Reception: 29 July 2022
Accepted: 27 January 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.51829/Drassana.30.691

CC-BY-NC-ND

◼ ABSTRACT

This article examines the policies and personnel that allowed France’s Old Regime monarchy to obtain huge supplies of naval timber from within the kingdom. In contrast to many other accounts, however, the main focus here is on the people who actually carried out this work (forestry officials, naval shipwrights, government contractors), specifically in south-western France. These agents were supposed to cooperate, but that did not always occur, and this article suggests some explanations. The demands of the central state provoked varied responses from woodland proprietors (the Church, rural communities, and private landholders). Their reactions are considered as well, since this “social history” approach allows us to appreciate that France’s success in building up its naval forces during the “age of sail” were not always welcomed by the king’s subjects.

Keywords: Ordinance of 1669, Eaux et Forêts, Guyenne, naval timber, social history.

Una qüestió de servei al rei: El subministrament de fusta per a la marina francesa en el segle XVIII

◼ RESUM

Aquest article examina les polítiques i el personal que van permetre a la monarquia francesa de l'Antic Règim obtenir enormes subministraments de fusta naval dins del regne. No obstant això, a diferència de molts altres relats, l'enfocament principal aquí és en les persones que realment van dur a terme aquest treball (funcionaris forestals, armadors navals, contractistes del govern), específicament al sud-oest de França. Se suposava que aquests agents havien de cooperar, però no sempre va ser així, i aquest article suggereix algunes explicacions. Les demandes de l'estat central van provocar respostes diverses dels propietaris de boscos (l'església, les comunitats rurals i els terratinents privats). També es tenen en compte les seves reaccions, ja que aquest enfocament “d'història social” ens permet apreciar que l'èxit de França en la construcció de les seves forces navals durant “l'era de la vela” no sempre va ser benvingut pels súbdits del rei.

Paraules clau: Eaux et Forêts, Guyenne, Ordenança 1669, fusta naval, història social.

Una cuestión de servicio al rey: El suministro de madera para la marina francesa en el siglo XVIII

◼ RESUMEN

Este artículo examina las políticas y el personal que permitieron a la monarquía del Antiguo Régimen de Francia obtener enormes suministros de madera naval dentro del reino. Sin embargo, a diferencia de muchos otros relatos, el enfoque principal aquí está en las personas que realmente llevaron a cabo este trabajo (funcionarios forestales, armadores navales, contratistas del Gobierno), específicamente en el suroeste de Francia. Se suponía que estos agentes debían cooperar, pero eso no siempre ocurría, y este artículo sugiere algunas explicaciones. Las demandas del Estado central provocaron respuestas variadas de los propietarios de bosques (la Iglesia, las comunidades rurales y los terratenientes privados). Sus reacciones también se consideran, ya que este enfoque de “historia social” nos permite apreciar que el éxito de Francia en la construcción de sus fuerzas navales durante la “era de la vela” no siempre fue bienvenido por los súbditos del rey.

Palabras clave: Ordenanza de 1669, Eaux et Forêts, Guyena, madera naval, historia social.

◼ INTRODUCTION

Worldwide reports early in 2021 announced that the first huge oak trees had been selected to replace the 96-metre spire on Notre-Dame de Paris, which collapsed in the cathedral’s devastating fire of April 2019¹. To historians of forest policy and naval construction during the “age of sail”, this media fanfare might seem a little overdone. After all, pre-modern navies were constantly involved in long-term processes of identifying, acquiring and preparing mature trees of the highest quality and often of massive size. The development and effects of policies to obtain naval timbers have been studied by scholars from various perspectives: as a marker of the evolution of naval warfare and expanding military capacity; as a sign of growing political centralisation; as an enabler of colonial and imperial expansion; as a cause of environmental degradation; as a contributor to transforming the political economy². Often overlooked in some of these significant studies, however, is the social – or human – dimension: the roles played by individuals and groups whose involvement in timber extraction made the state’s demands possible. Yet that is precisely the focus of recent journalism about Notre-Dame’s restoration, which highlights the widespread enthusiasm for this important project of cultural renewal. It is understandable that today’s media should take a “human interest” approach, and the significance of Notre-Dame for the city of Paris, and for France’s national self-image, no doubt explains the resolutely positive tone. However, a “social history” of the policies to acquire timber for the pre-modern navy cannot afford to assume that the state’s priorities for construction timber were accepted by the wider population, or (even) by the ruler’s own officials and agents. A “social history” approach might be considered somewhat old-fashioned, but it has the potential to illustrate features of complex developments whose effects on both society and the environment were more equivocal than has been widely acknowledged. Supplying a pre-modern navy with suitable timbers was not merely a matter of organising effective procurement, but also involved processes of decision-making, negotiating with interest groups, and overcoming resistance. A broader, “social history” approach allows us to glimpse the concessions and confrontations that took place amid significant imbalances of wealth and power.

This article offers an illustration of those tensions by drawing on evidence from eighteenth-century France, primarily from the south-western provinces of Guyenne and Gascogne. These well-timbered regions were far from the centres of political power in Paris and Versailles, yet they also included significant sites of naval shipbuilding at Bayonne and (especially) Rochefort. The argument proceeds in stages. At the outset I provide an overview of the laws and requirements for forest management and timber extraction that were set out by France’s royal government, primarily in the 1669 Ordonnance des Eaux et Forêts, which was initiated for Louis XIV by his tireless minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert. Next we turn to a summary of the ways in which those regulations evolved between 1669 and 1789, the powers of the forestry officials who enforced them, and how they applied the law across the kingdom to different forms of woodland property. Finally and most importantly, we consider some evidence about how “ordinary” people were involved in these developments, whether by actively facilitating their application, or by attempting to resist their pressures.

This final section aims to sketch a social history of French forest policies and naval timber supplies, since that approach can offer a more nuanced picture than many that were produced at the time by contemporary commentators, or subsequently by many historians. Across the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century, it was not uncommon to hear that France’s forests were in a bad way. One pre-Revolutionary view highlighted the over-harvesting of the scarce resources, brought about by land clearing and the construction demands of the navy and public works, in parallel with the rising price of fuelwood, and the urban preference for “luxury” goods³. Post-Napoleonic commentators often preferred to blame the political upheavals of previous quarter-century for allowing the widespread depredation of French forests, in which rural inhabitants were left unconstrained to “pillage” the woodlands⁴.

Yet by the mid-twentieth century some historians of France’s political and administrative development under the Old Regime monarchy preferred to hail Louis XIV’s forest policy as a landmark. Marcel Marion called the 1669 Ordinance “one of Colbert’s great claims to glory… a cry of triumph [and], moreover, justifiable… The whole question of waterways and forests is covered and resolved under its thirty-two headings”⁵. Half a century later Roland Mousnier concluded his survey of pre-Revolutionary forest administration in similarly glowing terms:

Colbert made forest legislation uniform… [The Ordinance’s] text is a marvel of order and clarity. It established boundaries of jurisdictions, reduced the number of opportunities for conflict, and gave detailed specifications of procedures to be followed. The most important thing is that the edict was enforced. It remained in effect as the law governing use of the forests of France until 1827⁶.

