Background

Raoul Blanchard was born on September 7, 1877, in Orleans, France. His father was an inspector of the Department of Water of the Town Hall of Orleans.

Education

Blanchard attended Holy Cross School and the high school Pothier, where he studied under the geographer Louis Gallouedec. Then he was admitted to the Ecole Normale Superieure in 1897 from which he graduated in 1900, and passed the concours d’agrégation in history and geography. At the time, geography was still mainly in a descriptive stage and an adjunct to history. His thesis on Flanders, presented at the University of Lille in 1906, was one of the first important works of regional geography based on research done in situ.

Career

At the time of Blanchard’s appointment as lecturer in 1905, there was not a single student of geography at Grenoble. Through perseverance, teaching ability, and the novelty of his subject, he turned the university into one of the most active centers for geography in France. He later became a professor. In 1940 he was appointed dean of the Faculty of Liberal Arts and taught there until his retirement in 1948.

Since he knew North America well, he had been appointed instructor at Harvard in 1917 and was a full professor from 1928 to 1936. He also taught at Chicago, Columbia, and other schools in the United States as well as the universities of Montreal and Laval in Canada.

Blanchard was representative of his epoch in French geography. In time, of course, concepts and methods changed, and he was reproached by some for not having advanced his morphology beyond a somewhat oversimplified determinism.

Achievements

• Blanchard's major achievement was in becoming the creator of French Alpine geography, founding the Revue de géographie alpine, which published the first works on the French Alps. For the study of mountains, he instituted field observation together with rigorous arguments for studying structure, to which he gave priority (instead of erosion surfaces).
  
  His twelve volumes on the French Alps are considered his chief work, but his range of interests was much greater. In human geography, he produced important studies of cities, works that were novel at the time because they combined a study of the site with that of the development of the city. He prepared the volume on western Asia for the series Géographie Universelle (1929) and later published a general study of North America (1933).
  
  Also, Raoul Blanchard is considered the father of modern geography in Québec. It is due to his incredible effort and input into the study of the French part of Canada, Quebec has many books on geography.

Works

More photos

• book

  • La Flandre: Étude Géographique de la Plaine Flamande en France, Belgique Et Hollande 1906
  • Grenoble, étude de géographie urbaine 1912
  • L'Est du Canada Francais. Province de Quebec 1935
  • Grenoble. Étude de Géographie Urbaine 1935
  • Les Alpes occidentales 1937
  • Montréal: esquisse de géographie urbaine
  • Le canada français 1964
  • La Corse 1926
  • Geography of France 1913
  • The Promised Land 1966
  • Geography of the Holy Land 1966
  • Battle of Verdun 1917
  • Tactics & Armament: An Evolution (World War 1) 1917

Personality

Blanchard was known as an indefatigable hiker.

Interests

• Sport & Clubs

  hiking

Connections

teacher:

Louis Gallouedec

1864 – 1937

References

• Dictionary of scientific biography
  1981