How the Forest Was Saved

The argument Théodore Rousseau made to save the forest of Fontainebleau was not an environmental one. It could not have been — the word did not yet exist in the sense we now use it. The argument he made was aesthetic, and it worked.

In 1852, Rousseau wrote a letter to Charles de Morny, a minister to Napoleon III and one of the most influential men in France. The forest administration, he explained, had been clear-cutting and replanting the ancient oaks and beeches of Fontainebleau with fast-growing conifers since the 1830s — commercially rational, financially expedient, and in Rousseau's view a kind of destruction for which there was no adequate word. He did not appeal to ecology. He appealed to art. These trees, he wrote, are to landscape painters what the works of Michelangelo and Rembrandt are to other artists — irreplaceable models, accumulated over centuries, impossible to manufacture and impossible to replace. Destroying them is destroying a school.

The argument landed. In 1853, the administration withdrew 624 hectares from harvesting — the first time in France that land had been formally protected for reasons other than royal or military use. They called the protected zones séries artistiques. Artistic series. The vocabulary of painting pressed into the service of conservation.

Rousseau kept pushing. He had been living in Barbizon since 1847, and the forest was the subject and the engine of his entire practice. He knew every boulder, every clearing, every tree that the administration's axe was approaching. He lobbied, petitioned, and cultivated allies. Victor Hugo signed. George Sand signed. Théophile Gautier wrote in support. The painters of Barbizon were not, in 1852, particularly celebrated — Rousseau himself had been refused by the Paris Salon jury so consistently through the 1830s that the painters called it le grand refus — but by the late 1850s the forest paintings had begun to sell, and the collectors who bought them had ears in the right places.

On August 13, 1861, Napoleon III signed a decree establishing a réserve artistique in the forest of Fontainebleau: 1,097 hectares withdrawn from any exploitation, preserved specifically for artists and the visitors who came to see what artists had seen. The director-general of forests calculated that setting aside this much productive land would cost the state 300,000 gold francs annually in lost timber revenue. The emperor signed it anyway.

It was the first nature reserve in the world. Yellowstone would not be established for another eleven years.

The irony the historians note is that Rousseau did not live to see the full consequence of what he had done. He died in Barbizon in December 1867, four years before the decree's implications began to ripple outward — through the conservation movement in France, into the American wilderness debates, and eventually into the entire architecture of environmental protection law that now covers a significant portion of the planet's surface. He is buried in the cemetery at Chailly-en-Bière, beside Millet, the forest visible from the road that leads there.

What remains in the forest is what he fought for: the old oaks of the Bas-Bréau, the sandstone boulders of the Gorges d'Apremont, the clearings where the light falls in the morning the way it fell in 1850 when he set up his easel and painted it. The paths the painters used are still there, marked now with blue blazes. The forest has not changed much. That is precisely the point.