Affiliation:
1. Margot Lyautey obtained a Master’s degree in the history of science and technology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), after an initial training as an engineer at the École polytechnique. In 2022, she defended her Ph.D. on the history of French agriculture under German occupation (co-supervision agreement between the University of Tübingen and the EHESS), which has won several awards. She is currently pursuing her research as a postdoctoral fellow at the Helmut-Schmidt...
Abstract
By displacing Rachel Carson’s approach in
Silent Spring
to another time, another place and another family of pesticides, this paper tells the story of the wide adoption of arsenates, despite their known toxicity, to control the then newly present Colorado potato beetle in Western Europe from the 1920s to the 1950s. Although arsenate use entailed health and environmental risks, it was extended to other insect pests because this control method proved effective. The Colorado beetle appears as the matrix around which plant protection was developed in France and Germany. The regulations, administrative structures and habits that revolved around the wide use of arsenates then paved the way for the quick and massive adoption of organochlorides after 1945.
This article was published open access under a CC BY licence:
https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0
.
Publisher
Liverpool University Press