The Discovery of France

by Graham Robb

  Even mountains and gorges were not insuperable barriers. An isolated village that was forced to find resources in the world beyond was more likely to be bilingual than a community that could feed itself. Travelling teachers in the Dauphiné and Provence who walked among the livestock at fairs with an ink-bottle tied to their buttonhole crying ‘Maître d’école!’ traditionally came from the mountainous area around Briançon, where seasonal migration had produced a population of polyglots. The Provençal shepherds who walked two hundred miles from Arles to the Oisans could converse with locals all along the route and, when they arrived in the Alps, negotiate the rental of summer pastures with people who, from a linguist’s point of view, spoke a different language.

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  THE NOTION THAT French rapidly became the common tongue and supplanted other languages is only partly true. Before the Revolution, in the centre, but not the suburbs, of commercial cities like Bordeaux and Marseille, people from all walks of life could converse with French-speaking strangers from the north. In the Périgord, speaking French (once known derisively as ‘francimander’) was no longer considered a silly affectation, though many people refused to speak it in case they made mistakes and sounded foolish. In the Provençal Alps, where French was of little practical use in daily life, speaking the national language was the equivalent of putting on one’s Sunday best, just as speaking Latin must have been several centuries before.

  At the same time, some of the other languages of France, far from being smothered by French, were thriving. Improved communications spread the use of French, but they also gave some dialects a wider range than they had ever had before. The Abbé Grégoire would have been dismayed to learn that French-speaking town-dwellers in Brittany were learning Breton. According to the farmer who wrote to him from Tréguier, Breton had ‘become necessary to the inhabitants of towns who have to deal with peasants every day to buy their produce’. Breton was ‘now more familiar to townspeople than French’. At Avignon and Carpentras, according to an official report in 1808, ‘wealthy, educated people’ were ‘obliged to know and all too often to speak patois’ in order to communicate effectively with workers, tradesmen and servants. Priests delivered sermons and magistrates heard witnesses in Provençal. (For the same reason, presumably, when she revealed herself to Bernadette Soubirous in 1858, the Virgin Mary used the local dialect of Lourdes.) ‘It follows from this’, said the report, ‘that the French that is spoken in this region, and even the French that is taught, is not only inelegant, it is not even correct.’ French itself, in other words, was not imported to the provinces like a crate of merchandise. It was acclimatized and hybridized like a plant. About twenty regional varieties of French are still recognized today as distinct dialects.

  In northern France, where statistics seem to show the gradual retreat of Flemish before the tide of French, many French-speakers were just as keen as Flemish-speakers to acquire the second language. In towns and cities bordering the realm of Flemish – Lille, Douai, Cambrai and Avesnes – almost everyone was bilingual. In the Lys département, which was created in 1795 from part of Belgium, a language-learning programme had been in operation since before the Revolution. Farmers and tradesmen exchanged their children when they were eight to ten years old. ‘The aim is to familiarize one group of children with French and the other with Flemish. These emigrations last only a few years, after which each child returns to his own country.’ The same practice was reported after the Revolution in Alsace and Lorraine.

  Private arrangements like these would not have appeared in official statistics, which are extremely sketchy in any case until the twentieth century. The use of minority languages was certainly under-reported, as it still is today. Even now, there are French people who speak a language other than French without knowing it. An elderly innkeeper in Villard at the foot of the Little Saint Bernard Pass told me that he and his friend had been punished at school in the early 1940s for not speaking proper French, but he was uncertain whether the idiom they used was Savoyard or a patois form of French.

  Modern figures vary wildly, but even the lowest estimates suggest that, in certain situations, a large minority of people still use the languages that were thought to be dying out in the nineteenth century: the various forms of Occitan have at least two million speakers; Alsatian has 1.5 million; Breton 500,000; Corsican 280,000; Basque and Flemish 80,000 each (in France); Francoprovenc¸al 70,000. Figures for major dialects like Auvergnat, Norman and Picard are unavailable, though they can still be heard in daily use.

