Farming Communities in the Western Alps, 1500–1914

This is a book about the western Alps, defined broadly as the French-speaking part of the alps, including the French Alps, Suisse Romande (that is, the western parts of the cantons of Valais and Fribourg and the southern part of Vaud) along with Aoste in Italy (Fig. 1.1). Using archival material drawn from various regional archives, as well as drawing on the large body of published material that exists for the region, and adopting 1500–1914 as its time frame, it explores how traditional farming communities endured in such an environment despite the challenges and risks to their subsistence and welfare. In essence, how they endured is a question about how they established secure, viable adaptations to their setting. Seen in such terms, there has already been an extensive debate how we might answer this question, with many studies dealing with different aspects of how Alpine communities coped with the challenges of their environment, either as a significant thread within a wider analysis or as the prime focus. We can find in-depth analyses of how they did so at the level of the individual commune or local area as well as at a wider regional or pan-Alpine perspective. We can also find substantive treatment of it in studies covering the three or four centuries stretching back before 1500 as well as for the centuries that followed. However, whilst there is no lack of detailed case studies published in English that deal with issues of resource exploitation and how particular communities or local areas adapted to the challenges posed by their physical setting, such as Netting's work on Törbel in Valais, that by Crook et al on the catchment of the Lac du Annecy, or the recently published study of Cipières in the Alpes-Maritimes, there are fewer published studies written in English that offer a wider regional perspective on the problem. Viazzo's perceptive review of this aspect as part of his wider study of the demography and social structure of Alpine communities and the translation of Mathieu's history of Alpine environment, development and society 1500–1900, stand out as the most notable amongst them. This book adds to this regional perspective, combining the insights that have been generated by the existing literature with those that can be gleaned from commune-level documentary sources and wider regional data sets.

During the study period adopted by this book, the basic unit of administration across the western Alps was that of the commune. Although a relatively youthful institution when viewed in many areas c.1500, it formed the foundation for the top-down imposition of authority and the basis for the bottom-up collection of taxes from the farm community in the centuries that followed. It was also responsible, with direction and oversight from the wider département or cantonal assemblies, for framing the regulations through which the farming community and its resources were managed. Given these functions, it is hardly surprising that a significant part of the data available for studying the nature of the farming community are provided by commune-based archives. However, the commune and the farming community were not always cross-matched in a simple one-to-one way. Many communes were developed around a number of different settlements. The prime amongst them would have been the chef-lieu with the rest being subsidiary hamlets or even scattered holdings. Yet however many hamlets or dispersed settlements existed alongside the chef-lieu, the regulations that governed their management and resource use were framed increasingly by the commune in which they were set. Some regulations may have been specific to particular settlements but the majority applied, umbrella-like, to all settlements within the commune. In other words, whatever the complexity of on-the-ground arrangements in terms of settlement and landholding, the structures and authority of the commune provide us with a core unit of reference and analysis for the analysis of landholding, how it was structured, the balance between privately held land and those resources exploited as the commons through common property rights and how the balance between these two sectors altered over time.

The Alps form a challenging ecology for crop production. Factors like slope steepness and soil depth place fundamental constraints on what could be cultivated. Aspect too, plays a major role, with slopes facing the sun, the adret, being advantaged and those in the shadow or ubac with a severely oblique face to it, being greatly disadvantaged. The shorter growing season, and greater incidence of risk, that came with increased height imposed further fundamental constraints and, ultimately, set an uncompromising limit on what could or could not be grown as communities pushed upslope. Even what lay down the slope, on the low valley ground, could face problems owing to temperature inversions and the heightened risk of frost. Given this tight framing to cultivation, it is not surprising that Alpine communities needed to be acutely sensitive to the risks as well as the possibilities of their setting. Yet even given these limitations and risks, the traditional Alpine farming community maintained a significant arable sector. I want to deal with these various issues under six headings. First, I want to briefly review the ecology of Alpine arable. Second, I want to explore the scale of arable available to farming communities and how access to it varied across the farming community. Third, I want to examine the cropping strategies that were adopted, especially as regards grain cropping. In the fourth, I want to consider the diversity of cropping present in the region. Fifth, I want to review the kinds of crop husbandry employed by Alpine communities, especially how they coped with the challenge of maintaining nutrient flow. Sixth, I want to round off my discussion by considering the extent to which communities were routinely self-sufficient when it came to their arable output, looking at the problem in terms of what was sown and the returns on seed.

