the destruction of many of the ancient trees on the grounds of the Château de Versailles. Many of the last trees planted during Louis XIV’s reign fell, and experts announced that it would take over two hundred years for the park to look the same again. Versailles and its spectacular gardens like the Forest of Fontainebleau and its castle, which are the topic of this essay, are examples of monuments where nature has become as significant as the buildings it surrounds.

In France as well as in other western countries, the longevity of trees and especially oak trees has been for centuries a way to measure the passage of time. The oak tree and the specific symbolism that has grown around it since antiquity was by the 1850s a privilege site for anchoring French national identity. Beyond wars, revolution, heroes and their deeds, the oak tree has been witness to the temporality of human life and political regimes. The oak tree brought the French back to their native soil, to nature itself, beyond their personal and political allegiances. The oak tree has always been considered the archetypal French tree: from the druids to King Saint Louis, who chose to administer justice under its branches, to being the choice for the liberty tree during the Revolution, the oak tree has long been recognized as the national tree.

This essay examines a specific moment in order to better understand the fascination trees have held for urbanized western society in the past two hundred years. In the 1850s, Parisians looked at nature in a very different way than the people who actually lived in the country. It was a way that was, of course, deeply conditioned by their urban lives. Nature and the forest were not considered exploitable natural resources. Wilderness, untouched nature, was cherished and not simply a wasteland to be put to use. The forest was a place where one could escape; find subjects matter for artistic works, and experience with nostalgia for an ancient and undisturbed order of things.

While the 1840s saw the development of Parisian metropolitan culture, it also witnessed the anchoring of French identity in its countryside and its geographical diversity. The paintings of the naturalist landscape artists of the Barbizon School, the works of historians such as Augustin Thierry and Jules Michelet, and the desire to escape a city which was increasingly perceived as corrupt and unhealthy are all part of the same phenomenon, the crystallization of this new sense of national character.[1] The Forest of Fontainebleau, some forty miles south of Paris was the perfect place to embody these new ideas about national identity. It was bordered at one end by the royal residence of Fontainebleau and on the other by the small village of Barbizon where most of the artists had settled by 1849.[2]

As historical site, the forest has enjoyed uninterrupted fame as a royal hunting ground since Francis I, while providing kings and emperors with substantial revenues.[3]

Its privileged status as a royal domain paradoxically protected the forest from disappearing completely under the pressure of the surrounding agriculture. It was accessible only through an infrastructure of paths and alleys maintained by official agents and civil servants. During the July Monarchy, for instance, its staff numbered fifty-two. By the 1840s the forest had become a favorite haunt of artists and tourists alike, for all were able to enjoy this place whose longevity celebrated the endurance of national character through an unbroken connection with the past.[4]

The extreme diversity of its landscapes was initially what attracted artists to the forest of Fontainebleau. Artists had recognized these qualities since the early 1800s. Tourists followed soon after.[5] By the late 1830s, the growing appreciation by the urban middle-class of landscape paintings made the Fontainebleau forest an excellent destination for artists.[6] As It was close enough to the capital to be easily reachable first by coach then by train; the forest itself soon became a familiar subject matter, easily recognizable by the potential client. From manicured alleys and well-tended tree plantations (too many for artists’ tastes) to barren canyons and sandy deserts (much preferred by the artists), from ponds to fields dotted with strange granite boulders, the forest was capable of provoking a wide range of sensations in its visitors. It was a microcosm representative of the many landscapes of the nation.

The period of roughly 1830 to the 1870s was a period of relative peace in France, essential for the construction of this new self-image. It would eventually find its full political and cultural expression during the early Third Republic, when landscape painting was finally officially accepted as an integral part of the healing and reconstructing process after the trauma of the Franco-Prussian War and of the Commune. After decades of neglect, at the 1874 Salon the State finally bought twenty-nine landscape paintings, and in 1879 Jules Ferry announced major changes in State art policy in favor of open-air painting and modern-life subjects.[7]

By the late 1840s, however, the artists and writers associated with the village of Barbizon realized that what they had revered in the forest a sense of timelessness, of communion with the wild was gradually being compromised by the tourist industry and by the commercial exploitation of the forest itself.

