The Discovery of France Read online

  Graham Robb

  THE DISCOVERY OF

  FRANCE

  PICADOR

  For Margaret

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Maps

  Itinerary

  PART ONE

  1. THE UNDISCOVERED CONTINENT

  2. THE TRIBES OF FRANCE, I

  3. THE TRIBES OF FRANCE, II

  4. O O`C SÍ BAI YA WIN OUI OYI AWÈ JO JA OUA

  5. LIVING IN FRANCE, I: THE FACE IN THE MUSEUM

  6. LIVING IN FRANCE, II: A SIMPLE LIFE

  7. FAIRIES, VIRGINS, GODS AND PRIESTS

  8. MIGRANTS AND COMMUTERS

  INTERLUDE: THE SIXTY MILLION OTHERS

  PART TWO

  9. MAPS

  10. EMPIRE

  11. TRAVELLING IN FRANCE, I: THE AVENUES OF PARIS

  12. TRAVELLING IN FRANCE, II: THE HARE AND THE TORTOISE

  13. COLONIZATION

  14. THE WONDERS OF FRANCE

  15. POSTCARDS OF THE NATIVES

  16. LOST PROVINCES

  17. JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF FRANCE

  EPILOGUE: SECRETS

  Chronology

  Notes

  Works Cited

  General Index

  Geographical Index

  Acknowledgements

  List of Illustrations

  SECTION ONE

  1. ‘The Belles and Dames of Goust’, in Edwin Asa Dix, A Midsummer Drive Through the Pyrenees (1890). Private collection.

  2. A cagot in the Église Saint-Girons at Monein (Pyrénées-Atlantiques). Private collection.

  3. ‘Men-hir au Champ Dolent, près Dol’, in Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France, plate 235. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

  4. ‘Les Petits métiers de Paris. Le Montreur d’ours’. Postcard, c. 1905. Private collection.

  5. F. Bernède, ‘Intérieur dans les Landes (lou pachedeuy)’. Musée National des Arts et Traditions populaires. © A. Guey.

  6. Charles Nègre. Chimney-sweeps on the banks of the Seine. Paris, Musée d’Orsay, © photo RMN/© All Rights Reserved.

  7. ‘Bergers à La Mouleyre, Commensacq.’ Photo. Félix Arnaudin. Musée d’Aquitaine, Bordeaux.

  8. ‘Construction de route en Oisans, vers 1918.’ Collection Charpenay, Institut de Géographie Alpine. Musée dauphinois, Grenoble.

  9. ‘Un vieux Chouan’. Musée National des Arts et Traditions populaires.

  10. ‘Types d’Auvergne. La Bourrée’. Postcard, c. 1905. Private collection.

  11. Charles Marville, ‘Haut de la rue Champlain’. Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris.

  12. ‘M. Barthélemy dans une cour de ferme, Le Coin, Molines-en-Queyras, juillet 1917.’ Photo. Hippolyte Muller. Musée dauphinois, Grenoble.

  SECTION TWO

  13. I. B. Nolin, ‘Les Montagnes des Sevennes ou se retirent les Fanatiques de Languedoc et les Plaines des environs ou ils font leurs courses, avec les Grands Chemins Royaux faicts par lordre du Roy pour rendre ces Montagnes praticabes’ (sic), 2nd edition, Paris, 1703. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

  14. Jules Breton, ‘Le Chant de l’alouette’, 1884. Art Institute of Chicago, Henry Field Memorial Collection, 1894.1033.

  15. ‘Ex-voto, le 22 juillet 1855’. Musée National des Arts et Traditions populaires. © Danièle Adam.

  16. Joseph-Louis-Hippolyte Bellangé, ‘Le Marchand de plâtres ambulant’, 1833. Musée National des Arts et Traditions populaires.

  17. César-François Cassini de Thury, ‘Toulon’, 1779. Sheet 131 of Carte de France. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

  18. Léon-Auguste Asselineau, ‘Le Passage du Mont Cenis’, 1868. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

  19. Paul Delaroche, ‘Napoleon Crossing the Alps’, 1850. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool Museum/Bridgeman Art Library.

