The Discovery of France

by Graham Robb

  A modern historian who leaves behind the quiet towns and almost deserted main roads of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France has more to learn from George Sand’s illiterate guide than from the famous tourist herself. In many respects, the more accurate the map, the more misleading the impression. Most official, political definitions of the country are quite useless for describing the world of its inhabitants. For someone who sets out across the country, they serve mainly as distant landmarks, and create the comforting impression of knowing where the road is supposed to lead.

  Provisionally, then, pre-Revolutionary France can be described as a nation composed of several feudal provinces or ‘généralités’. Some of these provinces, known as ‘pays d’état’, had their own regional parliaments and imposed their own taxes. Others, known as ‘pays d’élection’, were taxed directly by the state. Many of them have been a part of France for less than four hundred years (see Chronology, p. 359). To historians who tried to describe the entire kingdom, the chaotic effects of the division of Charlemagne’s empire in 843, and even the tribal divisions described by Julius Caesar, were still apparent in the maze of internal customs barriers and legal discrepancies.

  This jumble of old fiefdoms was, however, controlled by an ambitious and increasingly powerful monarchy. Roman Gaul had looked to the Mediterranean. Now, economic and political power was firmly centred in the north. In 1682, Louis XIV moved his court to the edge of a hunting forest twelve miles south-west of Paris. The avenues of Versailles and the boulevards of Paris were gradually extended across a kingdom that seemed to educated people to be the work of divine providence. Nearly all the frontiers of France were natural: the Atlantic Ocean to the west; the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean to the south; the Alps, the Jura and the Rhine to the east; the English Channel to the north. Only the flat north-eastern frontier was open, but it was consolidated by the conquest of Artois and Flanders. Later, the annexation of Lorraine would give the kingdom its satisfying, providential shape. A guide for foreign and domestic travellers published in 1687 painted a familiar, reassuring picture of a nation ‘joined and united in all its parts and provinces’, ‘seated in the middle of Europe’, ‘almost round and like an oval’.

  The seventeenth-century guidebook went on to describe France as a densely populated nation with barely an acre of uncultivated land, a high-speed transport system and an extensive network of comfortable, moderately priced hotels. This was the sort of glorious mirage that might have appeared in summer skies above the manicured forest of Versailles. It will be our last sight for some time to come of an ordered and comprehensible country.

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  A HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS had passed since Louis XIV’s chief minister, Colbert, had dreamt of a road system that would unite and energize the kingdom, yet, in June 1837, when Henri Beyle – later known as Stendhal – stepped out of the public coach to stretch his legs at a tiny staging-post called Rousselan, thirteen miles from the city of Bourges, he was struck by a sense of ‘complete isolation’. (This was a man who had trudged across the endless Russian steppes with Napoleon’s retreating army.) Apart from the post-house itself and the towers of Bourges cathedral on the edge of the wooded plain, there were no signs of human life. A few hours later, beyond a marshy belt of cabbage fields, in Bourges itself, the only faces to be seen were those of a group of soldiers and a sleepy servant in the hotel.

  The city at the geographical centre of France seemed to be quite dead. And in the town Stendhal had left that morning, La Charité-sur-Loire, there was so little traffic that everyone had known where he was going and why he was forced to stop there (a broken axle) before he had spoken to a soul. Ahead of him lay an eight-hour journey on the overnight diligence to Châteauroux, forty miles to the west. He left Bourges at 9 p.m. At midnight he was in Issoudun, a proudly somnolent town which had won a battle to maintain its economic and social stagnation by forcing the Paris–Toulouse road to be built twelve miles to the west. Napoleon had paid it the compliment of using it as a place of internal exile. Five hours later, Stendhal’s coach rattled into Châteauroux, the capital of the Indre département and the biggest town in the former province of Berry.

