Vidal de la Blache, Paul (1845–1918)

Paul Vidal de la Blache is an important figure in the history of geography. Born in the village of Pezenas in the south of France in 1845, educated at the Lycée Charlemagne and the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris, Vidal took the lead in establishing a French school of geography at the turn of the 20th century that became world renowned for its holistic study of landscape. Vidal held positions at the University of Nancy (1872–1877) and the École Normale [Page 3015]Supérieure (1877–1898), and was chair of geography at the Université de Paris, Sorbonne, from 1898 until his retirement in 1909.

Throughout his career, Vidal sought to establish geography as an explanatory science instead of the descriptive, almanac-style fact-finding exercise that most geographers of his time practiced. Having been thoroughly schooled in history, he also emphasized the human aspects of geographical study at a time when geographers usually paid singular attention to the physical environment. Vidal emphasized that existing geographical landscapes are the result of a combination of human and natural processes. As he put it, landscapes should be considered like “medallions,” forged with the image of the social ways of life they include. Nature does not determine social behavior, and social behavior does not fully dominate nature. Rather, social behavior adapts to nature's constraints and opportunities in the production of what some now call social-nature. In geography, this became known as possibilism.

The scientific task of geography is thus to explain how the various landscapes that geographers observe actually evolved as a result of the different ways in which humans adapted to nature in different times and places. To study these various modes of life (genres de vie) in turn necessitates a holistic approach, including both social and natural science. To Vidal, this was precisely the synthesis that geography as a discipline should achieve, thereby distinguishing it from the more analytic disciplines of either society or nature.

To establish this new scientific geography, Vidal helped found a new research journal, Annales de Géographie, in 1891. This journal promoted holistic, interdisciplinary research on geographical landscapes and was dominated by the Vidalian approach, as was French geography until World War I. While critics questioned whether the notion of genres de vie could be used in the study of more urban, industrialized landscapes, Vidal's approach was instrumental in the formation of the now famous French Annales School of History, influential for its equally holistic emphasis on the longue durée of human-environmental adaptation in the course of history. Indeed, because most French geographers refused to engage in the disciplinary turf battles at the turn of the 20th century, la tradition vidalienne was largely relinquished to historians (as well as Durkheimian sociologists). As a result, soon after Vidal, French geography largely lost its focus and prominence both in France and elsewhere, and his role in the formation of these more successful disciplines is largely ignored.