The Discovery of France

by Graham Robb

  This community is situated in the most atrocious and abominable corner of the world. Its only possessions – if they can be called that – are rugged rocks and mountains that are almost inaccessible. . . . It is ten mortal hours on foot from the neighbouring towns of Cahors and Figeac. The paths that lead there are impassable on horseback let alone on foot. (Cabrerets, Lot département)

  On one side, the deadly winds of north and west lay waste to it by sand and storm from which it has no shelter but the islands of Jersey and Guernsey. On the other side, countless rabbits devour the various products of the soil. The parish is further afflicted by the voracious pigeons of three dove-cotes which seem to band together to devour every kind of seed. . . . This parish has no woods, next to no plants, no pasture and no trade. (Rozel, Manche département)

  The man who wrote directly to the King from Catus in the Quercy (‘a town of whose very existence, Sire, you are no doubt unaware’) suggested, with some justification, that ‘to know our little town is to know the province of Quercy and all of France’. In misery, the kingdom was united:

  If only the King knew!, we cried a thousand times from the depths of our abyss. Today, the King knows, and Hope, like a healing balm, is already coursing through our veins. . . . Our only desire is to preserve the bare essentials for our decrepit fathers, our groaning wives and our tender children.

  Eight miles from the King’s palace at Versailles, in a region where more than half the population owned no land, the parish of Saint-Forget was the twin in misery of Catus. The people were often reduced to ‘the most extreme poverty’ by a momentary lack of work, a fall of snow, a spell of rain or a few days of illness. They could not afford a schoolteacher and the land lay fallow because farmers were ‘discouraged’. In bad years, they starved; in good years, they went hungry because their produce was taxed but could not be transported and sold.

  The wealth of evidence in the Cahiers de Doléances is not completely reliable. Some places hoped to avoid tax by depicting their land as an arid desert, a festering flood-plain or a fruitless confusion of rocks and torrents ravaged by weeds and wild animals. If they could prove that the land could not be farmed, it would not be liable to tax. The village of Sexey-les-Bois (Meurthe-et-Moselle) claimed that two-thirds of its inhabitants were widows and that all the able-bodied people, who were taxed at 20 per cent, had ‘sold their meagre furniture and gone to live in the woods’. Some villages tried to shift the tax burden onto supposedly more fortunate neighbours. The Cahiers from the Quercy province make it sound as though all the soil of the region around Cahors had long since been washed away. The village of Escamps described its predicament in terms almost identical to those of many other Cahiers:

  Poor old people whom age and the burden of work have robbed of the strength to go running off to beg alms from charitable souls can be seen groaning with hunger. Every day, a multitude of little children can be seen groaning with hunger despite the vigility [sic] of their father and mother. Such is the sorry state of this unhappy community which can be called without the slightest hesitation the most wretched that exists and that ever could have existed.

  A slightly callous view of past suffering has emphasized the suspiciously repetitive nature of these Cahiers. Set phrases were suggested by central committees and copied down by local committees. One village found an adequate expression of its suffering and others repeated the impressive details: children eating grass, tears moistening bread, farmers feeling envious of their animals, and so on. But those grass-eating children were clearly not a figure of speech: the harvest of 1788 had been worse than usual, and the Cahiers were drawn up in the dangerously hollow months when last year’s supplies were running low and next year’s corn had yet to ripen. The relatively prosperous town of Espère obviously had nothing to gain when it applied the phrase to its neighbours:

  We have not yet seen our children munching grass like those of our neighbours, and our old people, happier than many of those in the surrounding region, almost all survived the rigours of last January. Only once did we have the affliction of seeing one of our own people die of hunger.

  If some of these accounts sound unconvincing, it is partly because they represent hours of intellectual labour. Their writers were struggling to find the right words, dressing up their misery in stiff, incongruous clothes for a trip to the city. Exaggeration was not a miserly ruse, it was a means of survival. Tax inspectors came to villages with armed dragoons on the lookout for signs of recent income: poultry feathers on a doorstep, a new suit of clothes, fresh repairs to rotting barns and crumbling walls. The collectors themselves were recruited locally and often barely numerate. They could be sent to prison if they failed to collect the prescribed amount.

  Even for prosperous peasants, disaster always loomed. Few lives were free from sudden setbacks. Every year, several villages and urban districts went up in smoke. An English traveller, crossing the Jura from Salins to Pontarlier in 1738, was told that ‘there is scarce a Village in all this Tract that does not perish by Flames once at least in 10 Years’. Salins itself was almost totally destroyed in 1825 by a fire that burned for three days. The city of Rennes disappeared in 1720 and much of Limoges in 1864. Thatch was cheap (gleaned from harvested fields in October), but it harboured huge populations of insects and caught fire easily unless it was completely covered by a layer of clay, quicklime, horse manure and sand. (In some parts, thatch was outlawed in new buildings in the mid-nineteenth century and replaced by the red corrugated iron that was thought to add a pleasant touch of colour to the landscape.) Many people burned to death in their homes or were killed when their house suddenly fell on them. The spontaneous combustion of dung heaps and haystacks was a surprisingly common cause of destitution and was often blamed on jealous neighbours and pyromaniac witches.

