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.
Character Analysis
The Narrator
The narrator is a young French man who shares many biographical details with the author. Importantly, both men served in the French infantry during World War I, fighting in the Battle of Verdun, one of the longest and deadliest battles in human history. The author was so traumatized by the horrors he witnessed in the war that he became a lifelong pacifist. And while the narrator does not explicitly claim any pacifist leanings, the World War II seems to pass him by with little comment on his part, except his observation that the wartime demand for wood briefly threatens Bouffier’s forest. In truth, he does not comment on much of anything except the glory of Bouffier’s one-man reforestation project; his wartime trauma manifests less through conscious imagery and more through an overall mood of despondency, haunting him as he revisits the Provence uplands.
To the narrator, Bouffier and his reforestation efforts represent a beacon of hope during a period of European history unmatched as a theater for human cruelty and destruction. His immediate personal trauma from World War I is healed as he walks with Bouffier among the young oaks in 1920. The sight of running water in once-dry streams, and the reeds and flowers that flourish alongside Bouffier’s trees, allows the narrator to once again see the human potential to create on a God-like scale.
Spiritually and emotionally healed, the narrator returns to Bouffier’s forest once a year, and each time he is invigorated by the increasingly diverse ecosystem and the continued influx of young, happy families, all of which grow out of one individual’s grief and determination. Ever sensitive to symbolism, the narrator is especially moved by the sight of a lime tree planted by one village. This represents the extent to which Bouffier’s proactive stewardship is contagious. It also represents the ultimate expression of resurrection for the region, perhaps because lime trees require a great deal of water to thrive.
Elzéard Bouffier
Elzéard Bouffier is a middle-aged shepherd responsible for singlehandedly revitalizing a desolate and lifeless expanse in Southeastern France. Little is revealed about his past except that he was once a farmer with a wife and son, both of whom suffered untimely deaths. Rather than succumb to grief and trauma, Bouffier channels this heartache into an ambitious project to plant 100,000 acorns. Within 10 years, 10,000 oak trees survive to grow over six feet tall. He continues his efforts over the next 29 years, increasing the area’s biodiversity and launching an ecological chain reaction. By 1949, the year of his death at 89, Bouffier has created a vibrant forested ecosystem where flora, fauna, and human families all live in bucolic harmony.
When the narrator first meets him, Bouffier is quiet and stoic, and as the years pass, he speaks even less until he is effectively mute, in a state of perfect meditative symbiosis with the forest he birthed. He wants no credit for his work, and indeed he is reticent to reveal his role in the region’s revitalization to French forestry officials, for fear they will evict him from the land or at the very least take steps to halt his reforestation efforts. Of Bouffier’s impact on both the local ecosystem and the collective human spirit, the narrator says, “When I reflect on the fact that one man, with only his own simple physical and moral resources, was able to bring forth out of the desert this land of Canaan, I can’t help feeling the human condition in general is admirable, in spite of everything” (30).
When Giono submitted his story to Reader’s Digest, he presented Bouffier as a real-life individual, thinking the character may serve as a more powerful symbol of hope and ecological stewardship if readers thought he really existed. Although Bouffier is fictional, he belongs to a long and rich tradition of real-life tree-planters, including the heavily mythologized Johnny Appleseed, who in the early 19th century introduced apple trees throughout the American Midwest; the early 20th-century French Canadian agronomist Ferdinand Larose, who oversaw large-scale reforestation efforts in Ontario; and the late 20th-century Indian environmental activist Jadav Payeng, who planted and continues to maintain a 1,360-acre forest on a sandbar on the Brahmaputra River.
