Polity’s Environmental History series
Introducing Polity’s new Environmental History series. These accessible books explore the history of human societies and how they have shaped, and been shaped by, the natural world.
Adrian Howkins, The Polar Regions
Jon Mathieu, The Alps
polity
First published in German as Die Alpen. Raum - Kultur - Geschichte, © Philipp Reclam jun. GmbH & Co. KG, Stuttgart, 2015
This English edition © Polity Press, 2019
The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International – Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association).
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2771-7
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Mathieu, Jon, author.
Title: The Alps : an environmental history / Jon Mathieu.
Description: English edition. | Medford, MA : polity, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018027493 (print) | LCCN 2018029306 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509527748 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509527717 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Alps--History. | Alps--Civilization.
Classification: LCC DQ823.5 (ebook) | LCC DQ823.5 .M375 2019 (print) | DDC 949.4/7--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018027493
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How many mountains in the world are called ‘Matterhorn’? A recent count turned up more than 200. They are found on all continents of this planet and owe their name to a nearly 4,500-metre-high ‘Matterhorn’ in the European Alps, on the border between Switzerland and Italy. This Matterhorn has a memorable shape, as well as a legendary history. In the nineteenth century, mountain climbers of several nationalities threw themselves into a fierce competition to be the first to stand at the summit. It was not a coincidence that these climbers came from different countries. The Alps are located at the heart of Europe. Today this mountain range is divided between six states. In alphabetical order, they are Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Slovenia and Switzerland. And if you look closely, two small principalities also belong to the list: Lichtenstein and Monaco. It was also not really an accident that the competition over the original Matterhorn took place in the nineteenth century. The summit attempt was precipitated and enabled by the ‘discovery’ of the Alps by European elites, which had begun more than 100 years before.1
We usually connect this discovery with the famous names of the Enlightenment. The most commonly mentioned is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose writings moved the reading public deeply in the eighteenth century and called for a reconciliation with nature in general. According to Rousseau, Western civilization was corrupt and must find its way back to nature. ‘Nature’, this new reference point for moral behaviour, was best exemplified by the Alps. Their higher elevations were only sparsely used for agriculture and so were fairly deserted, and their impressive silhouettes, shaped by mysterious geological forces, could be seen from afar. The Alps were promoted to a pièce de résistance of European culture, indeed to an embodiment of nature.2 And since Europe was on the path of expansion, and for a time struggled in a national competition for world domination, this idea and this example were widely distributed. It is not a great exaggeration to claim that the modern concern for the ‘environment’ began with the European Alps.
I say the ‘European’ Alps, because soon they were not the only ones. When the British captain and explorer James Cook saw the mountains of the South Island of New Zealand on his first South Sea expedition in 1770, he wrote the name ‘Southern Alps’ onto the map. Later came the Australian Alps, the Japanese Alps, the Alps of Sichuan in China, the Canadian Alps and others. Just as the Matterhorn became a pattern for mountains across the world after it was climbed, so the European Alps – thanks to their position in a hegemonic movement of expansion – had already become a model range. This can be seen from the life of Alexander von Humboldt. The German naturalist from Berlin first saw the Alps with his own eyes in 1792, and was enraptured in spite of the poor weather. When he undertook his famous South American voyage in the years around 1800, he referred again and again to these mountains, to bring the public closer to the Andes. How high were particular Andean mountains? About as high as Swiss passes. What was the difference in altitude between two Inca roads? More than that between Mont Cenis and Lake Como.3
Examples abound. The Alps played a pioneering role in other fields too, such as Alpinism or particular forms of nature conservation. We should not overstate this role, yet it is not self-evident, and needs to be explained. A first step towards explanation is to engage in earnest with the subject. This book is the product of such an engagement. It is an attempt to write a modern history of the Alps from prehistory to the present day.
