Rougier de la Bergerie’s Bucolic Poetry and the Nineteenth-Century French Discourse on Climate and Deforestation

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay examines the bucolic poetry of the French agronomist Jean-Baptiste Rougier de la Bergerie (1762–1836). It presents his views on the value of scientific poetry; situates his writing within the contemporary French discourse on deforestation and climate instability; and shows how his Églogues bucoliques clamoured for action to protect the nation’s woods and thereby regulate meteorological conditions across the land. In this regard Rougier criticised the ignorance and excessive influence of the French Academies in Paris and granted an important voice to rural experiences and perspectives. He therefore decentred traditional sites of authority and defended the value of a horizontal information network offering more empirical and local forms of knowledge.