by Graham Robb
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SINCE FRANCE HAD BEEN pieced together by treaties and conquests, and since two-thirds of the territory had been French for less than three hundred and fifty years, it is not surprising that there was no deep-rooted sense of national identity. Before the Revolution, the name ‘France’ was often reserved for the small mushroom-shaped province centred on Paris. In Gascony and Provence, anyone from the north was a ‘Franchiman’ or a ‘Franciot’. Neither term was registered by the official dictionary of the Académie Française. However, there was little sense of regional identity either. The Breton, Catalan, Flemish and Provençal populations of France developed their political identities only much later, in reaction to the national identity that was imposed on them. Only the Basques seem to have been united against the outside world, but the figures of hate in their public masquerades were not Frenchmen or Spaniards but gypsies, tinkers, doctors and lawyers. Inter-regional games of pelota aroused greater passions than the victories and defeats of Napoleon.
The propaganda of French national unity has been broadcast continuously since the Revolution, and it takes a while to notice that the tribal divisions of France were almost totally unrelated to administrative boundaries. There was no obvious reason why these people should have formed a single nation. As Hervé Le Bras and Emmanuel Todd wrote in 1981, referring to the extreme variety of family structures in France, ‘from an anthropological point of view, France ought not to exist’. Ethnically, its existence was just as unlikely. The Celtic and Germanic tribes who invaded ancient Gaul and the Frankish tribes who attacked the ailing Roman province had almost as many different origins as the population of modern France. The only coherent, indigenous group that a historically sound National Front party could claim to represent would be the very first wandering band of pre-human primates that occupied this section of the Western European isthmus.
The Cherbourg merchant, François Marlin, eventually found that the best answer to the question, ‘Who are the inhabitants of France?’ was no answer at all. He wanted his travel accounts to be an antidote to all the useless guidebooks written by armchair plagiarists and so tried simply to observe the physical differences that mirrored the changing landscape. If his observations were combined with those of other travellers, the result would be an unpublishable map of France divided into zones of ugliness and beauty. Basque women were ‘all clean and pretty’. ‘All the cripples, one-eyed people and hunchbacks seem to have been shut up in Orléans.’ ‘Pretty women are rare in France, and especially here in the Auvergne; but one does see a lot of robust women.’ ‘The most beautiful eyes in the provinces can be found in Brest, but the mouths are less attractive: the sea-air and a great deal of neglect in that department soon tarnish the enamel of the teeth.’
This would hardly satisfy a historical anthropologist, and it gives only the vaguest idea of the social geography of France. No one could tell whether these physical differences were signs of ancient ancestry or simply an effect of the trades people practised and the food they ate. But at least Marlin had seen the population (or the part of the population that lived near a road) with his own eyes:
I quite like the way in which women and children come running up to see a traveller pass. This enables a curious man to see all the beauties of a place, and I could tell you exactly how many pretty women there are in Couvin.
In Marlin’s mind, this was the kind of eye-witness description that could usefully be kept in the leather pockets of the diligence. The other guides, with their bogus erudition, could be left under the flapping canvas on top of the coach to be soaked by the rain and blown away by the wind.
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AN EXPEDITION INTO tribal France could begin almost anywhere and at almost any time. A hilltop in the Aveyron, for instance, where the limestone plateaux of the Causses turn into a crumpled map of rocks and gorges. The year is 1884. The priest of Montclar has found an exciting diversion from the monotony of life in a small town. His telescope is trained on a battlefield in the valley below. An army of men, women and children, wielding cudgels and lugging baskets of stones, is advancing on the village of Roquecezière. But scouts have been posted. Another army has already emerged from the village and is preparing to defend its territory.
On the bare rock that towers above the village, turning its back to the battle, is a colossal cast-iron statue of the Virgin Mary. The statue has been funded by public subscription – something of a miracle in this impoverished region – and has recently been placed on the rock to commemorate a successful mission.
Incensed to see the sacred effigy pointing its bottom at their village, the invaders have come to turn it around. The battle rages for hours. Several people are seriously injured. At last, the Roquecezièrain lines are breached and the statue is worked around to face the other village. To prevent a full-scale war, the Church authorities find a compromise. The Virgin is rotated ninety degrees, supposedly so that each village can see half of her face. However, she now looks east-north-east, towards Saint-Crépin, which contributed more than half the cost of the statue, and still has her back turned to the little clutch of houses at her foot.
The Battle of Roquecezière, like thousands of other tiny conflicts, is not mentioned in any history of France. Village wars had no perceptible effect on national security and their causes were often ancient and obscure. Yet they were a normal part of life for many people well into the nineteenth century. A ‘very fat file’ in the archives of the Lot département describes village brawls between 1816 and 1847: ‘bloody scenes, combats, disorders, serious wounds, treaties of peace and rumours of war’. Villagers settled their differences in pitched battles rather than waste their time and money in court. Half-forgotten insults and territorial disputes culminated in raids on neighbouring villages to steal the corn or to carry off the church bells. Sometimes, champions were appointed and their battles entered local legend. Usually, a single battle was not enough. The Limousin villages of Lavignac, Flavignac and Texon were at war for more than forty years. Texon ceased to exist as a commune in 1806, but this bureaucratic technicality did not prevent it from behaving as an independent state.