How does one write a history of the Alps? The historical method has source criticism at its heart, and also requires a justifiable, contextual and possibly theoretical approach. It is clear that an overview of such a vast space over so long a period must be undertaken very selectively. It is a question of working out the broad sweeps and most important connections in the clearest and most plausible manner. I wish to outline the way that this history has been written as follows:
For our central question, we turn to a proposition from the French historian Fernand Braudel. In his famous history of the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century, he explained why one finds certain ‘civilized’ achievements in the Alps that are lacking in other mountain ranges: ‘but the Alps are after all the Alps, that is an exceptional range of mountains, from the point of view of resources, collective disciplines, the quality of its human population and the number of good roads’.4 An exceptional range of mountains, une montagne exceptionnelle – is that true? In what respects? And why? Various chapters will consider these questions. In chapter 2, I present the biographical background and emergence of this viewpoint, and in chapter 10 we will take stock. There I will argue that the exceptional nature of the Alps has much to do with the exceptionality of their surrounding areas: the Alps were historically closely tied to the surrounding regions, and from a comparative perspective this can absolutely be described as exceptional. In European history, Venice, Lombardy, the area around Lyon, the Upper Rhine and other regions have long belonged to the economic avant-garde.
Braudel was one of the most widely read historians of the twentieth century and a co-founder of modern history, but in particular he was also a pioneer of environmental history. The first part of his Méditerranée was explicitly dedicated to the role of the environment. The French historian is therefore referenced in practically every genealogy of modern environmental history, whether eulogistically, critically or with mixed feelings. Examples of this are John McNeill’s important essay of 2003 (‘Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History’) or J. Donald Hughes’ introductory volume of 2006 (What is Environmental History?, reissued 2015).5 However, Braudel’s long shadow should not dissuade us from illuminating aspects and posing questions about which he had nothing to say. Of these, there is no shortage. At this point, I would like to briefly touch on two points at which the history of the Alps and modern environmental history interact in a special way. We can call them Elinor Ostrom and William Cronon.
Elinor Ostrom engaged in an empirically based, methodologically thought-through and practically oriented way with environmental economics. Later a Nobel Prize-winner, she was especially famous for her work Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (1990). Here she showed how human groups, organized in particular institutions, could function sustainably with limited communal resources, without endangering these resources or the natural ecosystem. According to Ostrom, this did not require either state intervention or the privatization of these ‘common-pool resources’. The functions could be taken on by communes and corporations. Ostrom was therefore interested in the Alpine economy with its communally owned summer pastures, which had followed this model for centuries. This long time period was important for her. The first example in Governing the Commons came from the commune of Törbel in the Valais, where sources begin in the thirteenth century and become more detailed in the sixteenth. Ostrom’s information about Törbel came primarily from a 1981 study by Robert Netting entitled Balancing on an Alp: Ecological Change and Continuity in a Swiss Mountain Community. The study also contained a reconstruction of population trends, which tracked available resources and so did not become unbalanced. Chapter 4 in the present volume is concerned with the long-term history of agriculture and Alpine husbandry.6
With William Cronon, the key consideration is not the economy, but the power of the imagination. In 1995, this American environmental historian published the controversial but now classic essay ‘The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature’. Here he emphasized the cultural dimensions of conceptions of nature. These conceptions are characterized by social conventions and world views, and cannot be taken for a one-to-one mapping of an external nature. ‘Wilderness’ was initially a religious expression, which became widely used in the King James Bible of 1611. It referred to the places at the margins of human society, where one descended all too easily into moral confusion. But in the nineteenth century these became positive, venerable, ‘sublime’ places, which, according to a saying of Henry David Thoreau, served the preservation of the world. This new viewpoint contributed very significantly to the creation of an institutionalized wilderness in the form of the great national parks of America. The Romantic impulse which enabled this reinterpretation originated in Europe, and not least in the Alps. They were at that time the pinnacle of the ‘sublime’. Later, this impulse returned to Europe in a different form. Patrick Kupper has recently shown that the first national park in the Alps was also the result of an intense transatlantic exchange, and today the value of the American-inspired wilderness in the Alps is debated very generally. The present book raises these themes in chapters 7, 9 and 10.7
One more word on the structure of the book. The first two chapters are concerned with the basic aspects of Alpine history, that is with their place in European history and their investigation in modern times. There then follow several chapters in loose chronological order and with various thematic emphases, covering the prehistoric to medieval periods (chapter 3), the late Middle Ages and the early modern period (chapters 4–6) and the most recent centuries (chapters 7–9). After a summary and perspective on the future (chapter 10), the interested reader will find the most important evidence for my claims in the endnotes, as well as a select bibliography. The book was first published in German in 2015. For the present English edition, I have written a new introduction, and modified – and, where necessary, updated – a few passages.
