The Man Who Planted Trees

There are two important autobiographical elements surrounding “The Man Who Planted Trees.” The first relates to the story’s genesis. In 1953, having already enjoyed great success as a writer in his native France, Giono was approached by the US magazine Reader’s Digest to write a nonfiction work of feature journalism under the prompt, “The Most Extraordinary Character I Ever Met.” Rather than approach the assignment as a journalist, Giono chose to write about a fictional character named Elzéard Bouffier who embodied the themes of hope, humanity, and ecological stewardship that the author wanted to convey with the piece. Yet he failed to tell Reader’s Digest his submission was a work of fiction. Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on one’s perspective—the magazine rigorously fact-checked the work and angrily rejected the piece, calling Giono a “cheat” (vi), according to the Foreword to the 2015 Vintage edition of “The Man Who Planted Trees.”

A reader may attribute this gambit to mere pranksterism on Giono’s part. Other readers may believe that the author’s disingenuousness in presenting Bouffier as real undercuts the story’s effectiveness. Yet the author’s sanguine attitude toward letting people believe Bouffier is a real person reflects his intent in writing the story. To him, there is no harm in this particular lie, and if a reader is more inclined to plant trees themselves by believing Bouffier is real, then the story has done humanity and planet Earth a great service, by his account.

An even more important autobiographical element when considering the work’s allegorical nature is Giono’s experiences during World War I. Like the narrator, Giono joined the French Army at the outbreak of war in 1914; also like the narrator, Giono was an infantryman present at the Battle of Verdun, one of the longest and deadliest battles in World War I and in human history writ large. Roughly 300,000 men were killed over nearly 10 months, as troops on both sides endured the unspeakable conditions of early 20th-century trench warfare. The horrifying experience turned Giono into a lifelong pacifist, and his controversial neutrality during World War II—for which he was imprisoned for two months—is reflected in Bouffier’s total lack of interest as the Second World War rages around him.

Yet what’s most affecting about how Giono transmutes this trauma into his story is how subtly he does so. There are scant direct references to World War I—which the narrator unassumingly refers to as “the 1914 war” (15)—and yet the conflict casts a long, dark shadow over the entire story. The author intentionally downplays the narrator’s post-traumatic stress disorder, characterizing it not through violent nightmares and soaked sheets but as a simmering, ever-present sense of despair that haunts him everywhere he goes. When the narrator returns to the desolate valley, he does so out of “a great desire to breathe some fresh air” (15)—a possible reference to the chlorine gas and other chemical weapons used against the French at Verdun. As the narrator approaches the moorland and finally remembers the shepherd he met five years earlier, he fatalistically thinks to himself, “I’d seen so many people die in the last years I could easily imagine that Elzéard Bouffier must be dead too” (16). When Bouffier shows him a birch plantation he started in 1915, the mere mention of that year sends the narrator back to the war, if only for a moment. In a brief aside before returning to the present, the narrator merely interjects to himself, “1915, when I was fighting at Verdun” (18).

These subtle interjections are arguably even more powerful than lengthier or more explicit war flashbacks because of how much goes unsaid. The reader is left with a distinct impression of a man who is clearly transformed by his trauma, yet the details that brought forth that transformation are left to the darkest corners of the imagination. Having placed the reader firmly inside the mind of this damaged narrator, the author renders the narrator’s healing at the sight of thousands of young oaks—which is characterized as no less than a “reason for living” (19)—as deeply poignant. Thus, the story’s separate functions as an antiwar allegory and an environmental allegory become fused together.

It is also worth considering how ahead of his time Giono was in his ecological understanding and advocacy. Narratives and poetry about communing with nature and the importance of preserving it were nothing new when “The Man Who Planted Trees” was published. Nineteenth-century Romantic poets like William Wordsworth and American Transcendentalists like Henry David Thoreau wrote eloquently of the spiritual and intellectual gifts bestowed by nature. The natural and human ecosystem that emerges around Bouffier’s forest also recalls the rustic utopian communities of 19th-century America.

However, Giono’s celebration of ecologically minded stewardship—meaning, the salubrious qualities of not just being in nature but actively participating in its growth and preservation—had yet to find purchase in mainstream culture and literature in 1953. Indeed, many of Giono’s literary peers responded to the horrors of World War I and II with modernist narratives that mirrored the fracturing of Western civilization, instead of presenting a vision of repair and rebirth. Moreover, the explosion of flora and fauna that results from Bouffier’s reforestation efforts reflect foundational precepts of ecology, which was only then beginning to be viewed as a hard science. Finally, the connections Giono keenly draws between industry, the environment, and human health predict the ideas explored almost a decade later by Rachel Carson in her landmark 1962 book Silent Spring, which helped launch the modern environmental movement.