Arboreal Attachments: Interacting with Trees in Early Nineteenth-Century France

This article documents the shifting status of trees in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century French imaginary, with a particular focus on the author, politician, and diplomat Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand’s planting work at La Vallee aux Loups. It examines the ways in which Chateaubriand viewed his saplings as “family” and “children,” and reads these declarations alongside contemporaneous discourses and practices of arboreal attachment (including the mesmerist use of magnetized trees). Ultimately, Chateaubriand’s memoirs and personal correspondence show a remarkable understanding of the possibility of a human-arboreal interactivity, and the article therefore addresses the potential relevance today of his notions of arboreal agency and sociability.