I first became involved with Alpine history a good forty years ago. I was then working on my dissertation on a series of Engadin villages during the Ancien Régime. I had previously read Jack Goody’s Production and Reproduction: A Comparative Study of the Domestic Domain, in which he asks how rural economies and familial social structures relate to each other throughout their historical development. Later, I broadened my research to include other mountainous landscapes. The microstudy was followed by a regional study of three Swiss mountain cantons and then a history of the whole Alpine region in a particular period and in relation to selected issues. In a moment of temerity, I then ventured once more into this field, and in 2011 published a book in which I considered mountains on different continents (The Third Dimension: A Comparative History of Mountains in the Modern Era). This led me to write essays on the comparison between the Alps and Chinese mountains and, on another occasion, the Andes.
On this mountain path, I have been inspired by many authors who are not necessarily thought of in connection with mountains. When I reflect on it, I would say that the Danish development economist Ester Boserup and the American historian and German specialist David W. Sabean have influenced me the most. I sometimes half-jokingly say that the former represents my macro-side and the latter my micro-side. On this journey, I also had the good fortune, in collaboration with my colleagues, to improve the institutional aspects of Alpine historical research. In 1995, we founded the International Association for Alpine History, which since then has published an annual multi-lingual journal. Later, the Association obtained a research institute at the Università della Svizzera italiana [University of Lugano], which I was able to lead for a number of years. Without these protracted collective efforts, it would not have been possible to write this book. When I moved from the research institute to the Universität Luzern [University of Lucerne], I was able to discuss, try out and develop further these themes with my students. It was they who listened to the present book in lecture form prior to its first publication. I was able to complete that version in a research semester at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich.
For manifold support in the development of this survey, my thanks therefore go to our Association for Alpine History and to the Rachel Carson Center, especially Luigi Lorenzetti and Luca Mocarelli, Christof Mauch and Helmuth Trischler. Numerous colleagues assisted me with suggestions and comments on earlier versions. I would like to thank Dionigi Albera, Simona Boscani, Franz-Josef Brüggemeier, Andreas Bürgi, Jean-Claude Duclos, This Fetzer, Heinz E. Herzig, Martin Korenjak, Patrick Kupper, Margareth Lanzinger, Jan-Henrik Meyer, Heinz Nauer, Seth Peabody, Felicitas Sprecher Mathieu, Werner E. Stöckli, Simon Teuscher, Manfred Tschaikner, Nelly Valsangiacomo and Ivar Werlen. For this English version, I am ultimately indebted to the translator Rose Hadshar and to the persons responsible for this book series, Pascal Porcheron and Paul Young of Polity Press. They have all ironed out numerous errors, and the remaining ones are on me.
