Popular Geographies in a French Port City: The Experience of the Le Havre Society of Commercial Geography, 1884–1948

Abstract

In the wake of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, many French provincial cities established geographical societies that informed the business community about trading opportunities, and educated and entertained the general public, whose taste for the exotic was met by talks from returned explorers. In 1884, Le Havre founded its own society, with an explicitly commercial orientation. Detailed reading of its Bulletin reveals that, in practice, it presented a variety of forms of ‘popular geography’. At first, its lectures and articles met a genuine demand for information about the rapidly changing world; after 1900, attention was directed toward the geopolitics of Europe. Audiences declined in the 1920s and 1930s, as the city's businessmen joined new associations that offered effective professional contacts. The fate of the Society was sealed when its offices and library were bombed in 1944, however its role in diffusing geographical knowledge should not be ignored.

Key Words:

• Geographic thought
• historical geography
• regional geography
• France
• history of geography
• Normandy

Acknowledgement

The author wishes to thank François Gay, Hugh Prince and two referees for their advice, and to reading room staff at the Royal Geographical Society (London) for assisting the consultation of the volumes of the Bulletin.

Notes

  ¹ In 1892 a ‘colonial group’ was set up comprising députés belonging to different political persuasions but “united by a desire to ensure France's strength and greatness in colonial and foreign spheres” (Brunschwig, 1966, p. 107). In February 1898, the Senate announced that it too had a ‘colonial group’, with Jules Siegfried as chairman. See also Andrew & Kanya-Forstner (1971), Abrams & Miller (1976), Girardet (1978), Persell (1983) and Pervillé (1993).

  ² The origins of geographical societies at Montpellier and Nancy are discussed by Saussol (1990), Bonnefont (1999) and Goerg (2002).

  ³ The Ecole Supérieure du Commerce du Havre, together with counterparts in Bordeaux, Marseille, Nantes and Rouen, was a private, rather than a state-run, institution (Maffre, 1988, p. 601).

  ⁴ Most provincial geographical societies charged an annual fee of 10–12 francs, but Lyon (20 francs) and Marseille (25 francs) charged double that amount (Lejeune, 1993, p. 111).

  ⁵ However, there is no evidence that expeditions were funded by the Society.

  ⁶ On the origins of the Société de Géographie Commerciale, see: Heffernan, 1994, pp. 106–07.

  ⁷ De Brazza's approach contrasted with the harsh regime operating in the Belgian Congo, with the King of the Belgians becoming a powerful enemy. The victim of a campaign in the French press following the ‘Dreyfus affair’, De Brazza was dismissed in 1898.

  ⁸ Further information on De Brazza's travels appeared in articles in the Bulletin by his secretary, Charles de Chavannes (1886), and by M. Descheverry (1889), one of the explorer's former employees.

  ⁹ Journalist Harry Alis (Henri-Hippolyte Percher) established the Comité de l'Afrique Française in the autumn of 1890. It campaigned vigorously for a revision of territorial boundaries that had been recognised by the Franco-British treaty earlier that year. Its objective was to allow French territory to extend from the Sahara to French possessions on the Gulf of Guinea, with Jules Siegfried as a prominent supporter (see Berdoulay, 1981, p. 55). In 1900, a Comité de l'Asie Française was set up to promote French interests in the Far East. In 1901, Archinard's ethnographic collection was moved into the natural history museum in Le Havre. A bronze statue of the local hero was unveiled in Le Havre by Maréchal Pétain in 1934, but the Germans melted this down during World War II. A second statue was unveiled in Ségon, Mali, but is now held in store.

¹⁰ A complete set, held by the Royal Geographical Society, has been used for this analysis.

¹¹ These were: Bourg-en-Bresse (1888), Paris (1889), Montpellier (1890), Rochefort (1891), Lille (1892), Tours (1893), Saint-Nazaire (1897), Marseille (1898), Algiers (1899), Paris (1900), Nancy (1901), Dunkirk (1906), Nancy (1909) and Roubaix (1912)—the 30th national meeting.

