Paul Vidal de La Blache

He conceived the idea of genre de vie, which is the belief that the lifestyle of a particular region reflects the economic, social, ideological and psychological identities imprinted on the landscape.

He was appointed to the École française d’Athens, taking advantage of the opportunity to travel in Italy, Palestine, and Egypt (in the latter, being present at the inauguration of the Suez Canal).

La Blache received his doctorate at the Sorbonne in 1872 with a dissertation in ancient history, afterwards published as Hérode Atticus: étude critique sur sa vie.

He was the first to tie together all those domains in a somewhat quantitative approach, using numbers sparingly, essentially narrative, even descriptive—not far removed, in some ways from a guidebook or a manual for landscape painting.

Influenced by German thought, especially by Friedrich Ratzel whom he had met in Germany, Vidal has been linked to the term "possibilism", which he never used but which summed up conveniently his opposition to the determinism of the sort that was defended by some nineteenth century geographers.

The economic realities of the modern world, with worldwide competition and the shrinking of the planet due to accelerated communications, made him think that less centralized, less static modes of organization ought to be promoted.

"Vidalian" geography is based on varied forms of cartography, on monographs, and on several notable concepts, including "landscapes" (paysages), "settings" (milieux), "regions", "lifeways" (genres de vie), and "density".

Undoubtedly because this approach was more structured, many of Vidal's successors, and still more those of Martonne, specialized in a geomorphology that became gradually stronger, but that also, by its narrowness, weakened French geography.

It was defended by an establishment that marginalized all attempts at epistemological renewal, to such an extent that after World War II the discipline was at the same stage where it had been left at Vidal's death.

This classical geography—naturalistic, monographic, morphological, literary, and didactic—would experience a rapid renewal and a radical transformation into a social science with the revolution of the 1960s and 1970s and the rise of urban and industrial studies.

Vidal's ideas formed the main paradigm for the geographical science of the epoch, controlling the universities, the research centers, and the granting of degrees.