  Stendhal’s discovery of solitude was not unusual. To travellers stunned by hours of monotony and desolation, a small provincial town like Châteauroux was an oasis of noise and colourful inconvenience. Later tourists in search of picturesque isolation would be amazed by the din of tiny places, putting up their bulwarks of noise against the surrounding silence: bells ringing on the slightest pretext, unoiled pump handles screeching, and normal conversations being carried on at a volume that would now seem deliberately offensive. At the gates of Châteauroux began a region of marshes and moors known as the Brande. Some of the younger inhabitants of the Brande had never seen a paved road, let alone a four-wheeled carriage lurching through the countryside like an enchanted house. Renegade priests who had marooned themselves in the Brande during the Revolution had freely given themselves up after a few days.

  Beyond the squares, the monuments and the rooms of state that form the backdrop of most French history lay a world of ancient tribes and huge vacant spaces. Anyone heading north on the Paris–Toulouse road had to spend at least eleven hours crossing a pestilential, undrained region of stagnant ponds and stunted woods called the Sologne: ‘a desolate country, on a difficult, sandy, deserted road; not a single château, farm or village in the distance, just a few lonely, wretched hovels’. The main road east from Paris to Strasbourg and Germany passed through the almost featureless plains of the Champagne, where settlements were so rare that single hawthorn bushes were preserved as precious landmarks.

  When the Romantic poet Alfred de Vigny expressed the seemingly un-Romantic wish ‘Never leave me alone with Nature’, he was writing as a man who had travelled widely in France. The words ‘Sologne’, ‘Champagne’, ‘Dombes’, ‘Double’, ‘Brenne’ and ‘Landes’ aroused as much horror in travellers as the wilder passes of the Alps and the Pyrenees. Even the most garrulous writers struggled to find something to say about these forlorn regions. ‘Nothing of note’ was a common remark in guidebooks and travellers’ accounts.

  From the red, stony wastes of the Esterel in south-eastern Provence, to the ocean of gorse, broom and heather that covered much of Brittany, France was a land of deserts. The greatest of these was the Landes (the name means ‘moorland’ or ‘waste’). In the south-west of France, three thousand square miles of scrub, pine plantations and black sand occupied a triangle bounded by the river Garonne, the foothills of the Pyrenees and the gigantic, land-devouring sand dunes or ‘walking mountains’ of Mimizan and Arcachon. The zone of silence, where birdsong was never heard, began just south of Bordeaux and continued for two days until the swathe of sinking sand that passed for a road reached the outskirts of Bayonne. Travellers sometimes reported seeing tall, spidery figures passing over the horizon, a few ancient tile-kilns and ramshackle huts of wood and clay, and very little else.

  As late as 1867, after more than a century of agricultural improvements, a national census estimated that 43 per cent of land that could be cultivated was ‘dominated by the forces of nature’: grasslands, forests and moors. Wolves were still a threat in several central regions, including the Dordogne, at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1789, when the Revolutionary parliament discussed the division of the old provinces into départements and communes, there was some concern that they were creating phantom districts in which a hypothetical population would be governed by a non-existent mayor.

  This disconcertingly spacious world, whose inhabitants will begin to emerge in the following chapter, is almost unimaginable without a drastic recalibration of the scale of populousness and isolation. The two hundred thousand square miles of Europe’s biggest country were still magnified by medieval time. On the eve of the French Revolution, France was three weeks long (Dunkirk to Perpignan) and three weeks wide (Strasbourg to Brest). Journey times had barely changed since the days of the Romans, whe
n wine-merchants could reach the English Channel from the Mediterranean ports in less than a month. When speeds increased in the late eighteenth century, they did so only for a handful of rich people, and luck still played a big role. Marseille was less than two weeks from Paris, but only if certain conditions were met: perfect weather, a recently repaired road, a modern coach with full suspension, healthy horses, and a fast but careful driver who was never thirsty and never had an accident. These times, moreover, refer only to the transport of human beings. Goods transport was even slower and less predictable. In 1811, overseas produce entering France through the port of Nantes would not be expected in Paris for another three weeks. A merchant in Lyon would be surprised to receive it in under a month.