  Two centuries ago, these languages and dialects cohabited with French and often lived quite happily without it. As late as 1863, a quarter of all army recruits were said to speak ‘patois’ and nothing else. French itself seemed to be declining in certain areas. School inspectors found that children in the Lauragais south-east of Toulouse forgot what little French they knew as soon as they left school: ‘French leaves no more trace in their minds than Latin does in the minds of college students.’ In the Cerdagne, in the eastern Pyrenees, language teachers inadvertently created a bizarre school pidgin composed of Latin, French and Catalan. Men returning from the army quickly reverted to their native tongue. A man who came home to Cellefrouin near Angoulême in 1850 after seven years in the army and thirty years in America was speaking the patois of his boyhood again within a few days. Conscription spread the national language but it could also preserve the older forms of patois, and some recruits never learned French at all. There are several reports of Breton soldiers being shot by their comrades in the First World War because they were mistaken for Germans or because they failed to obey incomprehensible orders.

  Many people who were recorded in statistics as French-speakers would have spoken the language only during a certain phase of life, when they were serving an apprenticeship, travelling to markets or working in a town. The dormancy of the local language could create the impression – often a false impression – that it was disappearing. For the last hundred and fifty years, examples of ‘pure’ patois have been collected from people invariably described as ‘old’, as if a separate, senescent species somehow propagates itself and its language without ever growing young. Generation after generation, countless people said the same thing: that the old language was spoken now only by the old people. A woman in the small Alsatian town of Thann told me this (in French) in 2004. She was probably born in the early 1970s. It turned out, however, that when she talked to her little daughter at home, she used Alsatian. The younger woman who was with her was introduced – and introduced herself – as an example of the generation that has almost forgotten the language and will see the last speakers of it die away. Yet she, too, spoke Alsatian with her mother and grandmother. She also took many of her school classes in Alsatian. She could easily have told me in Alsatian that Alsatian was dying out.

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  THE BELIEF THAT the proliferation of different dialects is related to the economic and cultural backwardness of a region is no longer tenable. President Pompidou’s statement, in 1972, that ‘There is no place for regional languages in a France that is destined to set its mark on Europe’ now seems to belong to a distant age. Mountainous areas, like the remote Cantal where Pompidou was born, might have swarmed with micro-dialects, but so did some of the more vibrant and industrialized parts of France: Normandy, Flanders, Alsace and parts of the Mediterranean coast.

  The Abbé Grégoire and all the later politicians and teachers who tried to eradicate ‘patois’ wanted to impose a single language. They were bound to see French as the language of authority and everything else as a sign of chaos, barbarism or rebellion. But official surveys revealed a picture of unexpected order. Far from being a slate on which the modern principles of liberty and equality could be inscribed, France appeared to have been divided up long before, not by kings and armies, but by ancient, inscrutable processes that would not easily be changed by act of parliament. The Revolution created a new nation and a new calendar, but it also discovered a country – or countr
ies – that had been taking shape even before the nation had a name and the Christian calendar had been invented.

  Something like a fault-line ran across the land. The Abbé Grégoire saw only part of this rift – the division of the languages of Oc and Oïl – and blamed it on ‘the former feudal domination’. The curiously sharp division of Oc and Oïl does appear to follow the boundaries of medieval provinces for part of its course, but it also matches several other ancient divisions. North of the line, roofs usually have a slope of forty-five degrees and are made of flat tiles or slate; to the south, they slope at thirty degrees and are made of rounded tiles. North of the line, agricultural practice – three plantings a year and use of the plough – differed from practice in the south: biennial plantings and use of the araire (a primitive, wheel-less plough that could easily be dismantled). Customary law prevailed in the north and Roman law in the south.

