The Discovery of France

by Graham Robb

  Hugo’s fantastic vision of a densely populated desert is confirmed by the map (p. 16). The population predictably appears to be densest along the main corridors of trade: the Rhône valley and the Rhineland, Flanders and the Channel coast, Paris and its zone of supply, a few Mediterranean ports and the fertile valley of the Garonne from Toulouse to Bordeaux. But there are also some curiously high concentrations in areas that seemed to many travellers to be almost uninhabited.

  It was quite possible to pass through some densely populated regions, close enough to smell the pigs, without seeing a single human being. Jacques Cambry, who explored Brittany in 1794–95 (‘for no one, I believe, has ever gone to Brittany in order to study it or to satisfy their curiosity’), claimed that only a few hunters had ever seen ‘those houses that lie hidden behind ditches, in tangles of trees or bushes, and always in the lowest parts so that water will collect and help to rot the straw, scrub and gorse that they use for manure’. Settlements could be isolated by mud and thorn as effectively as by canyons and cliffs.

  South of the Loire, in the Vendée, unmapped tracks ran for hundreds of miles through deep tunnels of vegetation. An aerial view would have shown a typical bocage landscape of fields marked off by trees and bushes. On the ground, it was a muddy labyrinth sunk in a limitless wood. On a sunny day, a traveller could walk for hours and emerge from the bocage as pale as a ghost. Openings in the hedgerow were closed with hurdles made from the same material as the hedge. A peasant could slip into his field, close the leafy door, and leave no trace of his passing.

  In the Vendée, a hundred and seventy thousand people lived in groups with an average size of fifteen. There were twenty thousand tiny places in the Ille-et-Vilaine département, the same number in the Sarthe, and twenty-five thousand in Finistère. In the hills of the Cévennes, some parishes had more than a hundred hamlets. This explains why the extermination of Protestants in the Cévennes at the end of the seventeenth century was such a long and arduous task, requiring a large army and the biggest road-building programme since the Roman conquest. It also explains how the royalist rebels in the Vendée were able to hold out for so long against the republican troops who were sent to ‘cleanse’ the west of France. Until the bleak, rectilinear town of Napoléon-Vendée was created as an imperialist outpost, only one town in the département had more than five thousand inhabitants.

  The faceless millions who lived in this vast and largely undiscovered country belonged to an earlier stage of civilization than the three hundred or so people who make up the usual cast list of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century French history. Their patterns of settlement were a guarantee of ignorance and illiteracy, since a scattered population was just as difficult to educate as it was to conquer. But they were, after all, the inhabitants of France.

  Even today, the labourers, land-owning peasants, artisans, and uncategorized women and children who made up the ‘rural’ three-quarters of the population are often described collectively as though they were proto-French beings, too remote and nebulous to feel the gravitational forces of centralization. They received historical rather than anthropological attention only when they began to think of themselves as French, when they heard about Paris and wanted to see it, or when they asserted regional identities and separatist desires and thus acknowledged the effective primacy of Parisian France. One of the quotations most frequently used to evoke this mass of population is Jean de La Bruyère’s depiction in 1688 of the ‘wild animals that one sees in the countryside’ – sun-blackened beasts, both male and female, ‘attached to the earth that they stubbornly dig’: ‘They make sounds that resemble articulate speech, and when they rise up on their feet, they show a human face . . . At night they creep away into lairs where they live on black bread, water and roots.’

  Similar descriptions of the ignoble savages of modern Gaul can be found by the hundred. Some of these picturesque insults are better known than the most basic facts of daily life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They belong to the history of that internecine racism that still plays a major role in French society. These administratively inconvenient millions belong to French history as much as American Indians belong to the history of America. Not all of them were mud-caked field-hands. They were provincial aristocrats and tribal chiefs, mayors and councillors, migrant workers, merchants, magicians, hermits, and even local historians.

