20 INTRODUCTION. 



These forests originally formed a part of the royal domains. In the 

 south it is only in the county of the Foix (Department of the Aridge) 

 that we now find a large forest area belonging to the State ; this 

 was the patrimony of Henry IV. Unfortunately half of it consists 

 at the present day of pure blanks. The state forests in Corsica, no 

 less important than those just referred to, labour under unfavorable 

 economic conditions. The dunes of Gascony have now been fixed by 

 a young pine forest raised by the State, which still possesses the 

 greater portion of it. In the last place, as a result of the confiscation 

 of the property of religious houses effected under the decree of the 

 National Assembly of 19th December 1789, the State owns a few 

 forests in every Department, twelve excepted. But the mountaine 

 of Auvergne and the elevated peaks and ridges of the Alps are 

 almost without state forests. 



The forests belonging to Communes, which compose two-thirds of 

 the whole area managed by the State Department, are found, so to 

 say, in one huge compact mass east of the meridian of Paris. This 

 line, passing through Dunkirk, Beauvais, Paris, Bourges and 

 Carcassonne, cuts France into two halves, one of which contains all 

 the communal forests, the other none at all. The communal forest 

 is an institution totally unknown in the west of France. The con- 

 stitution of communal property and even of the Commune itself 

 probably grew out of different circumstances in the east and in 

 the west. 



There is, however, one grand exceptionto the rule that there are 

 no communal forests west of the meridian of Paris, and that is in 

 the Pyrenees and in the sub-Pyrenean region comprising the Black 

 Mountain of Tarn and the Landes of Gascony. It is there that the 

 Visigoths settled in the fifth century of our era. We there find to 

 this day about 500,000 acres of wood owned by Communes. But north 

 of the GJronde, Western France has, if we except the state forests, 

 scarcely 37, 500 acres under the management of the Government 

 Department. These woods, belonging- as well to Public Foundations 

 as to Communes, obviously owe their pieseivation to accidental cir- 

 cumstances. Scattered over so vast an exteut of country, they offer 

 a strong contrast to the communal forests of Eastern France, 

 which, before the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, aggregated as much as 

 nearly 5,000,000 acres. The Departments containing the largest 

 exteut of communal forests are those of the iteurthe .and Mo.selle, 

 and of tlie Meuse, of the Vosges and of the Haute-Marne , of the 