  No one knows exactly why this divide exists. It may reflect the influence of Frankish peoples from the north and Burgundians from the east, or it may reflect the more lasting establishment of Roman rule in the south. (Occitan is closer than French to Latin.)12 It may even be evidence of much older tribal territories. Later studies showed that eyes and hair were generally darker south of the line. They also suggested that southerners were less educated and more likely to refuse to fight for their country.

  A study of aerial photographs and place names has identified a possible frontier zone comparable to the Welsh Marches, covering most of the former province of La Marche and corresponding to the ‘Croissant’ where dialects have elements of both Oc and Oïl. This limes may once have separated Ligurian tribes from Celtic invaders and, later, Romans from barbarians. A major Roman road, the Via Agrippa, from Lyon to Bordeaux via Clermont and Limoges, follows the language divide quite closely. Like most Roman roads, it was almost certainly built on a much earlier route.

  This line can still be followed on the ground. In 2005, I cycled along sections of the Oc–Oïl–Croissant frontier for a total of about fifty miles, between towns and villages identified as linguistically distinct by the 1873 expedition. For almost twenty miles, the line follows a narrow ridge on a road that is barely used by modern traffic but forms an obvious route through the landscape. Elsewhere, the Oc–Oïl divide runs through areas that are still unpopulated or covered by forests on treacherous, marshy terrain used mainly for military training. Curiously, where the two languages once came together, in linguistic ‘islands’ of mixed Oc and Oïl along the valleys of the Dronne and the Vienne, there is now a noticeable preponderance of bilingual Franco-British towns and villages (notably Aubeterre), in which local forms of pidgin French are evolving.

  By using the 1873 data, it is possible to find the point at which Oc, Oïl and Croissant intersected. This watershed of three language groups is one of the most obscure and significant locations in the historical geography of France. It lies on a tiny road north-east of Angoulême where the Braconne Forest ends abruptly and opens out onto the plains and valley of the Charente. By chance, the landscape has arranged itself in a textbook illustration of the north–south divide: the Croissant is marked by the forest, the northern, Oïl side by a wheat field, and the southern, Oc side by a vineyard.

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  SUCCESSIVE GOVERNMENTS would try to erase this north–south line or rather, pretend that it didn’t exist. One of the lasting innovations of the Revolution, in January 1790, was to carve the country into départements. The départements were to be of roughly equal size so that everyone would be able to reach the legal and administrative centre in a day. Nearly all the départements were named after physical features: mountains (Basses-Alpes, Cantal, Vosges, etc.), rivers (Dordogne, Haut-Rhin, Vendée, etc.), or geographical location (Nord and Côtes-du-Nord). Later, as the empire grew, southern Savoy became ‘Mont-Blanc’, the Swiss Jura became ‘Mont Terrible’ and Luxembourg became ‘Forêts’. Only one city had a département to itself: Paris, which was described in the parliamentary debate on départements as ‘the most beautiful city in the world’, ‘the fatherland of arts and sciences’, ‘the capital of the French empire’.

  The idea was that timeless, natural logic should prevail over the old feudal and tribal divisions. Tyrants came and went but the Alps would last forever. In this way, ‘prejudices, habits and barbaric institutions consolidated by fourteen centuries of existence’ would be swept away. Language barriers were explicitly ignored, despite objections from some councils – like that of Saint-Malo on the borders of Brittany – that they would be forced to work with people who spoke ‘languages predating Caesar’s conquest’.

  A seemingly small but important complaint about the new départements was that people would lose their collective names. Bretons, Burgundians, Gascons and Normans would officially cease to exist and be left with nothing but a national identity. The new names were too brutally descriptive to be used for individuals. No one would try to call themselves a Bouches-du-Rhônien or a Mont-Blancois.

  The success of the Revolution’s egalitarian reinvention of France lay, ironically, in the rise of the urban middle class, which was less attached to ancient boundaries and local identities. The historical divisions of France came to be associated with quaint provincials and primitive peasants. For all its practical virtues, the division of France into départements helped to accelerate a process that can best be described as the opposite of discovery. Ignorance of daily life beyond the well-connected cities and familiarity with the monuments and personalities of Paris would be signs of enlightened modernity. The provinces would be recreated as the great domain of the unconscious mind – la France profonde, a source of fairy tales, natural wonders and threats to civilization.