  When they murdered the young geometer on Cassini’s expedition, the people of Les Estables were acting ignorantly but not irrationally. They were defending themselves against an act of war. If a local sorcerer had shown them on the surface of a pond or in the flames of a bonfire their home as it would appear in the twenty-first century – a second-rate Nordic ski resort ‘on the confines of three attractive regions’, ‘thirty kilometres from the nearest hospital’, ‘waiting to seduce you with its hospitality and its customs’ – they would have been amazed at the mysterious forms that their punishment had taken.

  2

  The Tribes of France, I

  AT THE SOUTHERN END of one of the lovely flat valleys that spread out from the Pyrenees like the rays of the sun, when the cloud is not too low, the hamlet of Goust can be seen on a rocky platform fifteen hundred feet above the chilly spa of Eaux-Chaudes. Until the early twentieth century, it was considered to be an autonomous republic. The smallest undeclared nation in Europe consisted of twelve granite houses and about seventy people, who were ruled by a council of old men. There were no beggars, no servants, and, to the envious delight of the travellers who discovered this spartan Shangri-la, no tax-payers.

  The hamlet-nation of Goust had been known to the outside world since at least the fifteenth century, but the people were left to their own happy devices, ‘an entirely isolated tribe, which has conserved its simple, primitive customs’. The frighteningly steep, rubble-strewn road that leads up to the hamlet was built less than forty years ago. In 2005, Nathalie Barou, the great-granddaughter of one of the women in the photograph of 1889 (figure 1), showed me the medieval door-lintel that bears the original name of her family: Baron. A Baron of Goust is known to have existed in the sixteenth century. One of his ancestors, impoverished by the crusades, may have sold the land to his serfs, who never saw the need to join the confederations that would one day form the province of Béarn and eventually become part of France.

  The people of Goust had no church and no cemetery. When someone died, the coffin was attached to ropes and lowered to the valley below. In fine weather, the living clambered down the mountain to sell milk and vegetables, to have their children baptized or to look at the ladies who came to take the waters at Eaux-Chaudes. When a road was dynamited through the gorge below the hamlet in 1850 and the skimpy wooden ‘Bridge of Hell’ was rebuilt in stone, Goust became a picturesque excursion for a few bored invalids and travel writers. Without them, it might have passed into oblivion like the hundreds of other ‘autonomous republics’ that once existed within the borders of France.

  Goust was an exception mainly because it was relatively well known and because geographical force majeure held it in its patriarchal pose well into the steam age. Compared to other small, remote places, it was really quite well connected to the outside world. Its seventy inhabitants, some of whom were said to have celebrated their hundredth birthday, could hardly have thrived in total seclusion. Their communal treasury contained wool from Barèges and ribbons from Spain, and their genes too must have contained mementos of trips to the world beyond. Even the dead of Goust were comparatively well travelled. Their counterparts in high Alpine villages, if they gave up the ghost during the six or seven months of isolation, were stored on the family roof under a et of snow until spring thawed the ground, releasing the body to the grave and allowing a priest to reach the village.

  Spectacular sites like Goust came to play a vital role in the creation of a French national identity. For the postcard-buying public with return tickets to modern civilization, tribes belonged to remote places – the further from the city, th
e further back in time. Teetering on the rocky perimeter of France, villages like Goust in the Pyrenees or Saint-Véran in the Alps were the national parks and reservations of the educated imagination. The truth was soon forgotten when cheap travel and national newspapers had telescoped the country and erased the old tribal divisions. Goust was in many respects a normal community in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France. As the economist Michel Chevalier told the readers of a Parisian journal in 1837 after a visit to the eastern Pyrenees and Andorra:

  Each valley is still a little world which differs from the neighbouring world as Mercury does from Uranus. Each village is a clan, a kind of state with its own form of patriotism. There are different types and characters at every step, different opinions, prejudices and customs.

  If Chevalier had travelled from Paris on foot, instead of taking a high-speed coach on a modern road, he might have found that his description fitted most of the country.

