Jean Brunhes

Jean Brunhes , born with Toulouse the October 25th 1869 and died in Boulogne-Billancourt the August 25th 1930, is a French geographer,

Biographical elements

Jean Brunhes, wire of a professor mathematics named at the end of his career to the Faculty of Science of Lyon, becomes aggregate of history-geography in 1892 after having been raises National university of Paris. On the councils of Paul Vidal of Blache, prize winner of the first promotion of the Foundation Thiers in 1893, it remains more than one year in Spain, area where it studies the matter of his future thesis. This one, innovative, constant in 1902, is entitled the Irrigation. Its geographical conditions, its methods, its organization in the Iberian peninsula and North Africa: study of human geography . It is in charge of teaching at the university of Freiburg in 1896, then of Lausanne in 1907, first pulpit in the world where appears the term “human geography. ”

Of a family originating in Aurillac, he was member, at the time of his foundation in 1898, of the Société of High-Auvergne with his brother Bernard Brunhes, geologist, director of the Observatoire of the Puy-de-Dôme, him also former student of the National university.

Brunhes is an atypical geographer. It is it by its political opinions - he is democratic committed Christian - and especially by its epistemological choices who put it at the margin of the geographical current dominating of his time, while at the same time he has a considerable influence on the opinion, the university world and especially the institutional mediums.

Thus the human Geography , the handbook of higher education which it publishes in 1910, like the Traité physical geography of Emmanuel de Martonne published the previous year, takes part in the constitution of a geography into full becoming of which the concepts are not stabilized yet. It registers it however in a university field which legitimates its choices near its pars, its silent partners and his public. The institutional recognition is fast for Brunhes, appointed professor of human geography to the Collège de France as of 1912.

The following year, Brunhes is distinguished by the banker and patron Albert Kahn to take the scientific department of the project of the Archives of the planet, initially the extraordinary photographic collections - the geographer one is impassioned of this technique to support his research on the ground - Museum.

Elected official member of the Academy of Science morals and political in 1927, Brunhes will publish until his death in 1930 of many remarkable works, which will in addition meet a great public success and which will contribute to popularize in France the concepts of the human geography.

A very original theory of space

The ideas of Brunhes are very with counter-current of the general movement when it defines in 1910 its Principes of human geography of France , work which will be increased in 1912 and 1925, where several levels of perception of the space phenomena spread out: initially geography of the vital needs (exploitation of the ground), then social geography and finally historical and political geography. Its method is ordered around three series of “essential facts”, the unproductive occupation of the ground (houses and ways), the vegetable and animal conquest (culture, breeding) and the economy which it calls “destroying” (animal, vegetable devastations and mineral exploitations).

This classification takes as a starting point the idea of surface and aims at the objects by which the action of the man appears there. This human geography received a reception very mitigated on behalf of the vidaliens, very skeptics as for this approach which privileges material human works (architecture for example) with the detriment of the vision more adding up which they defended.

Family posterity

The girl of the geographer, Mariel Jean-Brunhes Delamarre (1905-2001), is a geographer who traversed during very long years the French campaigns and many rural regions, of China in Canada while passing by the countries of Europe. Researcher with CNRS, it published at Gallimard many work on the rural life. In the Library of the Pleiad , it Co-directed the collections of general and regional geography, and took part in that devoted to the ethnography, then looking further into the bonds maintained in research Jean Brunhes, by this last discipline, with the geography. It was in charge of the departments of the agricultural and pastoral techniques to the Musée of arts and traditions popular. It especially was the author - with Pierre Deffontaines - universal Géographie published in three volumes by Larousse in 1958.

The wife of Jean Brunhes, Henriette Brunhes (1872-1914), is the girl of Emile Hoskier (1830-1915), banker and consul of the Denmark in France. The couple, formed in 1896, was among the founders in France of the social League of purchasers, created in Paris in 1902, association influenced by the social doctrines of the pope Leon XIII which aimed, in a very original way, with responsabiliser the women in their statute of consumers - lists of tradesmen complying with certain social rules and hygiene, etc - while considering the work conditions of the workmen and the employees of France of the time. Following these engagements, the couple will publish in 1901 Ruskin and the Bible: to be used for the history of a thought at Perrin.

The brother of Jean Brunhes, Bernard, published a work, the Degradation of the energy , which exposes its research on flows of energy and the erosion of the grounds. Born in 1867, Bernard Brunhes, director of the weather observatory of the Puy-de-Dôme, died in 1910. He saw in deforestation a consequence of the privatization of the communal grounds, deploring the “tragedy of the enclosures” which pushes their private owners to forget the cost of the impoverishment of the soil, contrary to the users of the communal grounds. The latter, concerned of the risks of deforestation and degradation, anticipate this long time but they do not have the control of it. Having can assume it, but only account, for them, the immediate income obtained by this mode of exploitation whatever the irreversibility of the destruction which they arrange thus.

Gabriel Brunhes, another of his/her brothers was archbishop of Montpellier (1932-1949)

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