For traditional Alpine farming, livestock had two sources of value. First, they were a resource that offered multiple resource benefits to farmers, being a source of food (cheese, butter, milk, meat), raw materials (wool, leather, hair, bone, horn and tallow), traction, carriage and, last but by no means least, a vital form of nutrient transfers in the form of manure. The animals themselves, as well as their produce or raw materials, could also be traded in markets, turned in to profit or exchanged to offset deficiencies in the household economy. Second, we need to understand the role played by livestock in binding together the distended resource mix of communes, with many communities having not just a considerable distance between what was their arable core and their alpages, but also, a considerable variation in height. Given the limited season of output from the alpage and its lower output compared to lowland pastures, and given the energy costs for the animals, herders, milkers and cheesemakers involved in reaching it, we need to be clear about what its wider benefits were. Arguably, its value rested on more than just the milk, cheese and butter produced over the season of alpation. As well as helping to maximise output from the resources available, it removed stock upwards away from arable over the summer growing season and enabled the growth of low ground meadows to be cut for the hay needed for stock feed over winter. The winter housing of stock produced the manure that could be spread over both arable and meadows in spring. Seen in these terms, livestock became the ties that bound lowland arable and the high alpage into a single system of husbandry and resource exploitation. The role of livestock in providing energy, subsistence and materials, together with their role in maximising the exploitation of the system's disparate resource sectors and in facilitating the vital transfer of nutrients from grass to arable provides us with a number of themes that can be grouped under three broad headings. First, I want to comment on the strategic role played by livestock in the structuring of the Alpine farm economy, how this role brought the resources of the higher ground into active play and how the transfer of nutrients from pasture and meadow land was essential for arable. Second, I want to explore stocking levels, both at the level of the commune and the individual farm unit, and how they changed over time. My initial discussion here will be organised around the 1500–1700 period, the eighteenth century and the nineteenth to early twentieth century. These phase-based discussions will be followed by short thematic reviews, one on seasonal stock listings, 1800–1914, and another on regional stock lists. In the third and final section, I want to review the changes that can be detected in the strategies of stock farming, 1500–1914.

The Alpine commons are often seen as an exemplary context for the debate over the commons generally, with a large percentage of the region's land surface forming an area of shared use rights with resource exploitation managed collectively or jointly. What is more, as Vivier noted, many of the Alpine commons endured, preserving their status at a time when those of lowland areas were being divided into privately managed spaces of resource use. However, we need to ask how exemplary were the Alpine commons as commons? Those who controlled them in the centuries following 1500—the communes as well as lay and ecclesiastical lords—openly claimed them as a property holding. When we consider how the Alpine commons were exploited, we are dealing with the community of commoners that existed within this wider framework of presumed ownership and from which they derived the fact that they were shared-right holders in what, to use Hardin’s phrase, were ‘managed commons’. The essence of their managed basis was embodied in the fact that their exploitation by commoners was not an unbridled right of access but restricted to specific use rights that had to be paid for. These use rights were carefully defined and closely regulated. This chapter looks at the different ways in which the use rights were defined, managed and exploited. It explores six themes. First, it surveys the range of uses that the commons were put to. Second, it looks at how communes managed the exercise of use rights in their commons through a regulatory framework put in place by their governing assemblies. Third, it examines the primary focus of this regulatory framework, or the question of who had entitlement to use rights. Fourth, the use of the commons expanded in step with needs. Where extensive areas of mountain pastures were available, the outer reaches of these pastures tended to remain ill-defined until extra need pressed the case for their sharper definition. Inevitably, such areas involved rival claims from neighbouring communes so that any sustained expansion into such areas led to inter-communal disputes, some of which proved intractable and enduring, fostering confrontations not just over decades but across centuries. Examples of such conflicts are explored. In the fifth and sixth sections, two of the more important use rights in the commons are considered: use rights in timber, including firewood, and those surrounding the water needed for irrigation.

Amongst the varied use rights that existed on the Alpine commons, that of grazing on the alpage was the most valuable, at least as regards what it added to the viability of the farm economy. Defined simply, the alpage was the high, seasonally grazed pasture of the Alps. Across the wide range of published output available on the topic, studies have either focussed on detailed commune-based case studies or have taken a wider approach by surveying the nature of the alpage across the region as a whole. This chapter mixes aspects of both these approaches, drawing on both commune-level and territorial data drawn from French and Swiss archives. Altogether, it examines seven aspects. First, it examines how the alpage was defined as a physical space. Second, it examines the ecology of the alpage and how its opportunities fitted into the wider farming system. Third, it explores the different ways in which the grazing capacity of alpage was defined. Fourth, it looks at the different institutional forms, practices and regulations that emerged to manage grazing rights and the production of milk, cheese and butter. Fifth, it reviews the ways in which the grazing capacity attached to the alpage was allocated between those with use rights. Sixth, it brings together some of the points already made about the development and opening up of the alpage. Seventh, it explores questions about whether its condition deteriorated over time and, with it, output.