From 50,000 BC | Sporadic, seasonal visits to the Alpine region by hunters and gatherers. |
13,000 BC | Continuous settlement of the Alpine region from the last Ice Age. |
5500 BC | Advent of crop cultivation and animal husbandry in the Alps. |
5000 BC | The first pile dwellings in the Alpine region. |
Around 3200 BC | The ‘iceman’ (Ötzi) lived in what is now Tyrol. |
800–480 BC | Iron Age ‘Hallstatt culture’, originating from the Salzkammergut. |
218 BC | The Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca crosses the Western Alps. |
25–13 BC | The most important Roman Alpine campaigns. |
7–6 BC | Construction of the ‘Tropaeum Alpium’ as a sign of the Roman victory over the Alpine tribes. |
Around AD 50 | Completion of the Via Claudia Augusta from the Adriatic over the Alps to the Danube. |
380 | Christianity becomes the Roman state religion. |
Around 600 | Many diocesan towns in the Western Alps; in the east, the consolidation of bishoprics continues into the thirteenth century. |
754–1452 | The Italian expeditions of the Carolingian and German kings over the Alps. |
1336 | Francesco Petrarch on Mont Ventoux – perhaps as a literary fiction. |
1492 | The ascent of Mont Aiguille (or Inaccessible) at the behest of the French king. |
Around 1500 | Population in the Alpine region (the area of the Convention) around 3.1 m. |
1574 | De Alpibus Commentarius by Josias Simler. |
1618 | Large landslide in Piuro near Chiavenna. |
1713 | Peace of Utrecht, with important border shifts in the Western Alps. |
1732 | Die Alpen (didactic poem) by Albrecht von Haller. |
1741 | Exploration of the glacier at Chamonix by a group of Britons, with William Windham. |
1761 | La Nouvelle Heloïse (Alpine-related epistolary romantic novel) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. |
1786 | First ascent of Mont Blanc by Jacques Balmat and Michel-Gabriel Paccard. |
1788 | General estates of the Dauphiné in Vizille call for reforms – harbinger of the French Revolution. |
1800 | Napoleon Bonaparte crosses the Great St Bernard Pass with an army. |
Around 1800 | Population in the Alpine region (the area of the Convention) around 5.8 m. |
1809 | Uprising in Tyrol against Bavaria and France (Andreas Hofer). |
1816 | Large climate-related agricultural crisis (the ‘year without summer’). |
1854 | The first Alpine railway at Semmering; in 1871 and 1882, Mont Cenis and the Gotthard follow suit. |
1857 | Establishment of the Alpine Club in London; by 1873, all Alpine states have an Alpinist club. |
1860 | Italy cedes Savoy and Nice to France. |
1871 | The first rack railway up Rigi near Lucerne. |
1871 | The Playground of Europe (collection of Alpinist essays) by Leslie Stephen. |
1872 | Italy creates the first mountain troops with the alpini; other states follow. |
1880 | Heidis Lehr- und Wanderjahre [Heidi: Her Years of Wandering and Learning] (Alpine-related children’s book) by Johanna Spyri. |
1898 | First crossing of the Alps in a balloon. |
Around 1900 | Population in the Alpine region (the area of the Convention) around 8.4 m. |
1910 | First crossing of the Alps in an aeroplane; the pilot crashes shortly before landing. |
1914 | Swiss national park in Engadin; later many other parks and protected areas follow. |
1915–18 | Mountain war between the Kingdom of Italy and Austria-Hungary. |
1919 | Partition of Tyrol at the Brenner; the southern part falls to the Kingdom of Italy. |
1921 | The Austria section of the Deutscher und Österreichischer Alpenvereins excludes Jewish members. |
1924 | The first Winter Olympics in Chamonix. |
1937 | Der Berg ruft (‘mountain film’) by Luis Trenker. |
1943–5 | Partisan warfare in the Italian and Yugoslavian mountains. |
1955 | Austria becomes an independent state again after the Second World War. |
1963 | Disaster at the dam at Vajont near Belluno with many victims. |
1972 | Arbeitsgemeinschaft Alpenländer [Association of Alpine States]; in 1978 and 1982, working groups emerge in the Eastern and Western Alps. |
1980 | Histoire et civilisations des Alpes (standard work), edited by Paul Guichonnet. |
1991 | Slovenia secedes from Yugoslavia and becomes an independent state. |
1991 | Discovery of the ‘iceman’ (Ötzi) in the Ötztal Alps. |
1991 | Signing of the framework agreement for the Alpine Convention. |
1992 | Reintroduction of wolves into the Alpine region. |
Around 2000 | Population in the Alpine region (the area of the Convention): 13.7 m. |