  Visiting these clans and tiny states involves a long journey into undiscovered France, from towns and villages to hamlets and other forms of settlement that are not so easily defined. France itself will begin to look like an almost arbitrary division of Western Europe. Later, nationwide patterns will appear and the inhabitants will turn out to have something more than geographical proximity in common, but if the historical road signs of later generations were allowed to dictate the journey from start to finish, most of the country and its inhabitants would remain as obscure as the origins of Goust.

  *

  BEFORE THE RAILWAYS blurred the landscape and reduced its inhabitants to faces on a platform and figures in a field, travellers were often bemused by sudden changes in the population. On fording a stream or turning at a crossroads, the occupants of a carriage could find themselves among people of radically different appearance, with their own style of dress and architecture, their own language and their own peculiar concept of hospitality. The colour of eyes and hair, the shape of heads and faces and even the manner of watching a coach go by could change more abruptly than the vegetation.

  When the differences were exaggerated by speed, tribal frontiers were often startlingly obvious. On the left bank of the river Adour, in the Chalosse region east of Bayonne, the natives were said to be tall, strong, well fed and welcoming. On the right bank, they were skinny, miserable and suspicious. Climate, water and diet, ancient and modern migrations, clan rivalries and all the inexplicable variations of habit and tradition could turn the smallest area into a maze of unmarked borders. Even supposedly civilized regions were carved up like provinces after the fall of an empire. In Burgundy, according to Restif de la Bretonne, the neighbouring villages of Nitry and Sacy were so dissimilar (respectively courteous and brutish) that a certain Comte de S* ‘chose them especially so that he could see a lot of country without travelling very far [about three miles] and thus produce an abbreviated description of rural life throughout the entire kingdom.’ Restif’s own mother was always treated as an outsider in Nitry because she came from a village on the other side of the river Cure, ten miles to the west. ‘According to custom, her children-in-law disliked her, and no one took her side in the village because she was foreign.’

  It is easy to imagine the bewilderment of wealthy urban travellers who set out to discover their country only to find a crazed human landscape of tribes and clans. Even a brief journey through northern France could make it impossible to form a clear impression of ‘the French’. At Dieppe, the Polletais or Poltese fisher-folk spoke a dialect that was barely recognizable as a form of French. Cross-Channel tourists, who bought their ivory carvings and gawped at the women in their bunched-up petticoats and knee-length skirts, wondered why they looked so different from the rest of the population. (No one knows to this day.) Further up the coast, at Boulogne-sur-Mer, the suburb of Le Portel had a separate population numbering about four thousand, remarkable for its height and its handsome, vigorous appearance. In 1866, an anthropologist suggested that the people of Le Portel were of Andalusian origin, but his study of the heads, hands, feet and breasts of the female population (the male population was out at sea) proved inconclusive. Thirty miles inland, at Saint-Omer, the ‘floating islands’ to the east of town were farmed by a community which had its own laws, customs and language. They lived in the low canal houses in the suburbs of Hautpont and Lysel, which still look like a Flemish enclave in a French town.

  To many travellers, the various populations of France seemed to have little in common but their humanity. There were doubts even about this. Even at the end of the nineteenth century, there were reports of distinct, autonomous tribes on the borders of Brittany and Normandy. On the Côte d’Azur in the hills behind Cannes and Saint-Tropez, wild people were said to descend into market towns wearing goatskins and speaking their own incomprehensible language. In 1880, in the forest around Villers-Cotterêts (Alexandre Dumas’s birthplace, forty-five miles north-east of Paris), an anthropologist discovered ‘some out-of-the-way villages whose inhabitants are of a completely different type than those of the surrounding villages and who seem to bear the mark of a particular race, predating the Cimmerian invasions with which our historical era begins’.

  Now that another century has passed and the Villers-Cotterêts forest is a well-publicized excursion for Parisians, forty-five minutes from the Gare du Nord, its ‘prehistoric’ population will remain forever mysterious. As far as French anthropology is concerned, prehistory did not end until the Revolution. Before then, the state took no interest in the cultural and ethnic diversity of the masses. Statistics are scarce until Napoleon and unreliable even then. Sciences that made it possible to analyse populations according to physical and cultural traits evolved only when the tribes they hoped to study were turning into modern French citizens. But the troubling question was at least asked by inquisitive travellers: who were the inhabitants of France?