  France was, in effect, a vast continent that had yet to be fully colonized. No one who crossed the country on minor roads would have found it hard to believe that Julius Caesar had been able to march an army for several days through Gaul without being spotted by the enemy. Fugitives made journeys that now seem incredible. In 1755, during the official persecution of Protestants in Languedoc, the pastor Paul Rabaut, who was one of the most wanted men in France, travelled from Nîmes to Paris and then to L’Isle-Adam for a secret interview with the Prince de Conti. He returned to the south without being captured or seen. During the royalist reprisals known as the White Terror, a republican lawyer fleeing for his life left the Paris–Lyon road and walked into the hills and forests to the west of the Rhône. From there, he made his way safely back to Paris on the main road from the Auvergne. His route would have taken him through the forest of Bauzon, which was practically a separate principality, ruled for several centuries by a succession of robber kings known as the ‘capitaines de Bauzon’.

  The appalling isolation in which some feral human beings managed to exist gives some idea of how lonely a remote area could be. In the wooded hills of the Aveyron, where only an occasional column of smoke might betray a human presence, the boy who came to be known as Victor de l’Aveyron lived alone for several years before he was captured by peasants in 1799 and put on display as a freak of nature. The ‘wild girl’ of the Issaux forest, south of Mauléon in the Basque Country, had been playing with friends when she got lost in the snow. She wandered in the gloom of the green desert for eight years before she was discovered by shepherds in 1730, alive but speechless. Further west, on the edge of the Iraty forest, a naked, hairy man who could run like a deer, and who was later thought to be the remnant of a Neanderthal colony, was spotted several times in 1774, indulging in his favourite pastime: scattering flocks of sheep. On the last occasion, when the shepherds tried to catch him, he ran away, giggling, and was never seen again.

  Even in apparently civilized parts, it was possible to cover large distances undetected. In the mid-eighteenth century, the bandit Louis Mandrin and his three-hundred-strong band of smugglers roamed over an area one-fifth the size of France, from the Auvergne to the Franche-Comté, attacking large towns and successfully evading three regiments for a year and a half. He was eventually captured only because his mistress betrayed him. For years after the Revolution, banditry remained a problem in the Somme département. Until the 1830s, even the relatively industrialized northern départements were a thieves’ paradise.

  Tales of isolation and ignorance tend to be associated with spectacular exceptions and with regions that lie beyond what some French historians have termed ‘an enlarged Paris Basin’, which accounts for more than one-third of the country – an enormous parallelogram stretching from Lille to Clermont-Ferrand and from Lyon to Le Mans, where ‘men, ideas and merchandise’, all identifiably and selfconsciously French, had supposedly been pumping through the system since the Ancien Régime. In this view, modern France existed long ago, in a virtual form, as an enormous Parisian suburb, and was simply waiting for the bicycle, the steam engine, and the automobile to bring it to life.

  If a mischievous muse of History deposited a group of these historians by the side of a route nationale at any time between 1851 and 1891, they would see, on average, fewer than ten vehicles an hour, travelling at speeds between 3 and 13 mph. Further back in time, the influence of those radiant towns and cities would be almost imperceptible. Accurate traffic censuses are unavailable for earlier periods, but since only a few hundred private vehicles were using the national road system at the end of the eighteenth century, it can hardly have been prone to traffic jams.

  In 1787 and 1788, the English farmer Arthur Young was amazed to find ‘the wastes, the deserts, the heath, ling, furze, broom, and bog that I have passed for three hundred miles’ continuing to ‘within three miles of the great commercial city of Nantes!’ The outskirts of Toulouse were just as empty: ‘not more persons than if it were a hundred miles from any town.’ Surely, he thought, the capital itself, ‘where so many great roads join’, would prove that, if the body was sluggish, at least the heart was beating. But on a May morning, for the first ten miles of the great road south to Orléans, the total count was two mail-coaches and ‘very few’ sedan chairs. And when he drew near to Paris on the northern road from Chantilly, ‘eagerly on the watch for that throng of carriages which near London impede the traveller, I watched in vain; for the road, quite to the gates, is, on comparison, a perfect desert.’

