26 pages • 52 minutes read
Jean GionoThe Man Who Planted Trees
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1953A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Socio-Historical Context: Jean Giono's Wartime Experience
The circumstances surrounding Giono’s writing of “The Man Who Planted Trees” and the author’s life leading up to that point are crucial to analyzing the story. Like the narrator, Giono served in the French Army during World War I, fighting amid the incomprehensible destruction and suffering of the Battle of Verdun. The experience was so horrific for him that he became a lifelong pacifist, refusing to fight in World War II at great personal cost. Thus, when the narrator almost casually references the war and Verdun specifically, the reader can infer that the character carries enormous trauma, even if he never explicitly addresses it. The author’s wartime experiences also invest the story with poignant allegorical resonance, as Bouffier’s reforestation efforts represent the construction of a better world built from the ashes of postwar Europe—one that is capable of healing the personal and collective trauma of an entire generation.
The focus on Verdon is doubly significant because of the extensive environmental destruction inflicted on that region, especially during World War I. Chemical and aerial warfare poisoned the earth and decimated life to such an extent that swaths of land were declared uninhabitable. Some areas are still contaminated by heavy metals and undetonated explosives. It is remarkable, then, that the forest in Provence escapes the war largely unscathed. That the forest not only thrives but restores life reinforces the author’s message about ecological stewardship and hope for a better future.
Moreover, it is important to consider the conditions under which Giono wrote the story. Assigned by Reader’s Digest to write a nonfiction article about “The Most Extraordinary Character I Ever Met,” Giono invented Bouffier out of whole cloth, in the hope that others would be inspired by his determination and ecological stewardship. This is an acknowledgement of one of Giono’s predominant themes: that the mere idea of hope, even if it is not necessarily based in reality, can engender hope in others, inspiring them to accomplish amazing things.
Literary Context: The Nexus of Romantic and Modernist Literature
As a European author writing in the wake of World War I, Giono is sometimes grouped under the umbrella of modernism alongside T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Ford Madox Ford. Yet while those authors frequently responded to the horrors and trauma of the war through fragmented and even nihilistic narratives, “The Man Who Planted Trees” provides a path out of the darkness through a kind of back-to-the-land rusticity more aligned with the Romantic poets and Transcendentalists of the 19th century. For Giono, however, it is not enough to merely escape urbanity and industrialization by fleeing to the wilderness; one must also practice a proactive stewardship of the land, improving it for future generations and inspiring others to do the same. Thus, “The Man Who Planted Trees” exists at the nexus of Romantic and modernist literature, while paving the way for the new environmental movement that emerged in the late 20th century.