Many studies have shown that the rhetoric of the Old Regime monarchy often exaggerated the practical effect of its policies, and we certainly know that the provisions of the 1669 Ordinance did not always translate into effective action during the eighteenth century. Several of the grands-maîtres – the leading forestry officials with province-wide responsibilities for the operations of the Eaux et Forêts – were less than diligent, and their subordinates in the regional maîtrises were often poorly supervised⁷. Michel Devèze argued that the kingdom’s forests were generally less extensive and in a worse condition on the eve of the 1789 Revolution than they had been in 1669⁸. Paul Bamford’s classic study insisted that the spurts of naval shipbuilding undertaken by Louis XIV, and even more by his eighteenth-century successors, certainly contributed to this decline⁹. Another part of the problem was the legislation itself, whose applicability was limited by its state-centred perspectives. Later amendments were needed, for instance, to expand the Ordinance’s provisions to include softwood trees like firs and pines, and to streamline the requirements for acquiring mature timber from private woodlands¹⁰. Like the positive appraisals by Marion and Mousnier, however, critical assessments of the forest administration of the Old Regime monarchy did not always provide much direct evidence about the effects of these policies on the ground, preferring instead to rely on the perceptions and prescriptions of contemporary critics. To investigate these effects we need to pay less attention to the well-studied pronouncements of rulers, navy ministers and policy makers, and examine instead the documented involvement of the people who actually went in search of suitable trees, the people who transported and worked with timber, and the people who – whether individually or collectively – owned the trees that went into building wooden warships.

◼ ORDONNANCE DES EAUX ET FORÊTS OF 1669

A conventional account might choose to open with the following:

That year [1662] I also dedicated myself to [creating] a regulation for the forests of my kingdom, whose extreme disorder displeased me all the more since I had long before devised great plans for the navy¹¹.

Thus Louis XIV, the “Sun King”, retrospectively hailed his efforts to reorganise the management and exploitation of forests in France, primarily to the benefit of his naval forces. The first step in this process was Colbert’s decision to appoint a team of commissioners who were sent out to “reform” the management of France’s various royal forests, and report back on their productive potential. Then in August 1669 the king promulgated his famous “Ordinance on Waterways and Forests”, setting out the state’s priorities for the conservation and exploitation of woodlands, and empowering a revitalised bureaucracy – the officials of the Eaux et Forêts – to enforce the new law across the kingdom¹². (See Fig. 1)

Figure 1. Ordonnance

To ensure that forests were managed and exploited in line with official priorities, the 1669 Ordinance envisaged a two-step process. First there would be a survey (arpentement) to establish a woodland’s boundaries, which were duly inscribed on the ground, preferably with stone markers. The second stage was to draw up a management plan (aménagement) setting out the property’s internal divisions: one quarter of the area (the quart de réserve) was designated in the part where soils, drainage and aspect looked most promising; the trees there were to be set aside and allowed to attain full maturity. The remaining woodland was divided into a number of coupes, areas of land where trees could be harvested on a regular basis. This provided the fuel that was so essential in both domestic and industrial settings, as well as timber to supply carpenters, coopers and other wood-working artisans. Usually one coupe was cut each year, with the proviso that sixteen of the best trees were reserved for every arpent of woodland (about half a hectare). The reserve trees would then grow to maturity to provide both construction-quality timber and the seeds to produce seedlings. The number of coupes and their timing thus corresponded to a woodland’s overall cycle (révolution) of exploitation and regeneration, not less than ten years according to the Ordinance, and usually twenty or twenty-five years. Woodlands in the hands of the Church and those owned collectively by rural communities could be cut only with the Crown’s explicit permission¹³.

This form of woodland management was designed to increase the number of mature deciduous hardwoods, especially oaks and elms, which were so essential for construction purposes. From the French Crown’s point of view in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the most pressing construction need was the royal navy. Between the 1660s, when Colbert oversaw the introduction of this regulatory system, and the 1690s the French fleet expanded from about forty vessels to over 150. A second burst of shipbuilding began with the War of the Austrian Succession in the 1740s, and after the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), French naval bases moved to a policy of consistently stockpiling timber and other supplies. The result was a doubling of ship numbers between 1748 and 1780, from about fifty vessels to over 100¹⁴. Compared with Louis XIV’s navy, however, these ships of the late-eighteenth century were not only more heavily armed, but also much larger: for a first- or second-rate battleship with 90-120 guns, the hull alone was estimated to require about 4,500 cubic metres of wood, almost all of it oak¹⁵. Across two centuries from 1650 to 1850, according to one estimate, the French navy cumulatively represented over two million mature oak trees¹⁶.

We know that the ideal specifications for ship timbers were very exacting, which meant that the naval dockyards were extremely selective: in terms of overall volume, recent scholarship suggests that only about 1 per cent of all trees that were felled in that period actually went into shipbuilding – in this “wooden age” of renewable energy, most timber was used as fuel, for heating, cooking, and (above all) manufacturing¹⁷. Yet against that must be set the record of wastefulness in the processes of felling, seasoning, transporting and stockpiling naval timbers: one historian of the eighteenth-century British navy reported contemporary assessments that as much as three-fifths of all timbers delivered to the dockyards were rejected as damaged or otherwise unsuitable¹⁸. It is also worth considering that the navy’s preference for large, heavy and often curved pieces of oak or elm targeted the rarest resources, which were the result of long maturation: for construction purposes, oaks were regarded as ideal at over 80-90 years old¹⁹.

◼ THE EAUX ET FORÊTS AT WORK

Applying the Ordinance and refining its scope brought both negative and positive consequences. Like other branches of the royal bureaucracy, the Eaux et Forêts offered some telling examples of the expedient measures adopted when financial necessity loomed. In 1689 Louis XIV bowed to the pressures of military expenditure by replacing the grands-maîtres – the leading forestry officials who had been appointed by Colbert “on commission” – with sixteen venal officials. The edict’s preamble stated the Crown’s material needs unambiguously, and the measure was a fiscal success, raising nearly two million livres in the space of three years²⁰. Venality subsequently became the norm for all senior posts in the Eaux et Forêts, and even humble forest guards were appointed only after paying a bond of 300 livres²¹.

Almost from the outset, the 1669 Ordinance had a role to play in helping to integrate the administration of provincial France. In a strategically sensitive and resource-rich frontier region like Franche-Comté, newly acquired by Louis XIV’s armies in 1678, a concerted effort to apply the forest regulations was one powerful mechanism by which France’s territories were expanded²².

Yet in apparently well-integrated regions of southern France it was quite some time before the Eaux et Forêts acquired a significant presence, or even one that was documented consistently. The two sprawling grandes-maîtrises of Languedoc and Guyenne occupied almost half the kingdom, but contained few royal forests of any significance. Only in 1689 was a regional maîtrise established in the provincial capital of Bordeaux, and even then its archives dating from before the 1720s are sparse²³. The leading posts of the grandes-maîtrises in the south were dominated by the same two families across several generations, and several lesser posts were passed from father to son²⁴. Among the personnel of the Bordeaux maîtrise, for instance, Antoine Martin resigned his office as maître particulier in favour of his son, also named Antoine, in 1744, and the garde-marteau Jean Delpech likewise relinquished his position in 1780 to his son André²⁵. Nepotism of this kind prevailed across many venal offices in France at that time, and it was by no means conducive to effective administration.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, however, the French king’s forestry officials became much more numerous; they extended their activities across the kingdom, even in the south, and their regulatory powers were boosted. Some of those developments came in response to acknowledged oversights in the 1669 Ordinance, like the need to include softwood timbers that were so essential in the naval dockyards for masts and yards, particularly from the Pyrenees. Despite the shortcomings of a venal bureaucracy with close ties to their own region, there also seemed to be a conscious effort to realise Colbert’s vision for the Ordinance, by ensuring that all of France’s forest resources came under a uniform system of management and exploitation, where the Crown’s priorities would take precedence.

