“Between Ford and Gandhi”: André Siegfried’s Environmental Geopolitics, c. 1898–1956

In 1955, André Siegfried wondered whether the planet was entering a new geological age, wrought by industrialism and evident in major geopolitical changes. In this article, I trace his intellectual journey towards this claim and his singular focus on the international politics of agriculture and environmental change. First, I trace Siegfried’s early ideal of French rural democracy and its prudential virtues amid inter-imperial competition and interwar debt crises. Second, after the Dust Bowl, I examine Siegfried’s shifting engagements with environmental arguments against mechanized monoculture, focusing on his fears of erosion, and, after 1945, the loss of soil fertility and ecological resilience associated with small-scale mixed farming. Doubled through a geopolitical lens, I show how Siegfried saw such shifts as existential threats to his idyll of France’s rural democracy and global power. To conclude, I reflect on how Siegfried’s environmental geopolitics can help us rebuild intellectual histories of Anthropocene politics.