While revered, the majestic oaks of Fontainebleau were also being destroyed by commercial exploitation. In 1861, the oak trees still numbered over fifty percent of all the trees in the Fontainebleau forest. However, pine trees had been systematically planted since the eighteenth century as re-forestation rapidly threatened them, despite the fact that pine trees were not indigenous to the forest. In the most barren areas, beeches and some silver birches grew.[8] The oak trees brought the most revenues to the royal coffers. As the forest was part of the liste civile, which was the personal fund of the rulers, its profits went directly into first Louis-Philippe and then Napoleon III’s pockets. According to Denecourt’s 1840’s guide, the forest could yield a revenue between 500,000 to 600,000 francs a year, and more precise records indicate that some years, especially in the 1840s, could bring in 900,000 francs from sale of timber from these trees.[9]

Throughout the July Monarchy and the Second Empire, many art critics joined artists, such as Théodore Rousseau, in denouncing the negative impact of tourism, as well as the commercial exploitation of the forest. This included quarries as well as timber, for the cobbled stone that covered Paris’s new boulevards was made from the granite of the Fontainebleau forest. As early as 1839, L'Artiste, the leading art magazine of the period published an article denouncing a plan to plant even more pine trees on the barren sandy wastes of the Fontainebleau forest. In the press and in special letter campaigns to the authorities, critics and artists set out to defend the forest and their livelihood against the encroachment of developing capitalism.[10]

Among Théodore Rousseau’s papers, now in the Musée du Louvre, there is the copy of a petition that echoes the articles published in the press. In that petition written in 1852 and addressed to Napoleon III, Rousseau demanded that the forest be designated as monument historique. He denounced the commercial exploitation of the forest, stating that the 1100 hectares already protected were insufficient and proposing that the forest should be protected in the name of art. He attacked the forestry administration and the tourist industry for putting profits before the interests of the forest. Rousseau and his friend/biographer/dealer-promoter Alfred Sensier presented the petition to the Emperor through le duc de Morny. Morny had been impressed by Rousseau’s work, having attended the auction sale of his paintings earlier that year. Rousseau essentially wanted to preserve the most spectacular and untamable sites of the forest: The Bas-Bréau, the Gorges d’Apremont, the Monts-Girard, the Plateau de Bellecroix, and the Gorges aux Loups [See Map of the Forest of Fontainebleau, Théodore Rousseau, The Great Oaks of Old Bas-Bréau, 1864, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Théodore Rousseau, The Edge of the Woods at Monts-Girard, 1854, Metropolitan Museum of Art]. These were the sites that he and other artists painted most often.

A survey and study of the forest followed Rousseau’s petition. In this study the forest agents argued against Rousseau and his ideas of non-intervention. If the forest was to be preserved, it was through selective exploitation and re-planting. If the trees were allowed to die naturally, as Rousseau wanted, the forest would eventually degenerate, the official said. But finally in 1863, Napoleon III signed a decree setting aside 1,097 hectares of the Fontainebleau forest as a réserve artistique, which could not be exploited commercially. Ultimately this area was actually much larger than what the foresters had recommended.
For the artists and their supporters, preserving the wildness of the forest and its diversity meant letting nature pursue its course with minimal human intervention. It was not motivated only by what we would now call environmental concerns, but also by the fear of losing still more picturesque views to the pine trees, tourist paths, and woodcutters’ saws.
Among these artists, some lived in Barbizon year round or stayed for extended periods of time in the summer, others traveled from Paris or from neighboring villages, but they all maintained closed connections to the capital. Théodore Rousseau, for example, kept a Parisian studio after moving to Barbizon. The critic Théophile Thoré visited him in Barbizon, and then turned his visit into a series of articles promoting the work of Rousseau and the threatened wilderness as if they were one.[11] Both Rousseau and the oak trees were described as the indigenous inhabitants of the Forest. This trope was developed even further by Alfred Sensier, who, in his later biography of Rousseau, claimed that the painter could hear the voice of these ancient treesand understand their stories without word, positing an ecological model of communication between all different members of the similar environment.[12]