For example, the Eaux et Forêts made strenuous efforts, especially during the second half of the eighteenth century, to bring seigneurial and communal forest guards under their authority. Dominique-Yves Courtois found that the “private” guards employed by seigneurs and rural communities in the south-west made up about 20 per cent of all forestry officials whose appointment was formally authorised by the province’s grand-maître of the Eaux et Forêts during the 1730s; but in subsequent decades that proportion rose steadily to 50 per cent, and eventually far more²⁶. The overall aim of this policy was to generate a closer working relationship between the royal forestry officials and other forest guards, but also to extend the enforcement of the king’s laws and standardise their application.

◼ SURVEYING WOODLAND PROPERTIES

In their efforts to secure supplies of scarce ship timbers, the French king’s agents were empowered to search out potential resources. The initial focus for Colbert’s “reform” agenda in the 1660s were the forests of the royal domain, where officers of the Eaux et Forêts were responsible for carrying out both arpentements and aménagements, which were recorded in written reports (procès-verbaux) produced on the spot, and complemented by detailed plans. Comparable efforts were made across the kingdom to have the Eaux et Forêts apply the same principles to ecclesiastical woodlands and those that were owned collectively by rural communities.

As far as the Church was concerned, the Eaux et Forêts enjoyed a few successes in the south-west, but also faced several setbacks. Many religious houses had only small and scattered holdings. According to a 1756 survey, for instance, the Benedictine abbey of Faize near Lussac held woodlands amounting to about ninety-one hectares, the largest section of which – the Forêt de Faize – covered nearly fifty-six hectares. Their remaining woodland area was divided into eleven separate parcels, spread over five different parishes²⁷. The Eaux et Forêts complained in 1758 that the insignificance of many ecclesiastical properties apparently made it easy for the clergy in some parts of Guyenne to gain official approval to cut timber, or even to clear trees completely²⁸. In 1789 a Bordeaux forestry official publicly lamented that religious houses seemed to go out of their way to circumvent the laws that applied to cutting or clearing woodlands, and their actions were too readily approved by the king’s Conseil d’état²⁹.

Elsewhere the Eaux et Forêts ran into great difficulties in trying to have the 1669 Ordinance applied to properties in the hands of a powerful and well-connected churchman like the archbishop of Bordeaux³⁰. A more intrinsic problem was the sheer size of the territory that the Bordeaux-based forestry officials had to cover, which meant that some important ecclesiastical woodlands, such as Brantôme in the Périgord, were not inspected regularly. Equally, however, it seems clear that the clergy did not always choose to cooperate fully with the Crown’s agents³¹.

By contrast, the forest resources of rural communities seemed to be far easier for the Eaux et Forêts to supervise in conformity with the Ordinance. Such operations might be carried out by a group of senior officials who made a special – and, as far as the community was concerned, costly – trip from the far-off provincial capital; or they might simply involve a one-day assessment of the kind that the surveyor (arpenteur) Jean t’Kint carried out in the communal Bois d’Augreilh for the municipality of Saint-Sever in September 1761³².

The Bordeaux maîtrise had long been busy with ecclesiastical woodlands and communal forests that were situated in the city’s immediate hinterland. But starting in the 1750s they were encouraged by the grand-maître to pay closer attention to more distant regions like the Landes, especially in and around the Pays de l’Adour, where collective landownership was widespread. Several communities were subjected to visits from the forestry officials, and in a surprising number of cases there is evidence that at least some community members initiated these contacts. In the regional centre of Saint-Sever, for example – known as Cap de Gascogne for its prominence, both geographically (situated on a bluff overlooking the river) and institutionally (the presence of a royal sénéchaussée court, and the famous Benedictine abbey) – the urban community’s syndic, François Capdeville, petitioned the court in March 1753 to conduct a formal inspection of forest degradations and illegal alienations of common lands in the Bois d’Augreilh³³. The resulting procès-verbaux were then sent to the Eaux et Forêts in Bordeaux, detailing several hundred oaks that had been cut, many for fuel (which went to the collector of royal taxes). Over 200 of the largest trees had gone to repair the town’s bridge over the Adour, not a use of communal timber that the town’s authorities were legally authorised to make. There had also been at least sixteen alienations of common land in and around the forest, some so well-established that the tenant farmers who lived there were able to identify their landlords, who included several of the town’s leading citizens³⁴. This notification effectively accused the town’s previous administration of several breaches of the 1669 Ordinance, so it is no surprise that the maître particulier, Antoine Martin, and his officials were quick to follow up.

Small face-to-face communities, even in self-promoting regional centres like Saint-Sever, were always marked by hierarchies of wealth and status. They were thus perpetually riven by internal factions, whose tensions sometimes boiled over. In 1753 Capdeville was part of a power struggle among Saint-Sever’s elite, and found it convenient to seek support from an “outside” authority like the Eaux et Forêts. Almost identical claims about dirty dealings in communal woodlands by previous community leaders riddled the reports compiled by forest guards in several parts of the Landes during the eighteenth century³⁵. Equally, the Eaux et Forêts were able to exploit antagonisms of this kind, whether they arose from intra-communal or inter-communal rivalries, and used their influence to promote the Crown’s priorities.

The small village of Bégaar conducted a lopsided and long-running campaign against the town of Tartas to assert control over the Forêt de Saumage beside the River Midouze in the Landes. Both sides manoeuvred on occasion to gain support from agents of the state – the forestry officials, the navy, the courts, the provincial administration – often by making formal allegations of gross misconduct by the other side³⁶. But when lobbying and denunciations were felt to be insufficient, more direct action could follow, as in April 1762, when the mayor and a councillor (jurat) from Tartas led local constables and a team of carpenters into Saumage to fell some oak trees. A crowd of people from Bégaar, several armed with flails and batons, assailed the “intruders” with threats and oaths, causing a few minor injuries, and driving the Tartas men to seek refuge by attempting to cross the river. A drawn-out series of prosecutions followed, although only four people from Bégaar eventually had to undergo interrogation and imprisonment³⁷. By the late 1770s the villagers of Bégaar had resorted to sending a petition directly to Versailles in order to reassert their claims over the Forêt de Saumage, which they insisted they had “always managed with great care for the construction needs of the royal navy”³⁸. Communal forests were uniquely vulnerable to the Crown’s demands for old-growth timber in these unequal contests, since their collective owners were susceptible to internal fractures that could be exploited by the unscrupulous, and usually lacked the capacity to withstand powerful pressures from outside. Yet rural people often did their best to defend their interests.