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  THE SEEMINGLY RIDICULOUS QUESTION then arises: where was the population of Europe’s most populous country?

  Despite the impression of many travellers, most French people did not live in towns. At the time of the French Revolution, almost four-fifths of the population was rural. Over half a century later, more than three-quarters still lived in a commune of fewer than two thousand inhabitants. (This was the definition of ‘rural’ in 1846.) But these people were not necessarily aware of each other’s existence. A ‘commune’ is not a village or a town but the area controlled by a mayor and a council.1 Some, like the commune of Arles in the Camargue plain, stretched across large, sparsely populated regions. Others, like Verdelot, forty miles east of Paris in the Brie, contained dozens of tiny settlements, none of which could be described as a town or even a large village.

  After the Revolution, almost a third of the population (about ten million people) lived in isolated farms and cottages or in hamlets with fewer than thirty-five inhabitants and often no more than eight. A peasant girl who went to work in Paris might, when looking through the scullery window at the street, see more people at a glance than she had known in her entire previous life. Many recruits from the Dordogne in 1830 were unable to give the recruiting sergeant their surnames because they had never had to use them. Until the invention of cheap bicycles, the known universe, for many people, had a radius of less than fifteen miles and a population that could easily fit into a small barn.

  The distinction between ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ might suggest that some citizens at least were connected to the rest of the world. In reality, most towns were half-dissolved into the surrounding countryside. Before the gates were locked at night, people and animals came and went from field to street. Mud carpeted the cobbles and created its own miniature geography of hills and ravines. Agriculture resided in the city in the form of vineyards, vegetable plots, pigsties, paddocks and mounds of manure.

  In many minds, the clearest demographic distinction was not ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ but ‘Parisian’ and ‘provincial’. Travelling through France in 1807 ‘by a route never before performed’, Lieutenant-Colonel Ninian Pinkney of the North American Native Rangers found himself back on the frontier as soon as he left Paris (‘as retired as in the most remote corner of England’) and subsequently discovered that ‘there are absolutely no interior towns in France like Norwich, Manchester, and Birmingham’. French towns were confined and corseted by their customs barriers, and the population remained almost static from the early nineteenth century until after the First World War.

  Even before it became the goal of most internal migrants, Paris seemed to drain the country. In 1801, more people lived in Paris (just under 550,000) t
han in the next six biggest cities combined (Marseille, Lyon, Bordeaux, Rouen, Nantes and Lille). In 1856, Paris could have swallowed up the next eight biggest cities, and in 1886, the next sixteen. Yet Paris accounted for less than 3 per cent of the population until 1852 and, until 1860, covered an area of only 3,402 hectares (thirteen square miles), which is not even twice the size of the Eurodisney site.

  The hidden population of France was obviously not to be found simply by looking through a carriage window. Tax collectors, missionaries, and early ethnologists had to branch off onto tracks that no coach would ever follow. Even then, without the panoramic, Xray vision of a statistician or a poet, vital signs might be scarce. Victor Hugo’s description of the west of France might look like science-fiction anthropology, but Hugo had covered more miles on foot than any historian of France and he knew how to read a landscape:

  It is difficult to picture those Breton forests as they really were. They were towns. Nothing could be more secret, silent and savage than those inextricable entanglements of thorns and branches. In those vast thickets, stillness and quietness made their lair. No desert ever appeared more deathlike and sepulchral. Yet if those trees could have been felled at a single blow, as if by a flash of lightning, there would have stood revealed in those shades a swarming mass of men.

  Some curious statistics make it possible to comprehend the powerful organization of the great peasant revolt. In Ille-et-Vilaine, in the forest of Le Pertre . . . there was no sign of human life, and six thousand men were there under the leadership of Focard. In Morbihan, in the forest of Molac, not a soul could be seen, and there were eight thousand men. Those two forests are not among the largest in Brittany.