By looking at the paintings that Camille Corot and Théodore Rousseau excecuted of the ancient oaks of the Fontainebleau Forest, we can see that they can acquire a much richer meaning if they are examined against the growing concern with the transformation and the preservation of the forest. Paintings such as Corot’s Fontainebleau, Le Rageur (1830-32, private collection) and Rousseau’s Oak Trees in the Gorge of Apremont (c.1850-52, Musée du Louvre), best exemplify the symbolic value attached to such trees. Denoncourt gave the ancient oak trees of the Fontainebleau Forest names such as Le Rageur, Le Sully, Le Henri IV, le Déluge, and Le Gutenberg. By 1893 there were two hundred and seventy-six named trees, and three hundred and twenty-three by 1916. The oldest still standing is named Le Jupiter. In Fontainebeau, Le Rageur, Corot presented the oak tree as a survivor, growing wild out of the boulder. While this tree embodied the symbolic qualities of longevity and endurance it was also one of the most threatened species of the forest,. In Fontainebleau, Le Rageur, Corot confronts the audience with a piece of nature, as if seized by a traveler on the move; the oak dominates, while the human presence lets us measure the real size of the tree.

In one of the earliest articles on the School of Barbizon published in 1866 in L’Artiste, Hector Callias stressed the connection between the Barbizon painters and primordial France, comparing the painters to druids worshipping the oak tree. He argued that as the Gauls opposed the Romans, these painters rejected the classical tradition to find their exclusive inspiration in nature. Callias's article is an example of the prevalence of this new national consciousness. In keeping with the idea of a Gaelic France and by transforming the painters of Barbizon into druids, he claimed for these artists an ancestry outside the Greco-Roman classical tradition valued by the Academy.[13]

Callias assert a quasi-religious status for these artists by referring to them as druids, but he also promoted them as rugged and primitive bearded individuals, close to the nature they painted. Just like the peasant-painter, the trope of the original savage-painter, uncorrupted by the urban civilization and academic teaching, was firmly in place by the middle of the century. One needs only to remember how in the 1850s the realist painter Gustave Courbet actively cultivated his controversial persona: the artist as ruffian, individualistic and unmannered. He made sure he retained his regional accent and customs as a sign of independence from the official artistic institutions.[14]

This preoccupation with France, its historical past, its national character, and its countryside had once been related to romantic nationalism and the need to redefine national boundaries after the fall of Napoleon’s empire in 1815, but by the 1830s, it had become a truly complex phenomenon. The landscape paintings of the School of Barbizon were only one expression of this attempt to define Frenchness. One could see in the rustic novels of George Sand, the poems of Pierre Dupont and the works of historians such as Augustin Thierry and Jules Michelet, some other facets of a similar phenomenon.

Thierry and Michelet’s works on the Gauls and the origin of France shed new light on the history of the Third Estate. Instead of concentrating only on the monarchy, Michelet insisted that the ‘true France’ was rural France. Since the 1789 Revolution, the Gauls had been replacing the Franks as the founding fathers of France. The acceptance by the bourgeoisie of its Gaelic origins came to symbolize democratic freedom. After the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, the Franks were finally totally dispossessed from their historical role, they were definitely too German.[15]

We should understand the denunciation of the commercial exploitation of the Fontainebleau forest not so much as an act of political rebellion against the oppressive governments of the July Monarchy and the Second Empire, but rather as the penetration into the establishment of an early nationalistic rhetoric only a few decades after the Revolution of 1789. These paintings seem to have supported a specific idea of what France meant to its people, an idea rooted in the permanence of the past, the rural and the historical, where man works in symbiosis with nature, part of the natural order. Rousseau’s A Forest at Sunset in Winter (1846-67, Metropolitan Museum of Art) and Group of Oaks in the Apremont Gorges (1852, Musée du Louvre) [Ill. #1] exemplify these specific ideas. In an 1857 article published in L'Artiste, S. Cambray reviewed all the different type of trees and their value to the painter. The oak is quickly elevated to anthropomorphic form, the equivalent of the human figure in history painting imbued with nobility and virility, and is also compared to a hero from antiquity, withstanding the elements with courage and majesty even in its old age.[16]