◼ PRIVATE WOODLANDS

Private woodland property represented as much as 60 per cent of all French forests on the eve of the 1789 Revolution, according to Michel Devèze³⁹. Their owners – whether well-connected aristocrats, wealthy townspeople, or poor peasants and artisans – did not face quite the same restrictions as the Church or the rural communities. The 1669 Ordinance envisaged that they would be exempt from having to create a reserve quarter, although they were still required to set aside reserve trees from each coupe. During the mid-eighteenth century, moreover, forest owners across the kingdom were increasingly subject to regulations that required them to file a “declaration” to report mature trees that they planned to cut on their estates⁴⁰. The purpose was to give naval officials an opportunity to visit and assess the trees for likely ship timbers ( which would be compulsorily purchased by the navy), and to provide the forestry service with more detailed information about the kingdom’s forest resources.

Close examination of declarations sent from the Périgord, a region dominated by private woodlands, shows that the numbers of landholders who complied with this reporting requirement grew significantly between the 1740s and the 1780s, with a very noticeable upsurge to over 300 declarations in a two-year sample period, 1781-1783. In addition, these declarations were increasingly likely to record multiple coupes, often in more than one parish, and their geographical distribution expanded dramatically⁴¹.

In the Landes, and despite the fact that this was an area with substantial sectors of communal property, the growing number of declarations by the owners of private woodlands was even more startling. (See Table.) The prevalence of deciduous hardwood trees was substantial, reflecting the state’s priorities for naval construction and public works. Across all five samples, 85 per cent of declarations from the Périgord cited oak trees, while the proportion in the Landes was 94 per cent. That figure grew markedly over the decades, and in both regions reached 99 per cent during the 1780s sample period. Thirty-seven declarations (twenty-three from the Périgord, and fourteen from the Landes) mentioned elm trees, but none of the sample declarations recorded any softwood trees, such as pines, poplars or willows.

These sample data of declarations highlight the French state’s growing interest and involvement in the management and exploitation of private woodlands during the second half of the eighteenth century. Specifically in the Périgord and the Landes, which were among the more distant parts of the Bordeaux maîtrise, that official awareness about the extent and use of forest resources reached its peak during the 1780s. Together, these points reinforce the view that the Eaux et Forêts were increasingly obvious observers and recorders of timber resources and woodland management in the south-west.

To be set against those data, however, were some of the details on the declaration forms, which provide persuasive evidence about the reluctance of landowners and their agents to abide by the law’s precise requirements. Place names were recorded erratically, the distance from major waterways was exaggerated, the health and usefulness of the trees in question were frequently downplayed. Above all, very few declarations suggested that the landowners planned to observe the time period prescribed for legal timber cutting (October to April). In short, many woodland proprietors seemed to regard the declarations as little more than fulfilment of a bureaucratic obligation – a low-key yet widespread form of passive resistance⁴².

◼ NAVAL SHIPWRIGHTS

The work of the Eaux et Forêts, both in surveying woodlands and in compiling information from landholders’ declarations, allowed the French navy to target potential sources of ship timbers. Teams of naval shipwrights and their assistants spent part of the year away from their dockyard, searching out and assessing potential matériel. At every stage, wood destined for naval shipbuilding was carefully examined for faults and flaws; wherever possible, only the best trees and timbers were selected⁴³.

In February 1775, for example, the Rochefort-based shipwright Gilles-François Segondat spent three days inspecting the “small forest” of Clérans in the Bergeracois, the property of Jean-Charles Daugeard, noble president in the Bordeaux Parlement, seigneur of Tiregand, near Creysse, and one of the wealthiest men in south-western France. With the assistance of two foremen carpenters, Segondat estimated that this woodland contained between 15,000 and 20,000 trees, spread over an area of ninety arpents (about forty-five hectares). Of this number, however, the naval inspectors found only 228 trees with an overall volume of 4,000 pieds cubes (137 cubic metres) that were considered suitable for their purposes. According to Segondat’s report, they judged this “a mediocre forest… The said trees aged between 100 and 120 years… are long and reasonably well-developed [but they] are now past their best and, although healthy, are really too small to be useful for the king’s navy”. The 228 pieces they did requisition included two knees (genoux) and five beams for “floor pieces” (varangues); the rest were all planks and straight boards for decks and hulls⁴⁴. (See Fig. 2)

Figure 2. Naval report.
Source: ADG, Eaux et Forêts de Guienne, Procès-verbaux des commissaires de la Marine, 8B 806 (1775).

The navy’s cumulative claims on the woodlands of the south-west were far from insignificant. In the winter of 1765-1766, for instance, Segondat was busy in and around the subdelegation of Dax. His inspection team visited sixteen properties and filed sixteen requisition orders as a result of twenty-five days’ work over a two-month period⁴⁵. During that time they inspected forests that were said to contain a total of nearly 23,000 trees, some owned by great nobles who were absentees, some by humble widows; several concerned the communal property of small towns and villages. Overall, Segondat marked more than 1,600 trees (or just over 7 per cent of the total), all bound for the dockyards of Bayonne. These two months’ work yielded the navy over 1,200 cubic metres of construction material. Not enough to build a ship-of-the-line, of course, but quite enough for a smaller vessel (such as a thirty-gun frigate), or for repairs to warships in need of a significant refit⁴⁶.

The work of men like Segondat was a crucial and ongoing contribution to the French state’s shipbuilding and repair capability. And the explicit government encouragement for the increased professionalisation, more rigorous training, and enhanced status of naval shipwrights demonstrated the Crown’s high priority for naval construction and maritime power⁴⁷. It is worth noting that, unlike the officers of the Eaux et Forêts, these naval engineers were not venal office-holders. After March 1765, moreover, they were appointed and promoted by merit, on the basis of competitive examinations⁴⁸. Naval shipbuilding was a priority for the Old Regime monarchy, and issues about the supply of suitable timber for this purpose loom large in the surviving documentation, especially in legislative and regulatory prescriptions, even if the shipwrights’ own surviving inspection reports from the south-west remain few and scattered⁴⁹. Equally clearly, however, officials of the Eaux et Forêts did not have much say in the acquisition and exploitation of timber for naval construction, except on occasions when it was felt necessary to invoke their judicial powers.

◼ GOVERNMENT CONTRACTORS

Once the naval shipwrights had finished, it was time for the trees to be cut, seasoned, trimmed, and transported to the dockyards. That task was not carried out directly by naval officials, but by contractors (fournisseurs) who were authorised by the Crown. Yet these contractors were also in business for themselves, which could lead to tension and conflict. As timber buyers, the fournisseurs had two quite distinct roles: for some of the “best” timbers they acted as agents of the state, but for the rest (the majority), they sought to maximise their own profits. Paul Bamford’s detailed study of one particularly enterprising family of fournisseurs demonstrated how the Babaud brothers exploited the legal and cost advantages offered by their government contracts to compete successfully with their commercial rivals. The French state also deliberately overlooked the many occasions on which the Babauds used their “official” timber-trading as a cover for their far more lucrative “private” dealings⁵⁰. In periods of international tension, government ministers even colluded with the Babauds in creating fake, “foreign” identities that would allow them to continue supplying French dockyards with timber from Lorraine and Alsace via the Rhine⁵¹.

