Mountain land restoration - Savoie

The map provides access to the geolocated pictures of this collection, with a navigation by municipality. For each municipality, you will find all the photographs taken in that particular area.

Access to the digitized documents

It is a selection of photographs taken in the department presented here. The Archives Nationales hold "merely" 5,042 photographs from a much larger collection held in the Savoie departmental archives.

The collection is organised by forest conservation area around a river, a stream or main torrent, defined by the forest services, and then by series (equivalent to a municipality, a forest or a secondary branch of the main torrent) in alphabetical order within an area.
The title of the photograph generally contains a full description of the view.

This collection valuable for its continuity and the extreme regularity of the takes, ranges from 1885 to 1963, the most representative periods being 1883-1914 and 1930-1955. It constitutes an essential source of the history of mountain areas over a century, revealing an ethnographic approach (scenes of daily life, costumes, housing, village festivals, traditional cheese dairies), working conditions of forestry personnel and workers employed on building sites).

On the same subject

  • The great man of the mountain land restoration: Eugène de Gayffier
    vue du pavillon des forêts / coupe sur l’axe du pavillon des forêts. Beaux-Arts et merveilles de l'industrie à la fin du XIXe siècle (Exposition universelle de 1889) : grand ouvrage illustré historique, encyclopédique descriptif p.469
    Mountainous Area

    The great man of the mountain land restoration: Eugène de Gayffier

    The history of the mountain land restoration (abbreviated RTM in French) services has been strongly marked by a few men with assertive characters and remarkable talents: Eugène de Gayffier was the driving force behind the use of photography in RTM not only to document the works, but also to argue for the need to carry them out.

  • The Forester and his tent
    Plantation of hook pine trees, Canton of Chaumasse, Seyne area. Photograph taken by Eugène de Gayffier in 1877, in the context of mountain reforestation and grassing works.
    Favourite

    The Forester and his tent

    Agate presents its current favorite.
    Here we are in 1877, in the Basses-Alpes, during the great mountain reforestation efforts. Through the lens of Eugène de Gayffier, a solitary tent stands watch over the freshly planted pine trees, a testament to the hard work of foresters striving to bring new life to these fragile lands.