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Chapter 5

Landscape Typology of French

Agrarian Terraces

Jean-François Blanc

Abstract The landscapes of agricultural terraces occupy in France a geographical area essentially localized at east of a Strasbourg/Biarritz line. Built mainly by the peasants who cultivated them, they can be classified into two main types connected to their agricultural purposes: “food terraces”, the most numerous, and terraces of opportunity on very limited spaces. The geography of terraces on the scale of France is, however, more complex. Indeed, these arrangements join very different regional contexts which produced each of the specific agrosystems in which terraces are more or less present. So, according to the important size of occupied surfaces, four types can be distinguished: the “Cévenol” model, the “High Valleys” model, the “Provencal” model and the “Isolates” model. All these models worked until the middle of the nineteenth century, and then gradually declined for a century, challenged by the crises, the technical progress and the political choices that are almost a general abandonment of mountain agriculture. However, from the 1980s, the question of the reconquest of the slopes was posed, and gradually, projects of rehabilitation of the old terraces emerged. Even if the pioneers of this revival were especially the winegrowers, today, the reconquest concerns other sectors carried by the evolution of consumption patterns, the questioning of chemical agriculture and monoculture.

5.1Introduction

The landscapes of agricultural terraces occupy in France an important geographical area which far exceeds the Mediterranean frontage of the country. The vast majority of the slopes are located to the south-east of a line running from Strasbourg on the Rhine to Biarritz, in the western part of the Pyrenees.

J.-F. Blanc (&)

Member of the Scientific and Executive Committee of International Terraced Landscape Alliance, Lumbin, France

e-mail: jf15blanc@gmail.com

M. Varotto et al. (eds.), World Terraced Landscapes: History, Environment, Quality of Life, Environmental History 9, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96815-5_5

The terraces of France were built mainly by the peasants who cultivated them. Two types of terraces can be distinguished: terraces of need, the most numerous, and terraces of opportunity, on very limited spaces. The first type can be called “food terraces” because their primary purpose was to feed men. They received varied cultures associated with polybreeding, mainly sheep–goat. Unlike the “food terraces”, the second one very early specialized in monoculture: olive tree, floral crops, citrus. But it is mainly the vine that has settled on the slopes best exposed. The prestigious vineyards of the Eastern Pyrenees (Banyuls crus) and the Rhone Valley (Cornas, Hermitage, Côte Rôtie) testify to this.

It is not easy to present the geography of terraces in France because we do not have a precise map of these developments such as that made by our Italian neighbours (Bonardi and Varotto 2016). Indeed, if many researchers are interested in terraces, they all have limited their field of study to a few valleys (Alcaraz 1996; Castex 1980) and even those who have tackled larger sets like the northern part of the Mediterranean and have always limited their investigations and comparative analyzes to a few territories (Desbordes 1999). These completely assumed choices do not detract from the value of their scientific work and allow rich comparative approaches.

In the absence of exhaustive cartographic data, we will therefore propose a landscape typology of French terraces according to the importance of the areas occupied in the agrarian space.

Thus, four landscape models can be distinguished:

–The “Cévenol” model: when terraces and cultivated spaces were blended together.

–The “High Valleys” model of the Southern Alps, Southern Massif Central, Castagniccia and Eastern Pyrenees: small terraced areas associated with immense spaces of extensive agriculture.

–The “Provençal” model: when terraces adjoin flat lands potentially cultivable.

–The “Isolates” model: unusual developments in agrarian spaces that are generally without terraces.

The first model concerns the regions where most of the agricultural activities were carried out on the terraces because of the ubiquity of the slope. The land is heavily landlocked, with terraces corresponding to almost all of the cultivated land. The second model is associated with the first but serves as a transition to mountain areas where terraces gradually disappear. In the “Provençal” model, the agrarian space is divided between declining or flat plots and thus produces agricultures with or without terraces, even on steep slopes, but in more open regions. Finally, in other rural territories where terraces are virtually absent, certain productions, particularly the vine, can justify the choice of terraced crops very localized on insignificant surfaces sometimes, which thus present themselves in the form of unusual Isolates.

Two great types of land structures match these four models of landscape. In the “fully terraced” communes, tiny properties of 2–5 ha strongly fragmented (de Reparaz 1990) stand out. In communes where terraces occupy only a small part of the agrarian space, the rural society is more hierarchized and properties are more differentiated. We are in a less democratic social system, composed of both very smalland

5.2The Cévenol Model: When Terraces and Cultivated Areas Were Blended onto Enclosed Mountains

In absence of flat surfaces, in some French regions, agriculture could only be practiced on slopes. This first constraint, combined with a strong erosion linked to the Mediterranean climate, already justifies the generalization of the construction of terraces. Thus, the agriculture of the interfluves of the Southern Alps and southern part of the Massif Central would have been compromised without the use of the construction of walls initially intended to retain the land and facilitate the work of the men.