  20. Anon. Saint-Pierre de Montmartre and telegraph tower. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

  21. Pierre Saint-Ange Poterlet, ‘Chermin creux vers la cité de Carcassonne’, c. 1859. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

  22. Gustave Fraipont, ‘Chemin de fer du Nord. Pierrefonds, Compiègne et Coucy’, c. 1895. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

  23. F. Hugo d’Alési, ‘Chemins de fer de l’Est. Les Vosges’, c. 1895. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

  24. ‘Chemin de fer de Lyon à St Étienne’. Bridgeman Art Library.

  25. J. Maurel, ‘Alsace-Lorraine’, in Marie de Grandmaison, Le Tour de France (1893). Private collection.

  Itinerary

  TEN YEARS AGO, I began to explore the country on which I was supposed to be an authority. For some time, it had been obvious that the France whose literature and history I taught and studied was just a fraction of the vast land I had seen on holidays, research trips and adventures. My professional knowledge of the country reflected the metropolitan view of writers like Balzac and Baudelaire, for whom the outer boulevards of Paris marked the edge of the civilized world. My accidental experience was slightly broader. I had lived in a small town in Provence and a hamlet in Brittany next door to people whose first language was not French but Provençal or Breton, and I first became superficially fluent in French, while working in a garage in a Paris suburb, thanks to an Algerian Berber from the mountains of Kabylie. Without him, the Parisian dialect of the foreman would have been completely incomprehensible.

  In the periods of history where I made my intellectual home, the gap between knowledge and experience was even wider. There was the familiar France of monarchy and republic, pieced together from medieval provinces, reorganized by the Revolution and Napoleon, and modernized by railways, industry and war. But there was also a France in which, just over a hundred years ago, French was a foreign language to the majority of the population. It was a country that had still not been accurately mapped in its entirety. A little further back in time, sober accounts described a land of ancient tribal divisions, prehistoric communication networks and pre-Christian beliefs. Historians and anthropologists had referred to this country, without irony, as ‘Gaul’ and quoted Julius Caesar as a useful source of information on the inhabitants of the uncharted interior.

  I owed my first real inklings of this other France to a rediscovery of the miraculous machine that opened up the country to millions of people at the end of the nineteenth century. Once or twice a year, I travelled through France with the dedicatee of this book at the speed of a nineteenth-century stagecoach. Cycling not only makes it possible to conduct exhaustive research into local produce, it also creates an enormous appetite for information. Certain configurations of field, road, weather and smell imprint themselves on the cycling brain with inexplicable clarity and return sometimes years later to pose their nebulous questions. A bicycle unrolls a 360-degree panorama of the land, allows the rider to register its gradual changes in gear ratios and muscle tension, and makes it hard to miss a single inch of it, from the tyre-lacerating suburbs of Paris to the Mistral-blasted plains of Provence. The itinerary of a cyclist recreates, as if by chance, much older journeys: transhumance trails, Gallo-Roman trade routes, pilgrim paths, river confluences that have disappeared in industrial wasteland, valleys and ridge roads that used to be busy with pedlars and migrants. Cycling also makes conversation easy and inevitable – with children, nomads, people who are lost, local amateur historians and, of course, dogs, whose behaviour collectively characterizes the outlook of certain regions as clearly as human behaviour once did.

  Each journey became a complex puzzle in four dimensions. I wanted to know what I was missing and what I would have seen a century or two before. At first, the solution seemed to be to carry a miniaturized library of modern histories, ancient guidebooks and travellers’ accounts, printe
d on thin paper in a tiny typeface. For example, a set of the reports written by the Prefects who were sent out by Napoleon after the Revolution to chart and describe the unknown provinces could be made to weigh less than a spare innertube. It soon became apparent, however, that the terra incognita extended much further than I had realized and that far more time would have to be devoted to the more physically demanding task of sedentary research.

  This book is the result of fourteen thousand miles in the saddle and four years in the library. It describes the lives of the inhabitants of France – wherever possible, through their own eyes – and the exploration and colonization of their land by foreigners and natives, from the late seventeenth century to the early twentieth. It follows a roughly chronological route, from the end of the reign of Louis XIV to the outbreak of the First World War, with occasional detours through pre-Roman Gaul and present-day France.

