Histoire de deux plantes cultivées d'importance primordiale (1944)

Histoire de deux plantes cultivées d'importance primordiale. Le Lin et le Chanvre

History of two cultivated plants of primary importance: flax and hemp

Publication

Author	Auguste Chevalier
Language	French
Composed	1944
Published	1944
Publisher	Revue de botanique appliquée et d'agriculture coloniale, vol. 24, nos 269–271
Place	Paris
Volumes	1 (journal article)
Total pages	pp. 51–71, with three plates and one figure

Cannabis Content

Volume	single article
Pages	pp. 51–52, 62–71
Chapter	Part II, "Le chanvre" (pp. 62–69); Part III, on growing flax and hemp in France and the colonies (pp. 69–71)
Plates	Plate VII (p. 63); Fig. 1, hemp achenes (p. 65)
Regions documented	Northern Indochina (Lào Cai to Sa Pa; Xieng Khouang); the Congo and Ubangi rivers; Gabon; Angola; India (central India, the Himalayan provinces, Kashmir, Bengal, Kumaon); western France
Varieties described	Cannabis sativa var. vulgaris (forma spontanea, forma culta); var. chinensis; var. macrosperma; var. indica
Preparations	Hemp smoked, often with tobacco, in gourd pipes; haschisch
Uses documented	Fibre; seed oil; food; intoxicant
Taxonomic significance	Infraspecific classification of Cannabis sativa with Paris herbarium sheets cited by collector and number; var. macrosperma (Stokes) Chev.

Access

Digital facsimile	View on Persée

"Histoire de deux plantes cultivées d'importance primordiale. Le Lin et le Chanvre" ("History of two cultivated plants of primary importance: flax and hemp") is an article by the French botanist Auguste Chevalier, published in 1944 in the Revue de botanique appliquée et d'agriculture coloniale.^: 51 Its second part is about hemp: the crop's spread and its decline in France, a classification of Cannabis sativa into varieties with sheets of the Paris herbarium cited by collector and number, the cultivation of "Indian hemp" for its resin, and the smoking of hemp in Africa. That part includes Chevalier's own observations on the Congo and Ubangi rivers in 1902 and cites his specimen from Sa Pa in northern Vietnam.^: 62–69

Chevalier wrote for a journal of colonial agriculture, and the article measures both crops against the needs of France and "son Empire".^: 71 He calls Africans les Noirs throughout. He closed by advising against any revival of hemp in equatorial Africa, since it would risk the return of "la drogue pernicieuse" (the pernicious drug) among its people.^: 70–71 The article is evidence of how French colonial agronomy saw hemp as much as it is evidence of the plant.

The article writes Chanvre for hemp, Chanvre indien (Indian hemp) for the drug plant and haschisch for both the resin and the smoked drug. It calls the Hmong Méos, the Yao Mans and the Nùng Nhungs. This article uses the current names in its own voice and keeps the article's names in quotation.

Author and publication

Chevalier set out to give what he had learned about the two plants "au cours de nos voyages et lectures" (in the course of his travels and reading) and from going through the Linum and Cannabis sheets of the herbarium of the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris. He presented the work as an advance on the few pages that Alphonse de Candolle had given the two plants in 1883.^: 51 It appeared in the triple number 269–271, for January to March 1944. The journal later became the Journal d'agriculture traditionnelle et de botanique appliquée, under which name Persée publishes it.

The article has three parts. The first (pp. 52–61) is on flax and the second (pp. 62–69) on hemp. The third (pp. 69–71) asks whether the cultivation of either crop for fibre could be extended in France or its colonies. Two plates show forms of Linum perenne, a third shows forms of Cannabis sativa from Mongolia and Afghanistan. A figure compares hemp achenes at one scale.^{: 52, 55, 57, 62–63, 65, 69}

Origins of the crop

Chevalier held that hemp, like flax, first drew the attention of prehistoric peoples in Asia for its properties and not for its fibre. In his account the leaves and inflorescences of Central Asian hemp gave a resin, "Haschisch ou Ganja", that relieved pain and hunger; the plant was first regarded as magical and spread as a fetish and medicinal plant. Its fibre and oil came to be used later.^: 52 He gave hemp a simpler origin than flax, since there was in his view a single wild species with little variation.^: 52 After surveying the drug's spread he concluded that, until the 19th century, hemp grown for haschisch had covered a far larger area than hemp grown for fibre. He thought its use as a narcotic had probably spread it in prehistoric times.^: 68