Caesar’s famous description of Gaul as a country ‘divided into three parts’ must have struck many travellers as a breezy oversimplification. Caesar, however, went on to observe that Gaul was also subdivided into innumerable tiny regions: ‘Not only every tribe, canton, and subdivision of a canton, but almost every family is divided into rival factions.’ The basic division was the pagus, the area controlled by a tribe. Two thousand years after the conquest of Gaul, the pays (pronounced pay-ee) was still a recognizable reality. The word pays – usually translated as ‘country’ – referred, not to the abstract nation, but to the tangible, ancestral region that people thought of as their home. A pays was the area in which everything was familiar: the sound of the human voice, the orchestra of birds and insects, the choreography of winds and the mysterious configurations of trees, rocks and magic wells.
To someone with little experience of the world, the pays could be measured in fields and furrows. To a person far from home, it might be a whole province. The term has since acquired a more precise and picturesque meaning. It was revived in the 1960s to promote local development and tourism: ‘Pays de la Loire’, ‘Pays de Caux’, ‘Pays de Bray’, etc. These geographical areas are larger versions of the ‘Petites Régions Agricoles’ which were devised in 1956 to serve as a basis for agricultural statistics. The National Institute of Statistics currently lists 712 of them. The Brie, for instance, is divided into ‘wooded’, ‘central’, ‘Champagne’ (three zones, distinguished by postcode), ‘eastern’, ‘French’ (two zones) and ‘humid’. The part of Champagne once known as ‘pouilleuse’ (flea-bitten or beggarly) no longer officially exists.
This was the puzzle of micro-provinces that General de Gaulle had in mind when he asked, ‘How can one be expected to govern a country that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?’ This famous phrase, now usually inflated t
o ‘one cheese for every day of the year’, has become part of an unofficial catechism of national pride. It is often recited to foreign visitors, even in regions that are dominated by a single, economically buoyant cheese. But it was a puzzle that any modern-day marketing-board official could easily solve. In earlier days, no one could have put a figure on the pays of France. Even in 1937, when publishing a very long list of pays in his nine-volume Manual of Contemporary French Folklore, Arnold van Gennep warned that the list was incomplete because ‘some pays are still unknown’. Throughout the nineteenth century, functionaries at every level complained of this fragmentation of the territory with no trace of irony. The pays rather than the state was the fatherland of the benighted peasant.
Secret army reports of the 1860s and 70s show that ‘patriotism’ on a national level meant very little to natives of a pays. In most of the Auvergne, the army could obtain help only ‘by payment, requisition or threats’ (1873). In a town near Angers, the men would fight only if they were close to home: ‘They are still Angevin, not French’ (1859). ‘The peasants of the Brie are timorous and have little guile, and all resistance on their part would be easily put down’ (1860). Spies returning to Caesar’s camp on the banks of the Saône in 58 BC must have delivered very similar reports.
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WITH DIFFERENT MAPS and sensors, it is still possible to explore the labyrinth of tiny regions without getting lost. At certain times of day, even if the boundaries are invisible, the approximate limits of a pays can be detected by a walker or a cyclist. The area in which a church bell can be heard more distinctly than those of other villages in the region is likely to be an area whose inhabitants had the same customs and language, the same memories and fears, and the same local saint.
Bells marked the tribal territory and gave it a voice. When the bell was being cast by a travelling founder, villagers added heirlooms to the metal – old plates, coins and candlesticks – and turned it into the beloved embodiment of the village soul. It told the time of day and announced annual events: the beginning and end of harvest, the departure of flocks for the high pastures. It warned of incursions and threats. In the 1790s, recruiting sergeants marched across the Sologne through overlapping circles of sound to find, when they arrived in each village, that all the young men had disappeared. Bells were thought to dispel the thunder and hailstorms that destroyed the crops, which explains why so many people were electrocuted at the end of a bell-rope. They chased away the witches who piloted storm clouds and summoned angels so that prayers said while the bell was ringing – as in Millet’s painting L’Angélus – were more effective than at other times. In foggy weather, rescue bells were rung to guide travellers who might be lost.
The number of bells and the size of the bell tower often give a fairly accurate measure of population density. Hardly anyone complained about excessive ringing, but there were countless complaints about bells that were too faint to be heard in the outlying fields. When migrants talked nostalgically of their distant native clocher, they were referring not only to the architectural presence of a steeple in the landscape but also to its aural domain.
A map of these spheres of audible influence would show the tiny size of tribal domains far more accurately than a map of communes. A study of communes in nineteenth-century Morbihan (southern Brittany) appears to show that the population was quite adventurous. By 1876, more than half the married people in Saint-André had been born in a different commune. In almost every case, however, the commune in question was adjacent. According to the study, ‘sentimental determinants’ (love) might have played a role, but most people married in order to consolidate inherited land rights, even if it meant marrying a first cousin. The choice of partners was guided by the ancient system of hamlets whose frontiers – banks of earth, ditches and streams – have either disappeared or become unnoticeable. Official boundaries were scarcely more significant than garden fences in the territories of birds.
