1845-1918
Geographer

Academic Positions. Paul Vidal de La Blache was born in a small village in Mediterranean France, the son of a French highschool language teacher. He graduated from the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris in 1866 and taught in Athens, Greece, for four years before gaining his doctorate in History at the University of Paris in 1872. That year Vidal de La Blache accepted a post as professor of history and geography at the University of Nancy. While there he traveled frequently in Germany, where academic geography was much better established. In 1877 he accepted the new position in geography at the Ecole Normale Superieure. While there he was a co-founder of the academic journal Annales de Geographic and author of Histoire et Geographie: Atlas General (1894). In 1898 Vidal de La Blache attained a chair in geography at the University of Paris (the Sorbonne). In 1903 his...