Acquiring and maintaining such profitable contracts obviously required skills in cultivating the powerful, while the scope of the powers and privileges that could be bestowed by a government contract was immense. In the south-west, the Compagnie de la Dordogne was authorised to extract naval masts from forests in the Auvergne, which they undertook in the 1720s. Their contract with the Crown gave the company wide-ranging commercial advantages, not only over their timber-trading competitors, but also over the region’s wood-working artisans, and other users of the River Dordogne, including mills, weirs and fisheries⁵². Similar features were evident in the contracts awarded to the Babauds, and in the view of some scholars amounted to an entrenched form of rent-seeking that was economically regressive⁵³.

The commercial success of men like Babaud was actively fostered by changes in the way that the French Crown did business – or rather, by the fact that the Crown was increasingly engaged in encouraging commercial exchanges. Compared with Louis XIV’s government, the role of entrepreneurs became far more prominent during the eighteenth century⁵⁴. Martine Acerra argued, moreover, that particularly after about 1750 there was a significant move towards the standardisation of government contracts for the supply of naval matériel. She pointed out that contractual arrangements became far more detailed: they specified several different types (of timber, for example), the required quantities and quality, and the price of all goods to be supplied; they also set precise dates and routes for delivery. In addition, these contracts had much wider and more generalised applicability: contractors agreed to supply not only timbers but also other naval stores, and their contracts were to run for several years. During the second half of the eighteenth century, contractual arrangements to supply the French navy envisaged huge quantities of timber, procured from tree-felling operations in several different regions, and deliverable to a number of naval dockyards, both in the Ponant (the Atlantic seaboard) and the Levant (the Mediterranean)⁵⁵. One effect of this was that far fewer timber contracts were let for small amounts of wood drawn only from one area. But perhaps more crucially, such large-scale contractors dealt not with the naval intendants at each of the various dockyards, but directly with the French king’s ministers⁵⁶. More recent scholarship has developed these insights to put forward the concept of the “contractor state” as a distinctive phase in the developing political economy of the early modern period⁵⁷.

On the other hand, the naval dockyards of the Old Regime monarchy were notoriously unreliable customers⁵⁸. While the high quality and great size of most ship timbers made them valuable commodities, the navy was neither prompt to exploit marked trees nor very open-handed when it came to setting rates of remuneration. One problem was the difficulty of ensuring that approved contractors (fournisseurs) were available to arrange the cutting, trimming and transport of timber that was designated for naval use. There was also the extremely variable state of the French Crown’s finances. The result was that delays between inspection and exploitation could run into years. One historian described the situation in south-eastern France: “landowners protested when they saw that their trees had been marked [for the royal dockyards], but were then left to age and even fall into decay because the naval contractors had neither claimed them nor paid for them: capital tied up and often lost entirely, without profit to anyone”⁵⁹. In the Forêt Barade, part of the Marquis de Hautefort’s sprawling estate in central Périgord, a naval commissioner carried out an inspection in 1728 to reassess oak trees that had previously been marked for acquisition by the royal dockyards: at the time of an earlier visit in 1715, the original number of suitable trees had been whittled down from over 8,000 to 3,000; now, a further thirteen years later, the navy thought that only 724 were still suitable for building and repairing the king’s warships⁶⁰.

Case studies of fournisseurs like the Babauds demonstrate how supplying timber and other stores to the royal dockyards could not only bring wealth and status, but also great opportunities for personal profit. One means to achieve this was to keep costs as low as possible, even if it meant breaching a contractual agreement and placing unreasonable demands on employees. In the south-west, another family of fournisseurs, Imbert, Reclus et Compagnie of Le Fleix, sought similar success through forcing local hauliers to accept substandard payment, which they were able to do by harnessing the authority of the provincial intendant in Bordeaux, who apparently accepted their claim that this was “a matter of the king’s service”⁶¹.

Yet coordination between the government’s contractors and the Eaux et Forêts was not always evident. In the summer of 1756, for instance, the forestry officials from Bordeaux discovered that the woodlands belonging to the community of Mées in the Landes included about forty trees that had been marked on their trunks with fleurs-de-lis, the royal government’s symbol. A more detailed inspection showed that over 100 other oaks, with diameters ranging between six and ten pieds (1.95 to 3.25 metres), had already been felled. The maître particulier, Antoine Martin, asked the community’s representatives for an explanation. An order had come from the intendant’s subdelegate at Dax, they replied: the villagers were required to have their woodlands inspected by a Sieur Ducros, who was to select and exploit any timber that he deemed suitable for the navy. He was the person responsible for marking and cutting these mature trees, an operation undertaken intermittently in Mées over the previous seven or eight years⁶².

Ducros was not a government official, however. Besides his own business activities as a timber merchant, Léonard Ducros held a contract to supply the royal navy with construction material. He was also what later generations of police officers would call “known to the authorities”. Two years earlier, in 1754, Ducros and a man named Deyris, leader (syndic) from another Landes community, had been prosecuted by the Eaux et Forêts for the unauthorised cutting of 218 oak trees in the communal woodlands of Laurède, and the same maître particulier, Martin, fined them 600 livres each⁶³. Fortunately for Ducros, the navy rated these 218 oaks very highly, and Rochefort’s chief administrator, the Intendant de la Marine, lobbied the minister in Versailles to ensure that this timber would still be available to the dockyard. The minister agreed, repeating Ducros’s own claim that the forestry officials’ seizure of the contraband trees had arisen solely from a failure to “abide by a few formalities”, and suggesting that the navy should get the powerful provincial intendant, Aubert de Tourny, to add his voice to the campaign⁶⁴. The outcome was a success for Ducros and Deyris, whose financial penalties were waived by an arrêt du Conseil in June 1756, and the naval dockyard in Rochefort retained the valuable 218 oaks. Yet the royal council insisted that the strict provisions of the 1669 Ordinance should apply in the future⁶⁵.

Despite occasional setbacks, whether judicial or financial, contractors like Ducros and Babaud played a central role in the exploitation of French woodlands during the eighteenth century. Officials of the Eaux et Forêts carried out important duties, especially in managing the Crown’s forests, and in surveying and assessing ecclesiastical and (above all) communal woodlands. The naval inspectors had an even more immediate impact, through their work to identify and mark mature trees for exclusive acquisition by the royal dockyards. However, it was the government’s own timber contractors who were crucial intermediaries between woodland proprietors and the state. They stood at an important intersection in the political economy of the Old Regime monarchy, between “public” service and “private” profits.

◼ LIMITING FACTORS

Naval demands on France’s forest resources occasioned both under-estimates and overstatements. Counting the number of wooden warships, in an attempt to calculate the amount of timber required to construct and maintain the fleet, is a task fraught with difficulties: as we have seen, the naval dockyards probably consumed several times the volume of timber that actually went into the vessels. In the process, the most substantial and sought-after pieces of wood – long, flexible softwood trunks for masts and yards, or large, hardwood compass timbers such as knees (genoux) – became far more difficult to acquire. As the suitable resources in the Crown’s own forests became scarce, officials from the navy and the Eaux et Forêts turned their attention increasingly to ecclesiastical and communal woodlands, where they pursued the same policy of appropriating the most desirable old-growth timber.