The same agoraphobic settlement of the open spaces of France can be seen all over the country. As late as 1886, over four-fifths of the population were still described as ‘almost stationary’ (living in the département where they were born). Over three-fifths had remained in their native commune. But even the expatriates in other départements had not necessarily strayed from the local group of hamlets: the neighbouring hamlet may simply have lain on the other side of a departmental boundary.
Some communities were forced by low numbers or by local feuds to look further afield, but even they were unlikely to travel far. The widowed ploughman in George Sand’s The Devil’s Pond (1846) is appalled at the thought of finding a new wife three leagues (eight miles) away in ‘a new pays’. In an extreme case, the persecuted cagots, most of whom lived in scattered hamlets (see p. 43), might find a husband or a wife more than a day’s walk from home, but this was very unusual. Records of six hundred and seventy-nine cagot couples from 1700 to 1759 show that almost two-thirds of the brides came from within shouting distance of the bridegroom. The others were close enough to cause little inconvenience to the wedding guests. In Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, all but four of the fifty-seven women had married less than five miles from home. Only two of the six hundred and seventy-nine were described as ‘foreign’. This was not a reference to another land. It meant simply, ‘not from the region’.
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EVEN WITH STATISTICS and a proper sense of scale, descending into the land of a thousand pays is a disconcerting experience. The broader patterns that will eventually appear are not much in evidence, but nor is the expected anarchy. Many places turn out to be fullyfunctioning jurisdictions with their own parliaments and unwritten constitutions. Nearly every village had a formal assembly of some kind, especially in pays d’état such as Burgundy, Brittany and Provence, where royal influence had always been weak. In the south, where taxation was based on land, the need to measure and record holdings had given rise to some quite sophisticated village institutions that not only regulated the use of common land but also managed assets and ran a budget. When agents of the Revolution came to administer the kiss of life to the supposedly moribund towns and villages of provincial France, they found the body in surprisingly good health.
Some of these towns and villages were flourishing democracies when France was still an absolute monarchy. François Marlin ran into such a place on his journey through Picardy in 1789. The conspicuously clean and tidy village of Salency, he learned, was governed by an old priest. The children were never sent away to become servants, and they were not allowed to marry outside the parish. There were six hundred people with only three surnames between them. All were considered equal, and everyone worked the land, using spades instead of ploughs. As a result, their harvests were abundant, their children – even the girls – were taught to read and write by a salaried schoolmaster and his wife, and everyone was healthy, peaceful and attractive. ‘The very notion of crime is unknown to them . . . The story of a girl who sinned against modesty would sound to them like a tale invented by a liar.’
This is a fairly typical account of a self-governing village. The chief, as in Salency, was often a priest, acting as an administrator rather than as an agent of the Catholic Church. On the Breton islands of Hoedic and Houat, the priest, mayor, judge, customs officer, postal director, tithe collector, teacher, doctor and midwife were all the same man. The arrival of two deputy mayors in the 1880s – one for each island – made no difference whatsoever. Some places were run by councils that were perfect miniatures of a national administration. The town of La Bresse, in a valley of the western Vosges, had its own legislature and judiciary until the Revolution. According to a geographer writing in 1832, ‘the judges of this town, though clumsy and common in appearance, showed a great deal of common sense’. A visiting lawyer who quoted in Latin in his speech for the defence was fined by the court ‘for taking it into your head to address us in an unknown tongue’ and was ordered to learn the law of La Bresse within a fortnight.
Some village states co
vered many square miles. A clan called Pignou occupied several villages near Thiers in the northern Auvergne. They even had their own town, which apparently boasted all the comforts of modern civilization. A leader was elected by all the men over twenty years of age and titled ‘Maître Pignou’. Everyone else was known by their Christian name. If the Maître Pignou proved inept, he was replaced. There was no private property, and all the children were brought up by a woman known as the Laitière because she also ran the communal dairy. Girls never worked in the fields but were sent instead to a convent at common expense. People who married outside the clan were banished forever, though they all eventually begged to be readmitted.
If so many tiny places declared independence at the time of the Revolution, it was because they were already partly independent. Their aim was not to develop the local economy and become part of a larger society. Change of any kind generally meant disaster or the threat of starvation. The dream of most communities was to sever ties, to insulate the town or village, which is partly why measures varied from one village to the next: standardization would have made it easier for outsiders to compete with local producers.3 They wanted to refine and purify the group. The boast that no one ever married outside the tribe was as common in France as it is in most tribal societies. Local legends often referred to a special dispensation granted by the Pope (or, more likely, the local bishop) that allowed them to marry close relatives. Prudent management of village resources could prevent the population from abandoning the tiny fatherland. Sometimes, daughters as well as sons were paid to remain. The ‘Chizerot’ tribe on the banks of the Saône in Burgundy had a communal fund that was used to give poor girls a dowry so that they would not have to look for a husband elsewhere.