Vidal de La Blache focused on human geography, particularly the study of the relationship between humans and their environment. He also emphasized the importance of regional geography, believing that understanding specific regions was crucial for comprehending broader geographical patterns.
Vidal’s life study of the interrelations of people’s activities and their physical environment made him the founder of French human geography. He held that the role of people is not passive, since within limits they can modify their environment to advance their own ends. His key works include works Tableau de la ge´ographie de la France (portrait of French geography) (1903) or his Principes de ge´ographie humaine (principles of human geography) (1922).
Along with Friedrich Ratzel in Germany, William Morris Davis in the United States and Halford Mackinder in Great Britain, he was a key architect of geography’s rise at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Vidal developed his own geographical doctrine in which the concepts of milieu (natural surroundings), genre de vie (way of living), and paysage (landscape) would eventually serve as complements to his notion of the region.
Possibilism
Blache was a strong critique of Environmental deterministic approach of Friedrich Ratzel. Blache believed that it is unreasonable to draw artificial boundaries between natural and cultural phenomenon. Natural and cultural landscapes must be studied together as man and nature, both adapt to each other.
He believed that nature sets limits and offers possibilities. The way humans adjust to these possibilities depends on their way of living. Nature is just an advisor.
Genre De Vie
He gave the concept of ‘genre de vie’ (lifestyle). It refers to the inherited traits by humans which is known as ‘culture’. It is the reflection of complex institutions, traditions, skills etc. That is why same environment has different meanings for people having different genre de vie. In areas of human settlements, nature changes significantly.
Concept of ‘Pays’
Vidal de la Blache’s first works were greatly influenced by Germany’s Carl Ritter. Like Ritter, he saw geography at this point in his career as the study of regions whose goal was to discover how each region is marked by the specific contribution it has made to the advancement of humanity.
Again, like Ritter, Vidal adhered to the idea that each human society has its own way of transforming nature in order to produce whatever is useful. According to him, man and environment can be best studies in homogeneous regions known as ‘Pays’.
Each pay is unique and has its own distinctive agriculture due to its soil and water supply and also due to the demands of the people living in those areas. He was against the idea of taking drainage basin as the unit of study as it might have heterogeneous structure, different institutions, culture etc. He however also advocated for the study of regions at meso and macro level for practical purposes which can help in the planning of areas.
‘Principal of terrestrial unity’ – the idea that the Earth is a whole system where all parts are well-organized and coordinated. Geography should be studied as a whole, rather than as a collection of unrelated facts, and that humans interact with their environment but are not solely determined by it. His views were endorsed by French historian – Febvre. Acc to him ‘there are not necessities but everywhere possibilities.
As such, Vidalian geography became a method for studying how each human group, through its activities, practices, and techniques, adapts to its milieu, that is, the natural surroundings as they exist in the region where the group has settled. This adaptation constitutes a genre de vie (way of living) which, in return, leaves its mark upon the group’s milieu. Hence, by way of the genre de vie, the milieu acquires a specifically human dimension which, according to Vidal, the paysage never fails to reveal