Hemp in France

Chevalier traced fibre hemp from Central Asia to China, Manchuria and Japan on one side and to north-eastern Europe on the other. Citing Herodotus, he wrote that the Scythians used it while it was barely known in Greece.^: 62 In France it found its best ground in lower Normandy, Brittany, Maine, Anjou and Poitou. Before the Revolution the humblest Norman or Breton peasant kept a small field of hemp to spin at home. About 1830 the market at Domfront sold 4,500 pieces of cloth woven from local hemp.^: 62

The article charts the decline. French hemp covered 175,000 ha in 1840 and 3,900 ha in 1939. Output of fibre fell from 675,000 quintals in 1840 to 34,000 in 1930. From 1920 to 1938 France imported 180,000 to 200,000 quintals of fibre a year.^: 62 No methodical selection had been made in France. Ordinary French hemp was a mixture of unsorted lines grown for both fibre and seed, 1.5 to 2 m tall. The hemp of the islands of Chalonnes in Anjou had once been the most valued in the west. The Italian "Grand Chanvre" of Piedmont and Bologna reached 4 to 5 m.^: 68–69

Botanical varieties

Chevalier held that hemp is a single species, still wild in central Asia, which had changed little in cultivation. He kept var. vulgaris in two forms and three further varieties. He cited sheets of the Paris herbarium for each.^: 64

• Forma spontanea: slender stems and small, very hairy leaflets. His examples include sheets from Afghanistan collected by Griffith and one gathered by Karelin and Kiriloff in the meadows by the Irtysh in 1840 (no. 1043).^: 64
• Forma culta: stout stems, large leaves and well-developed fibre. His examples include sheets from Sichuan (Fang 3525), Tonkin (Bon 2113) and Kashgar (Mission Pelliot-Vaillant, no. 121).^: 64
• Var. chinensis: females 18 to 20 feet tall; known in China as Lô ma and brought to Europe in 1846.^: 64
• Var. macrosperma (Stokes) Chev.: a stout plant 2.5 m tall, with leaves of seven to nine leaflets 10 to 15 cm long, greyish beneath, very dense female inflorescences with long linear bracts and achenes twice the usual size. He cited a sheet from Shanxi (Licent 886), his own no. 29457 from Tonkin, "cultivé par les Muongs de Laokay à Chapa, 1 400-1 500 m." (grown by the Muong from Lào Cai to Sa Pa). He also cited Poilane's no. 2565 from Xieng Khouang in Laos, grown by the Hmong.^: 64 Figure 1 sets achenes of this variety beside those of the Fatza hemp sold by Vilmorin and of French hemp.^: 65
• Var. indica: C. indica of Lamarck, whose description of the type collected in the East Indies by Sonnerat Chevalier quoted at length.^: 64–66

Chevalier's sheet no. 29457, from Sa Pa, is dated 7 December 1913 and held at the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle (Chevalier 29457 (1913)). Plate VII draws a dwarf male hemp of the "groupe indica" from Li-Ning-Fou in Mongolia, collected by the Pelliot-Vaillant mission, with a small-leaved wild female from Afghanistan from Griffith's herbarium.^: 63

Indian hemp

In Chevalier's account Indian hemp differed little from common hemp. It had denser, more compact inflorescences carrying many more resin-secreting hairs. Only the female plant was used.^: 66 He placed the main cultivation for resin in India, in two regions: hot central India at middle altitudes and the provinces along the Himalaya up to 2,400 m. He added Tibet, Chinese and Russian Turkestan, Turkey, Greece and North Africa, above all Tunisia.^: 66 He reported as an accepted view that constant dryness and low air pressure favour the resin, so that Indian hemp grown in a rainy region tends towards a fibre hemp and fibre hemp moved to a dry climate becomes, after a few generations, a hemp for haschisch.^: 66 Among the herbarium sheets he placed between the two races are G. Mann's from Gabon of about 1860 (no. 1050) and Dieterlen's from Leribe in Basutoland, "cultivé et naturalisé" (no. 115).^: 66