  Part One describes the populations of France, their languages, beliefs and daily lives, their travels and discoveries, and the other creatures with whom they shared the land. In Part Two, the land is mapped, colonized by rulers and tourists, refashioned politically and physically, and turned into a modern state. The difference between the two parts, broadly speaking, is the difference between ethnology and history: the world that was always the same and the world that was always changing. I have tried to give a sense of the orrery of disparate, concurrent spheres, to show a land in which mule trains coincided with railway trains, and where witches and explorers were still gainfully employed when Gustave Eiffel was changing the skyline of Paris. Readers who are better acquainted with the direct route of political history may wish to take their bearings from the list of events at the back of the book.

  This was supposed to be the historical guidebook I wanted to read when setting out to discover France, a book in which the inhabitants were not airlifted from the land for statistical processing, in which ‘France’ and ‘the French’ would mean something more than Paris and a few powerful individuals, and in which the past was not a refuge from the present but a means of understanding and enjoying it. It can be read as a social and geographical history, as a collection of tales and tableaux, or as a complement to a guidebook. It offers a sample itinerary, not a definitive account. Each chapter could easily have become a separate volume, but the book is already too large to justify its inclusion in the panniers. It was an adventure to write and I hope it shows how much remains to be discovered.

  PART ONE

  1

  The Undiscovered Continent

  ONE SUMMER IN THE EARLY 1740s, on the last day of his life, a young man from Paris became the first modern cartographer to see the mountain called Le Gerbier de Jonc. This weird volcanic cone juts out of an empty landscape of pastures and ravines, blasted by a freezing wind called the burle. Three hundred and fifty miles south of Paris, at a point on the map diametrically opposed to the capital, it stands on the watershed that divides the Atlantic from the Mediterranean. On its western slope, at a wooden trough where animals once came to drink, the river Loire begins its six-hundred-and- forty-mile journey, flowing north then west in a wide arc through the mudflats of Touraine to the borders of Brittany and the Atlantic Ocean. Thirty miles to the east, the busy river Rhône carried passengers and cargo down to the Mediterranean ports, but it would have taken more than three days to reach it across a sparsely populated chaos of ancient lava-flows and gorges.

  If the traveller had scaled the peak of phonolithic rock – so called because of the xylophonic sound the stones make as they slide away under a climber’s feet – he would have seen a magnificent panorama: to the east, the long white curtain of the Alps, from the Mont Blanc massif to the bulk of Mont Ventoux looking down over the plains of Provence; to the north, the wooded ridges of the Forez and the mists descending from the Jura to the plains beyond Lyon; to the west, the wild Cévennes, the Cantal plateau and the whole volcanic range of the upper Auvergne. It was a geometer’s dream – almost one-thirteenth of the land surface of France spread out like a map.

  From the summit, he could take in at a glance several small regions whose inhabitants barely knew of each other’s existence. To walk in any direction for a day was to become incomprehensible, for the Mézenc range to which the mountain belonged was also a watershed of languages. The people who saw the sun set behind the Gerbier de Jonc spoke one group of dialects; the people on the evening side spoke another. Forty miles to the north, the wine growers and silkweavers of the Lyonnais spoke a different language altogether, which had yet to be identified and named by scholars. Yet another language was spoken in the region the traveller had left the day before, and though his own mother tongue, French, was a dialect of that language, he would have found it hard to understand the peasants who saw him pass.

  The traveller in question (his name has not survived) belonged to an expedition that was to lay the groundwork for the first complete and reliable map of France. A team of young geometers had been assembled by the astronomer Jacques Cassini, instructed in the new science of cartography and equipped with specially made portable instruments. Cassini’s father had studied the rings of Saturn and measured the size of the solar system. His map of the Moon was more precise than many maps of France, which still contained several uncharted regions. Now, for the first time, France would be revealed in all its detail as if from a great height above the Earth.