Like Rousseau himself, the peasants he represented in the painting live in symbiosis with nature. They are either herding animals, by then a disappearing practice or gathering fallen dead wood. Unlike Millet, Rousseau rarely painted the cultivated fields. These paintings were not about agriculture, about the domination of men over nature, as in paintings of Rosa Bonheur such as Haymaking Auvergne, (1855, Musée des domaines nationaux du château de Fontainebleau). Being able to let your cattle graze and gathering dead fallen wood had been two special privileges given traditionally to the population surrounding the forest as compensation for the damages incurred on their private property during royal hunts. But just as Monet later turned his back on the pollution and the factories of Argenteuil, as in his Effets d’automne à Argenteuil (1873, Courtauld Institute Gallery, London), in A Forest at Sunset in Winter Rousseau made Bas-Bréau look inaccessible and untouched by modernity, as none of the tourist paths are visible. The faggot gatherers are here rendered minuscule, blending into the fabric of the paint itself. Rousseau looked at the relationship between all living things in a specific environment. The forest of Fontainebleau had become its own ecosystem, where peasants and painters were naturalized as its original inhabitants. Painters and their supporters were allied against the tourists and pine trees, they were both rejected as foreign elements.

In Fontainebleau, Le Rageur and in A Forest in Winter at Sunset, each artist decides to erase any trace that could connect us with the tourist or commercial exploitation of the forest. Their vision is rooted in nostalgia, in the land and its inhabitants. But the painters also provide a vision of the forest that could please and soothe a potential client, usually an urban dweller who wanted--even imaginatively-- to escape the city, and sought the same emotion that Rousseau aims to preserve in his canvas. On the contrary, if one looks at a contemporary photograph taken in the forest of Le chêne de l’Empereur, one can see that the photographer has not chosen to avoid modernity, but has embraced the cohabitation of the top-hat urbanite with the white smock peasant [ill. #2, William Harrison, Près de la mare à Dagnan, le chêne de l’Empereur, 1870.

The forest, and by extension the paintings which depicted it, attracted many different ideologies. For Alfred Sensier, it symbolizes a mythical eternal agrarian natural order. While his ideas were grounded in the philosophy of the Enlightenment and in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, they were also imbued with a by now secular democratic-republican ideal typical among the Parisian bourgeoisie that Sensier, a civil servant, belonged to.[17] However, Sensier’s agenda was rather conservative; but for radical critics like Théophile Thoré, the forest epitomized freedom rather than nostalgia. Thoré’s republicanism pushed him to politicize Rousseau’s paintings in order to support his demand for a national art. This proves that nature was never really as a neutral place as it seemed to be.[18]

The symbolism attached to the Forest of Fontainebleau and evident in the canvases of artists like Rousseau, Corot, or Dupré was used by different voices for different reasons. It could be used to support the views of the conservative Parisian bourgeoisie but also the views of the utopian socialist followers of Saint-Simon and Fourier, who had so inspired Thoré. Their pursuit of love and harmony saw the establishment of rural communes as the cornerstone of their new order. Finally there were two additional factors extremely significant in Napoleon III’s decision to set aside part of the Forest of Fontainebleau for conservation against the advice of his foresters. First, nature was not just preserved for its own sake, but because the administration recognized the important role the forest played in the renewal of French landscape painting, which was hailed as the glory of the French School by the early 1850s. In an article by Philippe Burty for La Renaissance artistique, 1872 Fontainebleau was not seen as only a museum but also as the “wet nurse of modern landscape.”[19] To conserve plots of “untouched” ancient forest for artists and tourists meant that wilderness survived only to be transformed into the ultimate artifice: a painting. But most importantly this also meant that the government understood that after the succession of revolutions since 1789, nature and in this particular case the Forest of Fontainebleau, could be used to promote ideas of permanence and stability.

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