  The commemoration of national anniversaries that is still a notable feature of French public life is also an obliteration of events and cultures that are not to be remembered. This process of forgetting was one of the great social forces in the formation of modern France. Middle-class children would forget the provincial languages they learned from nurses and servants, or remember them only as a picturesque remnant of the past. Peasant children would be thrashed and mocked for speaking the language of their parents at school. Most of the descendants of those benighted millions in the Abbé Grégoire’s ‘eradication’ report would lose the tribal speech of their pays and acquire a highly codified and formal foreign language known as French – a language which, according to many French-speakers, almost no one speaks correctly. In the land of a thousand tongues, monolingualism became the mark of the educated person.

  5

  Living in France, I: The Face in the Museum

  ALMOST EVERY TOWN IN FRANCE every town in France now has a museum of ‘daily life’ or of ‘popular arts and traditions’. Most of them are stocked with artefacts that would otherwise have disappeared or turned into expensive accessories in homes and restaurants. The roughly decorated chests, the butter churns and baskets, the wooden tables with smooth, saucer-shaped depressions into which the soup was poured, bear witness to the resilience of their owners. They have the dignity of objects that shared a human life. Each one contains the ghost of a gesture that was performed a million times. They make it easy to imagine a life of hard work and habit.

  Naturally, the artefacts are the best examples available: the hefty cradle, the expensive plough with metal parts and a manufacturer’s name, the embroidered smock that was kept in a chest as part of someone’s trousseau and never saw the pigsty or the field. As survivors, they tell a heartening tale of endurance. Other companions of daily life – the rotting bed, the treasured dung heap, the stench-laden fug of human and animal breath that could extinguish a burning candle – are impossible to display.

  Sometimes, the person who was survived by her possessions appears in their midst and the purposeful display is belied by the photograph of a face scoured by hardship. The expression is often one of faint suspicion, dread or simply dull fatigue. It makes imagining the life that belonged to these objects seem a blundering intru
sion. It seems to say that daily existence is harder to fathom than the obsolete tools and kitchen utensils, and that, if it could be recreated, the staple diet of a past life, with its habits, sensations and smells, would have a stranger taste than the most exotic regional dish.

  Written descriptions of daily life inevitably convey the same bright sense of purpose and progress. They pass through years of lived experience like carefree travellers, telescoping the changes that only a long memory could have perceived. Occasionally, however, a simple fact has the same effect as the photograph in the museum. At the end of the eighteenth century, doctors from urban Alsace to rural Brittany found that high death rates were not caused primarily by famine and disease. The problem was that, as soon as they became ill, people took to their beds and hoped to die. In 1750, the Marquis d’Argenson noticed that the peasants who farmed his land in the Touraine were ‘trying not to multiply’: ‘They wish only for death’. Even in times of plenty, old people who could no longer wield a spade or hold a needle were keen to die as soon as possible. ‘Lasting too long’ was one of the great fears of life. Invalids were habitually hated by their carers. It took a special government grant, instituted in 1850 in the Seine and Loiret départements, to persuade poor families to keep their ailing relatives at home instead of sending them to that bare waiting room of the graveyard, the municipal hospice.

  When there was just enough food for the living, the mouth of a dying person was an obscenity. In the relatively harmonious household of the 1840s described by the peasant novelist Émile Guillaumin, the family members speculate openly in front of Émile’s bed-ridden grandmother (who has not lost her hearing): ‘“I wish we knew how long it’s going to last.” And another would reply, “Not long, I hope.”’ As soon as the burden expired, any water kept in pans or basins was thrown out (since the soul might have washed itself – or, if bound for Hell, tried to extinguish itself – as it left the house), and then life went on as before.