In the Southern Alps, the predominance of terraced landscapes in some valleys has been well analyzed in the Maritime Alps and in the Var (Castex 1996). Here, terraces dominate in the forms of practiced agriculture and cover between 30 and 50% of the surfaces. They are distributed between the sea and 1800 m above sea level, but most of them are located below 1300 m in the southern and eastern slopes, and even though they are at a low altitude, the slopes can be explained by a cooler microclimate (Castex 1983). In these hinterlands, the scarcity of available flat land and population growth are at the origin of the conquest of the slopes by a modest peasantry (de Reparaz 1990). The agriculture practiced on these “restanques” (local name for terraces) was initially based on the trilogy of Mediterranean cultures: wheat, olive and vine. This trilogy was part of a polycultural system involving a small sheep–goat farm.

The second French region that offers large terraces is situated in the south-east of the Massif Central, on three departments: Ardèche, Gard and Lozère. Often referred to as “Cévennes” (Martin 2006), it connects the uplands to more than 1000 m of altitude with the Rhone Valley and the hills of Languedoc, less than 300 m away. The slope here is still omnipresent “… between the valley of the Arre, in the south, and that of the Chassezac, in the north” (Usselmann 2006). In fact, this zone extends more to the north-east, in Ardèche, at least up to the catchment area of the Eyrieux. In these landlocked and isolated valleys, throughout history, men slowly and gradually settled, colonizing a constraining nature resulting from three geological components: shale, sandstone and granite that generated each type of specific terraces (Blanc 1983).

The landscape opposes a northerly forest, the shady side, to a south slope, the sunny side, where the peasants built their farms grouped in hamlets, surrounded by terraces. It is on this sunny slope that most of the “faïsses” or “traversiers” (local terms for terraces) are concentrated. But the terraces do not descend to the edge of the river which is reserved for a meadow irrigated by gravity. Above, from the habitat, the colonization of the slope was gradually carried out according to the demographic fluctuations. The oldest and most well-kept terraces adjoins the hamlets; the most recent climbs to the assault of the ridge lines, the summits, so characteristic of the Cévennes landscapes. Thus, over the centuries, peasant families have built the mountain to make arable lands that were not arable. With the sole objective of feeding, they created a unique landscape consisting of a mosaic of small properties of four or five hectares on average, which had to be rationalized to

the extreme in order to optimize low yields. It was first of all a remarkable mastery of water and a complicated management of shortages and excesses. In Ardèche, for example, on the same slope, dry agriculture and irrigated agriculture were present. The latter has generated systems for the recovery and capture of water that is too scarce and associated with measures to limit the erosive effects of severe thunderstorms, very characteristic of the Mediterranean climate, known as “Cévenol periods”, discharging up to 400 mm of precipitation per m2 in 24 h.

This need to optimize the use of space has become more apparent with the demographic pressure exerted in the nineteenth century. With more than 100 inhabitants/km2, the peasants settled on very small properties have rationalized the slopes by multiplying the facilities to make the land more profitable and try to feed their families. Thus, they have associated with the terraces many elements of vernacular architecture that make this “Cévenol” model an example, undoubtedly unique in the world. Indeed, there are no other forms of small rural architecture associated with terraces. The enormous work of inventory, carried out in Ardèche by Michel Rouvière, testifies to this richness (Blanc 1983). This diversity concerns firstly the circulation on the slopes which was made through narrow roads framed by walls, to the terraces in which one travelled by using ramps or stairs of various shapes, the most sophisticated using the cantilever technique. Water control has also produced multiple installations to capture, conduct, store or otherwise evacuate excess water in various ways, while also avoiding its erosive effects. The catalogue of these forms is rich: vaulted cisterns, basins, canals, wells, draining galleries, junctions, etc. To these elements of small rural architecture is added a great variety of shelters for the men and the harvests, far from the hamlets, often integrated into the retaining walls.

These terraces were the foundation of a self-sufficient agrarian system based on polyculture and sheep–goat farming, implemented by a poor peasantry. For the Ardèche, cereals occupied the most important areas (Bozon 1963). In the Gard, the olive tree covered many slopes. The vine was present everywhere, but on small surfaces, because everyone wanted to produce their wine, which explains why it could easily reach 800 m of altitude.

But the specificity of the terraced cultivation of these highly developed regions is also based on the “coltura promiscua” (Pinto-Correia and Vos 2005), which juxtaposed several crops on the same plot: vines and olive trees, chestnuts and cereals, mulberry trees and cereals, etc. This up-to-date farming, which had been brought back to life for its agro-ecological interest, was intensely practiced by peasants until the middle of the twentieth century.

This agrosystem reached its peak in the mid-nineteenth century. Thanks to the terraces, the communes of slopes were able to withstand demographic densities of 100 inhabitants/km2, up to 150 inhabitants/km2.

However, gradually, competing with the call of labour mines such as that of Alès and the booming industry that founded the rural exodus in France, terraced agriculture was the first affected by the abandonment of agricultural lands.