Albert Demangeon

Albert Demangeon (13 June 1872 – 25 July 1940) was a Professor of social geography at the Sorbonne in Paris for many years.

The book received hostile reviews, and Demangeon seems to have accused Vacher of sabotaging the project.

[2] The "section géographique française" helped define the policies that France would follow after the war on territorial arrangements.

One of his students was the future economist Albert O. Hirschman, who recorded that he gave "brilliant lectures", and used large and colorful maps to illustrate his themes of commerce and trade between geographical regions, and the resulting economic rivalries.

His pre-war work focused on physical regional geography, but later he also wrote on larger topics including several volumes of the Géographie Universelle published under the direction of Paul Vidal de La Blache and Lucien Gallois.

[7] Demangeon was interested in the interactions of man and nature, and also in history, although he felt that geography must remain a distinct subject.

[2] He wrote in 1906, "To explain the geographical phenomena of which man has been the witness or contriver, it is necessary to study their evolution in the past with the aid of documents."

[2] His Le déclin de l'Europe (1920) was published in the US in 1921 under the title America and the Race for World Domination.

It argued that Europe was deeply in debt and exhausted by the war, with reduced agricultural and industrial output, and low birth rates.

[7] His two-volume work France Économique et Humaine, published posthumously in 1944 and 1948, surveyed the rural life and economy, road, railway and canal routes and their traffic, coastal and inland towns, industry and Paris.