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This book traces the creation, maintenance, and contestation of the militarized environments from the establishment of France's first large-scale and permanent army camp on the Champagne plains in 1857, to military environmentalism in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In doing so, it focuses on the evolving and profoundly historical relationship between war, militarization, and the environment. The book treats militarized environments as simultaneously material and cultural sites that have been partially or fully mobilized to achieve military aims. It focuses on the environmental history of sites in rural and metropolitan France that the French and other militaries have directly mobilized to prepare for, and to wage, war. They include such sites as army camps, weapons testing facilities, and air bases, as well as battlefields and other combat zones, but not maritime militarized environments, which arguably deserve their own book. First World War cemeteries and the memorial landscapes of the D-Day beaches remain places of international importance and serve as reminders of the transnational character of many French militarized environments. And although the book focuses on the environmental history of militaraization within metropolitan France, it speaks to issues that mark militarized environments across the globe, such as civilian displacement, anti-base protests, and military environmentalism. By focusing on the French case, the author aims to encourage reflection and discussion on the global issue of military control and use of the environment.
century after the war began. War memorials and war cemeteries have themselves become historic monuments, the meaning of which is open to reinterpretation. This has been true both in Germany and in Britain, but in different ways. The following discussion will focus on these different ways, with a particular emphasis on the post-war creation first of cemeteries in Belgium and France and then, in England and Germany, of civic and local war memorials. First World War cemeteries as war memorials Within a year of the Armistice a battlefield tourist industry had got under way
. Thus the writer encounters modern-day marauding football-fan ‘Dragons’ (the title of the seventh story) and sees from the train a First World War cemetery in France that prompts him to think of the inscriptions of names on Lutyens’s Somme memorial arch at Thiepval, reminding the reader of ‘Evermore’. It transpires that a woman in the compartment is a Master of Wine, which recalls the story ‘Hermitage’, about two British women who take over a French vineyard, but also the end of ‘Experiment’, which mentions a female Master of Wine who seemingly provides the key to the
the French environment. First World War cemeteries and the memorial landscapes of the D-Day beaches remain places of international importance and serve as reminders of the transnational character of many French militarized environments.6 And although this book focuses on the environmental history of militaraization within metropolitan France, moving between national, regional, and local scales, it speaks to issues that mark militarized environments across the globe, such as civilian displacement, anti-base protests, and military environmentalism.7 This is certainly