Paul Vidal de La Blache
Paul Vidal de La Blache (pɔl vidal də la blaʃ, Pézenas, Hérault, 22 January 1845 - Tamaris-sur-Mer, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, 5 April 1918) was a French geographer. He is considered to be the founder of modern French geography and also the founder of the French School of Geopolitics. He conceived the idea of genre de vie, which is the belief that the lifestyle of a particular region reflects the economic, social, ideological and psychological identities imprinted on the landscape. Paul Vidal de la Blache was the son of a professor who subsequently became an academic administrator. Only some of these have been translated into English. His most influential works included an elementary textbook Collection de Cartes Murales Accompagnées de Notices along with Histoire et Géographie: Atlas General and La France de l'Est. Two of his best-known writings are Tableau de la Géographie de la France (1903) and Principles of Human Geography (1918). The Tableau de la Geographie de la France was a summary of Vidal's methods, a manifesto whose production required a dozen years of work. It surveyed the entire country, taking note of everything he had observed in his innumerable notebooks. He took an interest in human and political aspects, geology (an infant discipline at the time, little connected with geography), transportation, and history. He was the first to tie together all those domains in a somewhat quantitative approach, using numbers sparingly, essentially narrative, even descriptive—not far removed, in some ways from a guidebook or a manual for landscape painting. Influenced by German thought, especially by Friedrich Ratzel whom he had met in Germany, Vidal has been linked to the term "possibilism", which he never used but which summed up conveniently his opposition to the determinism of the sort that was defended by some nineteenth century geographers. The concept of possibilism has been used by historians to evoke the epistemological fuzziness that, according to them, characterized the approach of Vidal's school.
