Wetlands occupy an original place in the protection of nature in metropolitan and overseas France. Often at the origin of conservation programs at the international and national levels since the 1970s, and strongly represented in number and surface area among the spaces benefiting from a protection status, they participate in a privileged attention. Indeed, in addition to the undeniable challenge of maintaining, or even restoring, a considerable biodiversity, wetlands embody a lost ideal of "natural nature", now soiled, but which ecological engineering could reconstitute. Once erased, the "human sin" would give way to "virgin environments", to "reference states" whose research underlies management plans.
The work of geohistorians having shown that a good number of sites have been strongly influenced by human beings since the Neolithic period, this protective unanimity refers, both in its intensity and in its scope, to other discourses which, from the 19th century to the 1970s, had on the contrary set up the water places as unhealthy and unproductive zones to be fought and eradicated. To such an extent that one can only think of the contemporary revival of interest in wetlands as a balanced response to yesterday's discredit and that the question of the consideration of wetlands among naturalists of the 19th and 20th centuries is raised in filigree. For what reasons did they motivate such a low interest in their protection? How, before Odum, did the pioneers of nature protection and the great naturalists of these two centuries consider wetlands? Why has the biodiversity that is so highly praised today not been the subject of more vigorous protection measures?
Beyond the purely scientific arguments (biodiversity, ecosystem services...), wetlands are revealing of the systems of representation of nature and the imaginary of its protectors, they also reveal deficiencies intervening in the transfers of memory and in the mechanisms linked to scientific transmission.
Mots clés : Wetlands|history of nature protection|19th century naturalists| representation|geo history
A103785BS