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.
Themes
The Profound Healing Power of Nature
When the narrator returns to Provence after World War I, he is a deeply haunted young man. Although the grisly details of his wartime experience are left unsaid, he offers numerous hints of the horrors he witnessed and their traumatic effect on him. He is initially drawn back to that spot of dry desolation to breathe “fresh air” (16) again, an implicit acknowledgement of the chlorine gas used on French troops at Verdun—to say nothing of the stench of rotting bodies, which made soldiers huddled in the trenches almost as sick as the poison gas. The mere mention of the year 1915 briefly brings the narrator back to those trenches, and when he remembers Bouffier and his reforestation efforts, he immediately assumes the man is dead. Even more disturbingly, the thought of one more dead body hardly fazes him, given the tens of millions of corpses produced by World War I.
Yet within minutes of seeing the fruits of Bouffier’s tireless labor, the narrator is healed. It is more than just the trees that soothe his tortured spirit; it is the ecological explosion that occurs due to the trees’ presence. The narrator says, “Seeds were carried on the wind, too, so as the water reappeared, so did willows, reeds, meadows, gardens, flowers and some reason for living” (19). Nature as a “reason for living” is a powerful concept, in that nature requires nothing in return except a promise from humanity to treat it with respect.
Part of what makes the forest so inspiring to the narrator is his knowledge that one man is responsible for its existence. Yet the same cannot be said for the thousands of mothers, fathers, and children who resettle the area and find both physical and spiritual nourishment from its many natural gifts. They believe the forest emerged from nothing, which only makes their appreciation of it even more profound.
In his evocative descriptions of how merely being in nature can have a salubrious effect on the mind and soul, the author echoes Romantic poets like Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Wordsworth, as well as American Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Yet Giono takes this a step further by conveying the healing properties of being in nature and taking an active role in its creation and conservation. The impetus behind Bouffier’s ambitious reforestation efforts is his grief over the early deaths of his wife and son. In dedicating himself to improving and preserving the natural world, Bouffier transmutes his suffering into natural beauty, healing himself in the process. By explicitly detailing how conservation is its own spiritual reward, Giono places his work at the vanguard of the modern environmental movement that took shape in the second half of the 20th century.
The Urgent Need for Hope in a Seemingly Hopeless World
Aside from the narrator’s personal trauma stemming from World War I, “The Man Who Planted Trees” addresses the collective trauma of a generation that just saw 40 million soldiers and civilians die due to the conflict. Moreover, these deaths were of a unique ferocity, given the advent of modern weaponry like poison gas, machine guns, tanks, hand grenades, and larger and more destructive artillery. At the beginning of the story, as the narrator traverses “a landscape of unparalleled desolation” (4), there are clear echoes of T. S. Eliot’s seminal modernist poem “The Waste Land,” which in title and content evokes the physical and spiritual devastation of postwar Europe. Even Giono’s description of a dead land where nothing grows but lavender brings to mind Eliot’s famous first line: “April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land.”
Yet while many of his literary contemporaries in the modernist movement sought to mirror the broken pieces of Western civilization through fragmented and even nihilistic perspectives, Giono adamantly searches for reasons to hope—even and especially in the darkest chapters of human history. He first acknowledges this need for hope when discussing the charcoal burners who inhabit the area before Bouffier’s forest emerges. Of them, he writes, “They lived with nothing to hope for; all they had to look forward to was death. Not a situation propitious to virtue” (27). This reflects the author’s concept of hope as a self-reinforcing phenomenon—or, in its absence, a self-defeating one. He addresses this concept again when discussing the nearby town of Vergons, which “showed other signs of work that’s not undertaken without hope. So hope had returned” (27). To the author, hope is both contagious and a driver of the kind of virtuous and productive work that produces reasons to hope in the first place. Thus, there is nothing irrational about hoping for a better world, even when every indication points to the impossibility of such a world.
Of course, hope alone is not enough; it is merely the spark that leads to the kind of hard work needed to build that better world. In this, Bouffier leads by example, inspiring hope by showing others that “men could be as efficient as God in other things beside destruction” (17). Indeed, it seemed to many in the postwar era that whether one placed their faith in God or man, the result was the same: utter destruction. Bouffier’s achievements—which combine the natural beauty of God’s creation with individual grit and determination—show there are reasons to maintain faith in both the divine and the human.
There is also a generational component at work here. As the narrator puts it upon first meeting Bouffier and hearing about his reforestation plans, “Because I was young I naturally thought of the future in terms of myself, and assumed everyone sought the same happiness. So I remarked how magnificent his ten thousand oak trees would be in thirty years’ time” (14). To that, the older Bouffier soberly explains that he will likely be dead by then, destined never to see the full fruits of his labor. And this gets at why hope can be such a difficult thing to sustain. Most people are like the narrator—try as they might, they struggle to conceptualize the future past their own lifetime. This may be why preserving the planet “for future generations” is so difficult, particularly in the 21st century when those with the most institutional power to do so have far fewer years left in their future. This makes Bouffier’s conservation and reclamation efforts—which persist all the way up to his death at nearly 90 years old—all the more impressive: He is able to maintain hope for others in addition to himself.
The Power of Individual Determination to Change People’s Lives
Giono’s faith, however, only goes so far, and while he remains hopeful about nature and humanity’s potential to heal a broken world, he has far less faith in institutional forces. This makes enormous sense, given that it was the governments of large European countries that precipitated the bloodshed of World War I—bloodshed that was rendered largely pointless by the outbreak of an even more devastating war less than 30 years later.
The narrator signals his value of individual determination over institutional or government intervention early on, when he expresses gratitude that no one is aware of Bouffier’s role in the reforestation, referring to those institutional forces with a vaguely ominous “they”: “If they’d suspected what [Bouffier] was up to they’d have tried to stop him. But no one did suspect it. How could anyone, whether in the villages or in government offices, have imagined such perseverance, such magnificent generosity?” (20). To the narrator, a government official could not possibly comprehend the idea of an individual with Bouffier’s vision and diligence. Later, Bouffier himself mocks one of these government officials for his ardent belief that the forest must be natural: “This was the first time ever, replied the simple shepherd, that a forest had sprung up of its own accord” (21). His implication is that the government officials are so hubristic that they believe no one but themselves is capable of creating a forest—not even Mother Nature herself.
Bouffier’s individual achievements undoubtedly change the lives of the 10,000 people the forest supports at the time of his death. Yet for the narrator—one of the few people who knows he is responsible for the forest—Bouffier’s impact is of a different but no less profound variety: He revives the narrator’s faith in humanity. 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).
One can argue that the fact that Bouffier doesn’t exist in real life undercuts the narrator’s—and Giono’s—belief that he is a beacon of hope for humanity. Yet it is not as if there are no real-life analogues to Bouffier, including Johnny Appleseed, Ferdinand Larose, and Jadav Payeng, to say nothing of the countless other individuals throughout history whose solitary achievements changed a community. And while this emphasis on individual environmental contributions may ring hollow to 21st-century environmental activists, who believe the threat of climate change is so large that it demands an institutional response, Giono is not wrong to point out that exceptional individuals can and do accomplish extraordinary things when untethered from corporate or institutional structures.