Yet we have also observed how specific were the navy’s needs, and how localised was its predation. Official documentation like the naval inspectors’ reports and declarations by the owners of private woodlands focused almost exclusively on oaks and elms: the exploitation of most softwood timbers was almost invisible. The tendency to under-estimate the extent of the state’s demands on timber resources also – paradoxically – embodied an overstatement. Even where the Old Regime’s naval engineers found no materials suitable for their purposes, trees were still being cut and timber was still being worked. Unlike the well-publicised doomsayers of the time, France’s naval inspectors were well aware that much timber ruled unfit for the navy’s needs could nevertheless serve useful construction purposes. Recall that in February 1775 Segondat had refrained from requisitioning most of the “small forest” at Clérans belonging to Jean-Charles Daugeard, one of the area’s largest landowners. As we saw, Segondat’s report described the forest as “mediocre”. Yet, a few months after the naval engineers’ official visit, Daugeard agreed to sell substantial amounts of timber from this same “mediocre” forest in a ten-year deal worth over 500,000 livres⁶⁶. According to some reports, it was thousands of timbers from this operation, stacked on the banks of the River Dordogne, that added to the destructive force of floodwaters in sweeping away the wooden bridge at Bergerac in March 1783⁶⁷. Later exploitation of the same woodlands provided construction materials destined for the task of rebuilding that bridge. And more than ten years after the disaster, Pellissier, the Revolutionary representative “on mission”, revoked the use of this timber for the bridge’s reconstruction, and – since Daugeard was by then considered a counter-revolutionary – redirected it to the construction and repair of Bergerac’s “armaments manufactory”⁶⁸.

In contrast to many conventional histories of French forest policy under the Old Regime monarchy, a social history would insist on featuring people like the villagers of Bégaar, or indeed Jean and Philippe Laporte. These men were landholding peasants (laboureurs) who applied in September 1783 to have the royal court at Saint-Émilion hear witnesses’ testimony about the illegal exploitation of trees that they claimed to own near Castillon. The man they held responsible for this offence was François Lalibert de Carrère, with whom they had been in dispute for some time⁶⁹. There had already been litigation in local courts, and in January 1782 the Laportes forcefully demonstrated to Carrère that their claims were widely supported by the local community – as Carrère’s tree-felling operation was getting under way, he and his employees were confronted by a band (troupe) of unidentified people, all armed with bars and batons, who threw stones and other objects, and shouted menacing threats. When Carrère refused to be intimidated, the Laportes simply retired and obtained an arrest warrant from the police in Libourne, which resulted in Carrère and his workforce spending seven months in jail. Lalibert de Carrère was someone of importance, since he described himself as a businessman (négociant), who held a contract to supply the French navy with ship timbers⁷⁰. Yet that status did not completely shield him from the claims of the Laporte brothers, who may not have been able to sign their names, but nonetheless showed skill and cunning in their recourse to both legal and extra-legal pressures.

◼ CONCLUSION

Important studies of the ways in which early modern states formulated and implemented their policies to acquire naval timbers have revealed great changes that had significant implications for naval warfare and military capacity; for the power of states’ rulers and their bureaucracies; for the growth of empires; for the well-being of the natural environment; and for the development of the political economy. Yet none of these changes represented autonomous, unmediated, or inevitable outcomes. Rather, they were pursued, promoted and applied by central states and their agents, sometimes with the active cooperation and collaboration of the individuals and groups who were most involved. But these policies also faced diverse forms of opposition and resistance, which were sometimes overt, and occasionally even violent. In the many-sided struggles over forest resources in eighteenth-century France, people like the Bégaar villagers and the Laporte brothers bear out E. P. Thompson’s famous justification for challenging “top-down” views of the past, which “tend to obscure the agency of working people, [in other words] the degree to which they contributed by conscious efforts, to the making of history”⁷¹.

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◼ NOTES

1. Rémi Brancato, “Pour reconstruire la flèche de Notre-Dame, des chênes centenaires sélectionnés dans les forêts de France,” France Inter, 3 février 2021, accessed 26 April 2022, https://www.franceinter.fr/la-selection-des-chenes-pour-reconstruire-la-fleche-de-notre-dame-de-paris-debute; Kim Willsher, “France on the Hunt for Centuries-Old Oaks to Rebuild Spire of Notre Dame,” The Guardian, 16 February 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/16/france-centuries-old-oaks-rebuild-spire-notre-dame-fire-trees; Maxime Tellier, “Notre-Dame de Paris: les plus beaux chênes de France pour la flèche, son socle et le transept,” France Culture, 7 mars 2021, accessed 26 April 2022, https://www.franceculture.fr/architecture/notre-dame-de-paris-les-plus-beaux-chenes-de-france-pour-la-fleche-son-socle-et-le-transept; “French Oaks from Once-Royal Forest Felled to Rebuild Notre Dame Spire,” The Guardian, 10 March 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/09/french-oaks-from-once-royal-forest-felled-to-rebuild-notre-dame-spire.

2. E.g. Paul W. Bamford, Forests and French Sea Power, 1660-1789 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1956); James Pritchard, Louis XV’s Navy, 1748-1772: A Study of Organization and Administration (Kingston, Ont./Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999); Andrée Corvol, ed., Forêt et Marine (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999); Christian Buchet, Jean Meyer and Jean-Pierre Poussou, eds., Puissance maritime (Paris: Presses universitaires de Paris-Sorbonne, 2004); N. A. M. Rodger, “From the ‘Military Revolution’ to the ‘Fiscal-Naval State’,” Journal for Maritime Research 13, no. 2 (2011): 119-28; Caroline Le Mao and Philippe Meyzie, eds., L’Approvisionnement des villes portuaires en Europe du XVIe siècle à nos jours (Paris, Presses universitaires de Paris-Sorbonne, 2015).

3. Michel Devèze, “La Crise forestière en France dans la première moitié du XVIIIe siècle, et les suggestions de Vauban, Réaumur, Buffon,” in [Actes du] 88e Congrès national des Sociétés savantes (Section d’histoire moderne et contemporaine), Clermont-Ferrand, 1963 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1964), 595-616; [Dufort], Discours du procureur du Roi de la maîtrise particulière des Eaux et Forêts de Guienne (Bordeaux, [no publ.], 1789), 35-36.

4. E.g. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Harper Collins, 1995), 180; Jean-Pierre Husson, “Les trois âges de la forêt,” Gavroche. Revue d’histoire populaire 62 (1992): 8-10; Louis Badré, «Le XIXe siècle forestier (1820-1914),” in Les Eaux et Forêts du 12e au 20e siècle (Paris: CNRS, 1987), 477-81. For alternative assessments: Denis Woronoff, “La ‘Dévastation révolutionnaire’ des forêts,” in Révolution et espaces forestiers : [Actes du] Colloque des 3 et 4 juin 1987, ed. Denis Woronoff (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1988), 44-52; Peter McPhee, “‘The Misguided Greed of Peasants’? Popular Attitudes to the Environment in the French Revolution of 1789,” French Historical Studies 24 (2001): 247-69.

5. Michel Marion, Dictionnaire des institutions de la France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: A. Picard, 1923), 242.

6. Roland Mousnier, The Institutions of France under the Absolute Monarchy, 1598-1789, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago, Ill./London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), vol. 2, 296.

