Planet. “A Multifaceted Space”: A Book to Better Understand What the Desert Really Is

"Ask people what image the desert evokes for them, and most will tell you: a dune and a caravan of camels passing in the distance," smiles Marie Gautheron. And it's the same image that drew this Burgundian to the Sahara when she was 20 years old – in 1970.

“I ended up in Algeria because I was teaching literacy. And I wanted to go to the desert, with everyone’s images in my head, postcards, Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince : a dune, a star, and the void…”

But she wanted to go beyond the cliché. And over the course of her travels, she understood that nothing is less empty or more populated than the desert – witness the tribulations in the desert of Iznogoud, the character created by Goscinny!

But the desert, precisely because it seems empty, is the ideal receptacle for all our fantasies – and this is what the art historian and former teacher at ENS Lyon tells us in Desert, Deserts . The way in which we have, over the centuries, created our images of the desert, without paying much attention to the reality of the lives of its inhabitants.

In France, the desert is, of course, called the Sahara. "France has this crazy dream, which it will realize, of bringing together a colony of peoples, Northern Algeria, the fertile lands of Mitidja, and its sub-Saharan possessions, the former AOF (French West Africa, from Senegal to Togo)," explains Marie Gautheron.

The bloody conquest of the Sahara , what we call "pacification," builds the French imagination of the desert: we push the enemy further and further away, but the further we advance, the more we realize that the desert is not just a sea of ​​moving sand, but a multifaceted space with multiple populations, multiple cultures. And at the center, a world of mountains populated by Tuareg, which we will load with mysteries.

The image of the Tuareg, a mute warrior, remains. Along with others, more contemporary ones. Such as that of a space of trial, of spirituality, a form of return to the roots of Christianity - this is the figure of Foucauld's father, a worldly officer withdrawn to the arid vastness of Assekrem, in southern Algeria.

The image also of our future devastated by the climate crisis : the Sahel drought caused 200,000 deaths between 1968 and 1986, and today 500 million people live in areas that are becoming desertified...

"The desert," insists Marie Gautheron, "is what remains after the cataclysm, something that has been abandoned, it is the space of dereliction." A form of absolute that always fascinates us.

Desert, Deserts. From the Middle Ages to the ^21st Century , by Marie Gautheron (Gallimard).