¹² Brumpt's early interest in sleeping sickness led to a distinguished academic career, being appointed professor of parasitology at the University of Paris and elected a member of the Académie de Médecine.

¹³ In November 1910, less than two years after his lecture, Moll was killed in combat in Tchad.

¹⁴ On the limited significance of French settlement overseas, with the exception of Algeria, see Andrew & Kanya-Forstner, 1981, pp. 9–32.

¹⁵ After conquering Cochin-China and imposing a form of protectorate in Cambodia, France acquired Tonkin and Annam in 1885, which were grouped together as French Indo-China. Laos and Cambodia became formal French protectorates in 1893 and 1903 respectively.

¹⁶ Eugène Etienne founded the Comité du Maroc in 1904, and the Ligue coloniale Française three years later. Morocco became a French protectorate in 1912.

¹⁷ The Comité du Madagascar was a pressure group, set up in 1903 as an offshoot of the Union Coloniale Française established in 1893 to bring together leading French business houses with colonial interests.

¹⁸ In A Mission to Civilize, Alice Conklin discusses racial relativity and the French ‘civilising mission’.

¹⁹ Dr. Loir conducted extensive fieldwork into animal hygiene in North Africa, Australia, South America and the Canadian Rockies as well as Southern Africa. In addition to responsibilities in Le Havre, he taught at the Ecole Nationale d'Agriculture Coloniale from 1903 to 1932.

²⁰ The Bulletin contained 9630 printed pages between 1884 and 1938. In order to calculate percentages shown in Table 1, a notional 10 pages was allocated to items where only the title or author was shown.

²¹ These special lectures, recorded in the Bulletin by title and speaker only, were devoted to the war-time experiences of France (two), Russia, Britain, Serbia, the USA, Germany, and Switzerland; and to northern France under German occupation, German destruction in northern France, the devastation of Rheims cathedral, Alsace and its administration (two), Romania, and Poland.

²² These audiences would also have included French-speaking members of the British and, later, the American forces in the city, since Le Havre was a major supply base for Allied troops during the war.

²³ Unfortunately, the content of these lectures was not printed in the Bulletin. Other academics who lectured to the Society included historian Gabriel Hanotaux (1901), who spoke on the role of Le Havre in French history; the economist Georges Blondel who addressed the threat Germany posed to European stability (1912, 1926, 1932); the Belgian historian, Henri Pirenne, who spoke about the formation of the nation of Belgium (1926); and Henri Lorin, professor of colonial geography at the University of Bordeaux and député for the Gironde (1919–24, and later 1928–32), who described the geography of Egypt (1928).

²⁴ His course on economic geography was eventually joined by a course on the USA. The Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques was renamed the Institut d'Etudes Politiques in 1945, and is widely known as ‘Sciences-Po’.

²⁵ Like many French people, Siegfried used ‘Angleterre’ to mean Great Britain.

²⁶ André Siegfried occupied the chair of economic and political geography at the Collège de France between 1933 and 1945, simultaneously with his post at the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques. George Kish acknowledged Siegfried's “ability to size up complex problems in a few lines” and the fact that “He made three generations of Frenchmen interested in the world at large” (Kish, 1960, p. 288).

²⁷ The Société d'Aide et de Protection aux Colons merged with the Institut Colonial in 1934.

²⁸ Miroglio was a Protestant and a philosophy teacher in Le Havre. The Institut was backed by leading members of the city's trading community and by its chamber of commerce. Initial interest was on such questions as ethnography, national identity and global trade; subsequently urban sociology, planning and third-world issues drew attention. The Revue de Psychologie des Peuples and then the Cahiers de Sociologie Economique (starting in 1959) emanated from the Institut and from scholars in various disciplines, including geography, who were associated with it. Miroglio summarised his work in La Psychologie des Peuples (1958).