7. Louis Bourgenot, “L’Administration des Eaux et Forêts du XVIe siècle à la fin de l’Ancien Régime,” in Les Eaux et Forêts du 12e au 20e siècle (Paris: CNRS, 1987), 143-46, 162-64.

8. Michel Devèze, “Les Forêts françaises à la veille de la Révolution de 1789,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 13 (1966): 241-72.

9. Bamford, Forests and French Sea Power…, esp. 70-94.

10. E.g. Paul W. Bamford, “French Forest Legislation and Administration, 1660-1789,” Agricultural History 29 (1955): 97-107; Devèze, “Les Forêts françaises…”; Louis Badré, Histoire de la forêt française (Paris: Arthaud, 1983), 78-99.

11. Louis XIV, King of France, Mémoires for the Instruction of the Dauphin. Ed. and trans. Paul Sonnino (New York: Free Press, 1970), 108.

12. Badré, Histoire de la forêt française…, 71-78; Bourgenot, “L’Administration des Eaux et Forêts…,” 131-64. One regional case study: Chandra Mukerji, “The Great Forest Survey of 1669-1671: The Use of Archives for Political Reform,” Social Studies of Science 37, no. 2 (2007): 227-53.

13. “Ordonnance de Louis XIV sur le fait des Eaux et Forêts (août 1669),” in Baudrillart, Recueil chronologique des règlemens forestiers (Paris: Mme Huzard/A. Bertrand, 1821), 73-79.

14. Jean Meyer and Martine Acerra, Histoire de la Marine française (Rennes: Ouest-France, 1994), 48-50, 109, 114-15, 137.

15. Bamford, Forests and French Sea Power…, 11; Badré, Histoire de la forêt française, 76.

16. Jean Boudriot, “Chênes et vaisseaux royaux,” in Forêt et Marine, ed. Andrée Corvol (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999), 346-47.

17. Paul Warde, “Fear of Wood Shortage and the Reality of the Woodland in Europe, c. 1450-1850,” History Workshop Journal 62 (2006): 40-41.

18. Roger Morriss, The Royal Dockyards during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press, 1983), 93.

19. Boudriot, “Chênes et vaisseaux royaux,” 340.

20. Bourgenot, “L’Administration des Eaux et Forêts…,” 166. On venality more generally, see William Doyle, Venality: The Sale of Offices in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).

21. “Ordonnance des Eaux et Forêts (1669),” in Baudrillart, Recueil chronologique des règlemens forestiers…, 51-52.

22. François Vion-Delphin, “Politique forestière et rattachement de la Franche-Comté à la France (1678-1750),” in [Actes du] Symposium international d’histoire forestière, Nancy, 24-28 septembre 1979 (Nancy: ENGREF, 1982), vol. II, 11-35; François Vion-Delphin, “L’Exploitation des bois de marine : facteur d’intégration au Royaume? La Franche-Comté au XVIIIe siècle,” in Forêt et Marine, ed. Andrée Corvol (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999), 213-24; Kieko Matteson, Forests in Revolutionary France: Conservation, Community, and Conflict, 1669-1848 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), esp. 38-41.

23. Philippe Crémieu-Alcan, A l’Ombre du Roi : Solidarité, résistance et mentalités à travers les délits forestiers en Guyenne au XVIIIe siècle (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2020), esp. 23-25.

24. Jean-Claude Waquet, Les Grands-maîtres des Eaux et Forêts en France de 1689 à la Révolution (Genève: Droz, 1978), 101 (n. 6), 340-41; 342-44; Henri de Coincy, La Grande-maîtrise de Guyenne au XVIIIe siècle (Nancy: Imprimerie Berger-Levrault, 1928), 1-3.

25. Dominique-Yves Courtois, “La Maîtrise des Eaux et Forêts de Bordeaux au XVIIIe siècle,” in [Actes du] 99e Congrès national des Sociétés savantes (Section d’histoire moderne et contemporaine), Besançon, 1974 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1976), vol. II, 338.

26. Courtois, “La Maîtrise des Eaux et Forêts…,” 335.

27. Pierre Buffault, “Notes sur quelques anciennes forêts ecclésiastiques de la Guienne,” Revue historique de Bordeaux 28 (1935): 151-53; Bordeaux. Archives départementales de la Gironde [henceforth ADG], Eaux et Forêts de Guienne, Forêts et cours d’eau, Monastères, 8B 55: Abbaye de Faize (1734-1765).

28. Buffault, “Notes sur quelques anciennes forêts…,” 148, 150; ADG, Eaux et Forêts de Guienne, Arrêts du Conseil, Ordonnances du Grand-Maître, et divers, 8B 22: Ordonnance du grand-maître (Feb. 16, 1758).

29. [Dufort], Discours du procureur du Roi…, 22-24.

30. Hamish Graham, “‘Forced Against Our Will to Make a Report’: The Nature of Woodland Property and the Problems of Policing Forests in Eighteenth-Century France,” French History and Civilization. Festschrift in Honor of Peter McPhee 9 (2020): 56.

31. Graham, “‘Forced Against Our Will to Make a Report’…,” 55.

32. ADG, Eaux et Forêts de Guienne, Forêts et cours d’eau, Dossiers relatifs aux bois de diverses communautés, 8B 537: Saint-Sever, Procès-verbal de visite (Feb. 19, 1761).

33. ADG, Eaux et Forêts de Guienne, Forêts et cours d’eau. Dossiers relatifs aux bois de diverses communautés, 8B 537: Saint-Sever, Requête en plainte (Mar. 20, 1753).

34. ADG, Eaux et Forêts de Guienne, Forêts et cours d’eau. Dossiers relatifs aux bois de diverses communautés, 8B 537: Saint-Sever, Procès-verbaux de visite (June 13 and July 14, 1753).

35. Graham, “‘Forced Against Our Will to Make a Report’…,” 59-60.

36. Jean-Gilbert Bourras, La Querelle des vacants en Aquitaine (Biarritz: J. & D. Éditions, 1995), 137-41, 175-79; Hamish Graham, “‘For the Needs of the Royal Navy’: State Interventions in the Communal Woodlands of the Landes during the Eighteenth Century,” Proceedings of the Western Society for French History 35 (2007): 135-48.

37. ADG, Eaux et Forêts de Guienne, Procédure, Auditions, informations et divers, 8B 162: Procès-verbal (Apr. 15, 1762); Information (June 13 and 16, 1762).

38. Paris, Archives Nationales, Domaines, Département des Landes, Eaux et forêts, Q1 420: [anon.], “Mémoire des habitants de Béga[a]r,” (n.d.) [1778?].

39. Devèze, “Les Forêts françaises…,” 266-67.

40. The 1669 Ordinance required a preliminary declaration from the owners of private woodlands for mature trees that they wished to cut within ten leagues (about forty kilometres) of the sea, or within two leagues (eight kilometres) of navigable waterways. In 1700 those limits were expanded, and in 1723 the geographical specifications were effectively extended across the entire kingdom. A ruling in 1744 then made a declaration valid for only one year. Baudrillart, Recueil chronologique des règlemens forestiers…, 78, 141-42, 236, 315.

41. Hamish Graham, “Fleurs-de-Lis in the Forest: ‘Absolute’ Monarchy and Attempts at Resource Management in Eighteenth-Century France,” French History 23, no. 3 (2009): 324-28.