This chapter looks at how farming communities in the western Alps coped with the weather-based disasters that beset farming, 1500–1914. These were not the only kind of disaster affecting such communities but they were the prime source of risk for them. Nor did such communities have a monopoly over the challenges posed by the risk of disasters. Their lowland counterparts also faced such challenges. However, with their greater extremes of topographic variation, mountain areas generally experienced more extremes of weather and possessed a greater potential for locally destructive flash flooding, avalanches, landslides, more prolonged snowfalls and more severe frosts. Such risks were accentuated by the greater variability of alpine climates, with less predictability and more damaging out-of-season events, such as snow and frost during critical phases of the growing season. This greater variability was a point well stressed by Pfister in his comparison of risk between the areas of the Hirtenland and Kornland in Switzerland, with the former having a 'high vulnerability to meteorological stress' compared to the latter. To this, we can add the fact that Alpine communities generally operated within tighter margins of subsistence so that the threshold at which risks could threaten was lower. They also faced greater difficulties in offsetting shortfalls of food via the market or other forms of redistribution. As my prime concern is to establish how farming communities experienced weather-based disasters, and coped with their impacts, commune-based archival evidence has been used to compile a database of such disasters during the period, 1500–1914. Discussion of this data is divided into four sections. The first reviews the problems of profiling weather-based disasters, both as regards their general structural form (i.e. sudden or slowly unfolding, simple or complex) and as regards their specific character or the type of weather reported to have contributed to them (i.e. hail, heavy rain, snow, frost, drought, etc). The second uses specific examples to explore how weather-based disasters impacted on traditional farm communities and how the latter perceived the causes of those events that were exceptional in their impact. The third examines how communities sought to minimise risk from such disasters. The fourth considers how traditional farm communities coped with their aftermath.

Using data for the period 1500–1914, this study began with the question: how did traditional farming communities in the western Alps endure generation after generation given the challenges and risks of their environment? It has worked from the obvious premise that the greatest challenge to their sustained long-term survival lay in the challenges posed by their setting. Quite apart from its lower energy yield and higher levels of risk compared to lowland areas, the highly variegated nature of this setting and the implications which this had for the mix and spread of resource opportunities meant that if communities wanted to realise the potential output of their setting, they needed to map as much of this variety as was possible into their strategies of resource exploitation. There is a case for arguing that this found expression in a relative mix of cropping and stocking within each holding, even though the majority of landholders had access to only limited resources. As well as incorporating diversity, Alpine farming was also responsive. We can point to a number of shifts or changes in cropping which, over time, helped to maximise resource use. We also see it in the further development of resource balancing, or the bringing together of areas that had a deficit of key resources (i.e. summer grazings, winter feed) with areas that had a surplus of such resources. For some writers, the typical Alpine community was better able to regulate its relationship to its resource base by being closed and self-reliant as a community. We certainly find communities restricting access not just to its common property resources but also to its privately held land to those who were resident. However, we also find ways in which such attempts at exclusion were compromised over time, notably in the way many communes allowed stock from outside their bounds to graze their high-ground pastures or to be wintered in their byres. When we add the extent to which some communes relied on local markets to replenish their flocks and herds, or to move old or cast animals on, and then add the large numbers of men and boys who temporarily migrated to lowland areas and towns over winter, it becomes difficult to describe the typical commune as a closed community. Likewise, though we find principles of equality being routinely restated as regards access to grazings, it did not mean that we are dealing with communities of equals. Some wealth differentials did exist, most evidently as regards the possession of stock if not as regards the possession of arable. Overall, the most persistent threat to the survival of Alpine farming communities were environmental risks, particularly those that were weather-based. Communities coped by accepting their frequency of occurrence and all-pervasiveness, so that there was a degree of anticipation behind the range of mitigation strategies that were developed to reduce if not remove risk. When disaster events did occur, they were able to call on a range of coping strategies from mutuality both within and between communes to support from the state and public appeals. Ultimately, much depended on their success in coping the impact of disasters that played themselves out at different scales, temporally as well as spatially.