  One part of the expedition had followed the river Loire as far as it could go. Roads and byways came and went with the seasons and often passed through forests where no sightings could be taken, and so the river was the only certain guide to the interior. But south of Roanne, the Loire was a truculent stream that ran through narrow gorges. In parts, it could hardly be followed, let alone used for transport. The vast plateau of the Massif Central was still the fortress it had been when the Arverni tribes held out against the Romans. Its rivers were unnavigable and its links to the rest of France practically non-existent. The mail coach from Paris stopped at Clermont. A branch service struggled on as far as Le Puy, two days to the southeast. After Le Puy, there was nothing but mule-tracks and open country. Asking for directions was a waste of time. Even a century later, few people could walk far from their place of birth without getting lost.

  By the time the geometer reached the foot of the Mézenc range, he was two days from the nearest road. The only noticeable settlement for miles around was a village of black lava-stone hovels. According to one map, Les Estables should have been several miles to the south-west. In fact, it lay on a track that led towards the summit of the Mézenc. A small tower would make observations easy if the weather stayed fine, and there might be a French-speaking priest to identify remote hamlets and to give the names of woods and rivers. In any case, there was nowhere else to spend the night.

  The appearance of a stranger in the landscape was a notable event. To isolated villagers, a man in foreign clothes who pointed inexplicable instruments at barren rocks was up to no good. It had been noticed that after the appearance of one of these sorcerers, life became harder. Crops withered; animals went lame or died of disease; sheep were found on hillsides, torn apart by something more savage than a wolf; and, for reasons that remained obscure, taxes increased.

  Even a century later, this was still a remote and dangerous part of France. A nineteenth-century geographer recommended viewing the Mézenc region from a balloon, but ‘only if the aeronaut can remain out of range of a rifle’. In 1854, Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in France warned tourists and amateur geologists who left the coach at Pradelles and struck out across country in search of ‘wild and singular views’ not to expect a warm welcome. ‘There is scarcely any accommodation on this route, which can hardly be performed in a day; and the people are rude and forbidding.’ The handbook, perhaps deliberately, said nothing of Les Estables, which lay on the route, nor did it mention the only occasion on which the village earned itself a place in history – a summer’s day in the early 1740s when a young geometer on the Cassini exp
edition was hacked to death by the natives.

  *

  AS FAR AS WE KNOW, the villagers of Les Estables were never punished for the murder of Cassini’s geometer. To judge by similar incidents elsewhere in France, his death was the result of a collective decision taken by people who lived by their own unwritten laws. Outside interference of any kind was perceived as an evil intrusion. In many parts of France, even in the early twentieth century, a common prayer asked for deliverance from Satan, sorcerers, rabid dogs and ‘Justice’.

  The people of the Mézenc, like the inhabitants of many others towns and villages in France, would not have considered themselves ‘French’ in any case. Few would have been able to say exactly what the word meant. They knew what they had to know to survive from one season to the next. Some of them travelled south in search of work. They traded with their neighbours and leased their land to shepherds who brought huge, three-mile-long flocks of sheep to graze on their pastures in summer. But these movements were regulated by tradition and confined to ancient routes that never varied. When the writer George Sand ventured into the region in 1859, she was amazed to discover that ‘the locals are no more familiar with the area than strangers’. Her native guide was unable to tell her the name of the mountain (the Mézenc) ‘which has been staring him in the face since the day he was born’.

  Revelling in the ignorance of peasants was a favourite pastime of the tiny, educated elite, before and after the Revolution of 1789. Reports of half-human savages and grovelling troglodytes lurking in thickets and holes in the ground gave the civilized minority a sense of its own sophistication. But the ignorance was mutual. Forty years after the young geometer’s death, the few people who could afford the Cassini charts or who saw them in a private collection might have imagined that the hills and gorges of the Mézenc region were no longer terra incognita. They could locate Les Estables near the southeastern edge of the ancient plateau where most of the major river systems rise, on a line from Bordeaux in the west to a mountain in the foothills of the Alps which the charts called ‘Mont Inaccessible’. But the little cottages and turrets that represented human settlements on the map were deceptively precise. Many of these places had only been glimpsed by the map-makers from the tops of trees and towers.