42. Hamish Graham, “Greedy or Needy? Forest Administration and Landowners’ Attitudes in Southwestern France during the Eighteenth Century,” Rural History 16, no. 1 (2005): 9-10, 12-15; Hamish Graham, “A Time for Every Purpose? The Seasonality of Forest Exploitation and its Political Implications in Eighteenth-Century France,” Proceedings of the Western Society for French History 33 (2005): 163-79, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0642292.0640033.0642010.

43. Bamford, Forests and French Sea Power…, 11-14; N. D. G. James, A History of English Forestry (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), 150-55.

44. ADG, Eaux et Forêts de Guienne, Procès-verbaux des commissaires de la Marine, 8B 806: Procès-verbal de visite (Feb. 9-11, 1775).

45. ADG 8B 806, Procès-verbaux des Commissaires de la Marine, 8B 806: (Dec. 17-18, 18, 19, 20, and 30, 1765; Jan. 9-11, 15, 16-17, 18, 20-22, 23, and 27, 1766; Jan. 30-Feb. 1, 1766).

46. At mid-century, some 9,720 pieds cubes (or 333 cubic metres) of timber, almost all of it oak, were required to build the hull of a thirty-gun frigate like Renommée: Duhamel du Monceau, Élemens de l’architecture navale, ou Traité pratique de la construction des vaisseaux (Paris: Ch.-A. Jobert, 2nd ed., 1758), 335.

47. Martine Acerra, “Les Constructeurs de la Marine (XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles).” Revue historique 109, no. 554 (1985): 283-304; James Pritchard, “From Shipwright to Naval Constructor: The Professionalization of Eighteenth-Century French Naval Shipbuilders,” Technology and Culture 28 (1987): 1-25.

48. Acerra,”Les Constructeurs de la Marine…,” 288-289; Pritchard, “From Shipwright to Naval Constructor…,” 22-23.

49. ADG, Eaux et Forêts de Guienne, Procès-verbaux des commissaires de la Marine, 8B 806. The distribution of surviving documents in this file is very uneven: five reports for 1765, seventeen for 1766, two for 1768, one for 1775, twenty for 1777, and fifty-two for 1778.

50. Bamford, Privilege and Profit…, 30-37, 257-58 (nn. 34, 35, 37).

51. Bamford, Privilege and Profit…, 42-45.

52. Martial de Pradel de Lamase, “Le Flottage des bois sur la Dordogne,” Bulletin de la Société Scientifique, Historique et Archéologique de la Corrèze 87 (1965): 109; Hamish Graham, “Profits and Privileges: Forests and Commercial Interests in Ancien Régime France,” French History 16, no. 4 (2002): 385-86; Bamford, Privilege and Profit…, 222-25.

53. E.g. Hilton L. Root, The Fountain of Privilege: Political Foundations of Markets in Old Regime France and England (Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press, 1994). For more positive views on the economic impacts of naval fournisseurs in this period, see examples such as David Plouviez, “The French Navy and War Entrepreneurs: Identity, Business Relations, Conflicts and Cooperation in the Eighteenth Century,” Business History, 60, no. 1 (2018), 41-56; Pierrick Pourchasse, “Military Entrepreneurs and the Development of the French Economy in the Eighteenth Century,” Business History, 60, no. 1 (2018), 57-71.

54. Bamford, Forests and French Sea Power…, 30-32, 41-42.

55. Martine Acerra, Rochefort et la construction navale française, 1661-1815 (Paris: Librairie de l’Inde, 1993), vol. 3, 528-29, 534-36. The author noted a similar trend in naval contracts for the supply of artillery and munitions: Acerra, Rochefort et la construction navale…, vol. 3, 538-39.

56. Acerra, Rochefort et la construction navale…, vol. 3, 536.

57. For an overview, illustrative case studies, and a guide to wider literature: Hugh V. Bowen et al., “Forum: The Contractor State, c. 1650-1815,” International Journal of Maritime History 25, no. 1 (2013): 239-74.

58. Bamford, Forests and French Sea Power…, 28; Acerra, Rochefort et la construction navale…, vol. 3, 529.

59. Quoted in André Peyriat, “Problèmes forestiers en Provence d’après les archives de la Chambre des Eaux et Forêts d’Aix,” Provence historique 16, no. 63 (1966): 43.

60. Service historique de la Défense [henceforth SHD] (Division du Sud-Ouest, Rochefort), Correspondance de l’Intendant avec la Cour, 1E 93: Procès-verbal de visite (Dec. 5, 1715), fol. 263-264; Angers, Archives départementales de Maine-et-Loire, Fonds privés, Fonds Damas, 30J 91: “Pièces pour la coupe des bois de Barade” (1719-1730).

61. ADG, Intendance de Bordeaux, Administration provinciale, Correspondance des subdélégués avec l’Intendant, Subdélégation de Bergerac, C 458: Dupré de St. Maur to Gontier de Biran (July 13, 1782); Hamish Graham, “Profits and Privileges: Forests and Commercial Interests in Ancien Régime France,” French History 16, no. 4 (2002): 392-93.

62. ADG, Eaux et Forêts de Guienne, Forêts et cours d’eau, Dossiers relatifs aux bois de diverses communautés, 8B 539: Mées (1756).

63. ADG, Eaux et Forêts de Guienne, Forêts et cours d’eau, Dossiers relatifs aux bois de diverses communautés, 8B 538: Laurède (1752-1759).

64. SHD (Rochefort), Correspondance de l’Intendant avec la Cour, 1E 382: Le Normant to Rouillé (May 26, 1754); Dépêches de la Cour adressées à l’Intendant, 1E 152: Rouillé to Le Normant (June 9, 1754), fol. 113-114.

65. “Arrêt du Conseil (22 juin 1756),” in Baudrillart, Recueil chronologique des règlemens forestiers…, 395.

66. Amédée Grenier, “Inondations : pont de Bergerac, forêt de Clérans,” Bulletin de la Société historique et archéologique du Périgord 24 (1897): 410-13.

67. Grenier, “Inondations…,” 410-11; Humbert Augeard, “Les D’Augeard” (unpubl. typrescript, 1972), 44-45; Gustave Charrier, Les Jurades de la ville de Bergerac, tirées des registres de l’Hôtel de Ville. Tome 13, 1774-1789 (Bergerac: Imprimerie du Sud-Ouest, 1904), 113-21.

68. Périgueux. Archives départementales de la Dordogne, Administrations et tribunaux de l’époque révolutionnaire, District de Bergerac, 3L 26: Arrêté du Représentant du peuple, Pellissier, le 22 vendémiaire [an III], fol. 42v-43r. See also Henri Labroue, La Mission du conventionnel Lakanal dans la Dordogne en l’an II (Paris: H. Champion, 1912), 426, 430-34, 457, 625-26.

69. ADG, Eaux et Forêts de Guienne, Procédure, Auditions, informations et divers, 8B 239: Requête en plainte (Sep. 18, 1783).

70. ADG, Eaux et Forêts de Guienne, Procédure, Auditions, informations et divers, 8B 238: Supplique (June 2, 1783).

71. Edward Palmer.Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: V. Gollancz, 1963), “Preface.”