  *

  IN POLITICAL HISTORY, the answer seems quite simple. The people of Dieppe, Boulogne, Goust and Saint-Véran all belonged to the same nation. They were answerable to provincial parlements and ultimately to the King. Most of them paid taxes – in money, labour (maintaining roads and bridges) and eventually, when systematic conscription was introduced at the end of the eighteenth century, in human life. They had locally appointed officials – an agent to collect taxes and a guard to police the community. But laws, especially those relating to inheritance, were widely ignored and direct contact with the central power was extremely limited. The state was perceived as a dangerous nuisance: its emissaries were soldiers who had to be fed and housed, bailiffs who seized property and lawyers who settled property disputes and took most of the proceeds. Being French was not a source of personal pride, let alone the basis of a common identity. Before the mid-nineteenth century, few people had seen a map of France and few had heard of Charlemagne and Joan of Arc. France was effectively a land of foreigners. According to a peasant novelist from the Bourbonnais, this was just as true in the 1840s as it was before the Revolution:

  We had not the slightest notion of the outside world. Beyond the limits of the canton, and beyond the known distances, lay mysterious lands that were thought to be dangerous and inhabited by barbarians.

  The great cathedrals of France and their numberless flock of parish churches might appear to represent a more powerful common bond. Almost 98 per cent of the population was Catholic. In fact, religious practice varied wildly. (This will become quite obvious later on.) Heavenly beings were no more cosmopolitan than their worshippers. The graven saint or Virgin Mary of one village was not considered to be the same as the saint or the Virgin down the road. Beliefs and practices centred on prehistoric stones and magic wells bore only the faintest resemblance to Christianity. The local priest might be useful as a literate man, but as a religious authority he had to prove his worth in competition with healers, fortune-tellers, exorcists and people who could apparently change the weather and resuscitate dead children. Morality and religious feeling were independent of Church d
ogma. The fact that the Church retained the right to impose taxes until the Revolution was of far greater significance to most people than its ineffectual ban on birth-control.

  The smaller divisions of the kingdom paint a different picture of the population that turns out, however, to be just as unreliable. For a long time, the provinces of France were widely thought to be the key to understanding the national identity. The idea was that these historical, political divisions corresponded to certain human traits, like the segments of a phrenologist’s head.

  There are some good examples of this geo-personal approach in the travel accounts of François Marlin, a Cherbourg merchant who treated the naval-supplies business as an excuse to explore his native land and covered more than twenty thousand miles between 1775 and 1807: ‘The people of Périgord are lively, alert and sensible. The people of Limousin are more sluggish and constricted in their movements.’ Commercial travellers supping at the tavern in Auch could easily be told apart like different breeds of dog:

  The Lyonnais acts high and mighty, talks in a clear and sonorous voice, is witty but also arrogant and has a filthy, impudent mouth. The Languedocien is gentle and courteous and has an open face. The Normand spends more time listening than speaking. He is suspicious of other people and makes them suspicious of him.2

  However, as Marlin discovered, even if the assumptions were flattering, most people refused to be identified with such large areas. They belonged to a town, a suburb, a village or a family, not to a nation or a province. The common cultural heritage of certain regions was more obvious to outsiders than to the people themselves. Brittany would have to be subdivided several times before an area could be found that meant something to the people who lived there. Bretons in the east spoke a dialect of French called Gallo or Gallot; Bretons in the west spoke various forms of Breton. The two groups almost never intermarried. In the west, the people of Armor (‘the Land by the Sea’) had little to do with the people of Argoat (‘the Land of Forests’). And in Armor alone, there were sub-populations so diverse and antagonistic that they were assumed by various writers to have their origins far beyond the granite coast, in Semitic tribes, in ancient Greece or Phoenicia, in Persia, Mongolia, China or Tibet.