Chevalier wrote that Indian hemp was smoked, openly or in secret, over more than a fifth of the earth's surface. Where it was smoked, in his view, only a small part of the men smoked it, and only occasionally; people harmed by haschisch were far fewer than those who abused tobacco. He suggested that the smoked plant might be the nepenthes of Homer.^: 66 In India, he wrote, hemp was also grown for both fibre and oilseed. In Kashmir, Bengal and Kumaon tall and dwarf races were distinguished.^: 69

Hemp smoking in Africa

Chevalier traced the smoking of hemp from Asia to the Mediterranean and Arabia, and from there, following the Count of Ficalho, to the region of Zanzibar on the east coast of Africa. He wrote that by the 16th century it had reached southern Africa and then spread through the basin of the Zambezi to the Atlantic and, by way of the Great Lakes, into the basin of the Congo, so that when Europeans reached the equatorial zone it was grown in every Bantu village.^: 67 He gave vernacular names recorded in the Belgian Congo, among them kmoka and kianou. He recalled that about 1854 Welwitsch had found it grown in small quantity in almost every village in Angola, under the names bangué, riambe, riamba and diamba.^: 67

Chevalier rejected the claim, made by E. Pascal in a thesis of 1934, that caravans brought Indian hemp to Algeria from central Africa, in particular from the Sudan. In some fifteen years of collecting there he had never seen a hemp plant grown; none was grown around Lake Chad.^: 67 He wrote that the people of West Africa, from the mouth of the Niger to Lake Chad and Senegal, neither grew nor smoked it. In equatorial Africa, he wrote, its cultivation stopped a little beyond the edge of the dense forest. In the French Congo, by contrast, it was general throughout Gabon when the French arrived about 1880. The Fang had carried it into southern Cameroon.^: 67

In 1902 Chevalier went up the Congo and the Ubangi on his way to Lake Chad. He wrote that in almost every riverside village a few men smoked hemp, often mixed with tobacco, in large pipes made from Lagenaria gourds. The smokers usually hid. The few plants needed were grown in hidden places: in the forks of large trees, in the forest and on islands in the rivers.^: 67–68 In the Congo Free State, he wrote, a smoker caught in the act a second time faced penalties up to death.^: 68 The smokers he saw were mostly his own paddlers at rest and sometimes the Senegalese militiamen of the posts. They looked dazed for a time and then recovered. He wrote that he never saw a case of violent madness among them.^: 68 He supposed that hemp grown in the humid equatorial region had lost much of its strength, and judged its use no more harmful than the abuse of tobacco and less damaging on the African coast than imported gin.^: 68 A sheet he gathered on this journey, from a village at M'Poya on the Congo on 5 August 1902, is Chevalier 5043 bis (1902).

Chevalier also cited a note in Glaziou's herbarium: about 1880 the smoking hemp known in Brazil as "Congo" was still grown there in secret, despite a government ban.^: 68

Hemp and the colonies

The third part weighs hemp as a colonial crop. In northern Indochina, Chevalier wrote, the Yao and the Muong of the mountains already knew hemp and grew it for household needs, eating the seed at times and spinning the fibre into thread. He quoted Crevost and Lemarié on Hmong and Nùng women spinning hemp on their way to market and making their pleated skirts from the cloth. He agreed with them that the region could not become a producer of industrial hemp.^: 70 For equatorial Africa he argued that Indian hemp gives no fibre and that fibre hemp would hardly grow there. Bringing back hemp-growing there would be "fort dangereux" (very dangerous).^: 70–71 He concluded that France would never find in its own territory or its empire all the flax and hemp it needed.^: 71

See also

• Chevalier 29457 (1913)
• Chevalier 5043 bis (1902)
• Diamba
• Hemp

References

Sa Pa Xiangkhouang Province Gabon Angola Congo River Kumaon Cannabis sativa var. macrosperma Cannabis sativa var. chinensis Cannabis sativa var. indica Cannabis sativa var. vulgaris Hashish Hemp smoked with tobacco Fibre Oilseed Food Intoxicant Journal article