  Frosts, floods and livestock disease were the most frequent calamities after fire, but the greatest natural disasters were caused by hail. A ten-minute hailstorm could wipe out the work of a generation, demolishing roofs, stripping trees, flattening crops and covering the ground with a carpet of twigs, leaves and small dead birds. In 1789, the town of Pompey near Nancy was still recovering from the effects of a hailstorm that had decimated its harvest twelve years before. In 1900, forty years after a hailstorm swept through a valley in the Bourbonnais, some houses still had roofs that were half tile and half slate, because the local supply of tiles had been exhausted. Failure to prevent hailstorms was, understandably, one of the commonest causes of disenchantment with the local priest (see p. 127). More progressive towns and villages relied on the dubious effects of ‘anti-hail’ cannon, which were fired at the sky when dark battalions of storm clouds massed above the fields.

  These disasters affected all but a tiny minority of people. In a land of small, vulnerable pays, the section of the population comfortably referred to as ‘the poor’ could suddenly swell to enormous proportions. At the time of the Revolution, almost half the population of France could be described as poor or indigent. Depending on the region, between half and nine-tenths of families were unable to support themselves with the land they owned and were forced to sell their labour or fall into the stairless pit of debt. Hippolyte Taine’s image of the common people in his Origins of Contemporary France (1879) might seem melodramatic when compared to the steady march of economic progress, but it matches the simple evidence of daily life in every part of France:

  The people are like a man walking through a pond with water up to his chin. At the slightest dip in the ground, at the merest ripple, he loses his footing, sinks and suffocates. Old-fashioned charity and newfangled humanity try to help him out, but the water is too high. Until the level falls and the pond finds an outlet, the wretched man can only snatch an occasional gulp of air and at every instant he runs the risk of drowning.

  Taine’s alarming picture of a population sinking into destitution referred to the late eighteenth century but it could just as well have referred to much later periods.

  *
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br />   EVEN IF THEY WERE enterprising and intelligent and managed to acquire an education, and even if they were born in the more buoyant nineteenth century, life for most people was a game of snakes-and-ladders with very short ladders and very long snakes. The Breton peasant Jean-Marie Déguignet (1834–1905) wrote his memoirs because he had never read about anyone like himself, except in novels. In the Quimper public library, he saw a tiny part of French life brilliantly illuminated by a handful of egos while the mass of humanity was left in the dark. The bare facts of his own life are refreshingly unremarkable:

  1834, July. Born at Guengat in Lower Brittany. Poor harvests and sick livestock force his father, a tenant farmer, to leave for the city.

  1834, September. At the age of two months, moves to Quimper with some planks and straw, a cracked cauldron, eight bowls and eight wooden spoons. His earliest memory: watching his mother pluck fleas from his dead sister’s head.

  1840. Lives in the village of Ergué-Gabéric. Is kicked in the head by a horse and badly disfigured. For several years, suffers from a repulsive suppuration.

  1843–44. Is taught to read Breton by an old seamstress and learns the ‘noble profession’ of begging.

  1848–54. Works as a cowherd, as a field-hand on a governmentsponsored model farm and as a servant to the Mayor of Kerfeunteun, a suburb of Quimper. Learns to read the newspaper in French.

  1854–68. After enlisting in the army, serves in the Crimea, Algeria and Mexico.

  1868–79. Returns to Brittany, marries a young girl and rents some land from the owner of the château at Toulven. Despite opposition to his ‘new-fangled’ farming techniques (draining the barnyard and disinfecting the house, subscribing to an agricultural journal and ignoring the phases of the moon and his mother-in-law’s advice), he creates a highly successful farm.

  1879. The farmhouse burns down, and the landowner refuses to renew the lease. ‘Another fifteen years of my life wasted. After working so hard to improve that farm, now I had to leave it.’

  1880–82. Crushed by a cart and left half-crippled, he finds work as a fire-insurance salesman. His alcoholic wife is sent to the asylum.

  1883–92. Obtains a licence to sell tobacco in Pluguffan near Quimper. Rents a field and begins to rebuild his fortune. He supports himself and his three children.

  1892–1902. Forced to sell his tobacco shop and disowned by his children, he lives in slums and garrets, becomes progressively poorer and writes his memoirs ‘when the weather permits’.

  1902. Evicted from his rented ‘hole’ because of complaints about the filth. Suffers from paranoid delusions and attempts suicide. Committed to the mental hospital at Quimper. Dies at the age of seventy-one in 1905.

  As a literate, atheist Breton peasant with a passion for agricultural innovation, Déguignet was not entirely typical, but the world that wore him down was familiar to thousands of people: the precariousness of hard-won fortune and the weakness of family ties in the face of hardship. The modern edition of Déguignet’s memoirs appeals to a muddled sense of rustic nostalgia and suggests that the subject of the book is ‘The Waning of Rural France’. It describes him as a witness to ‘the start of the breakdown of traditional Breton society’. In fact, his memoirs describe the exact opposite. The society into which he was born was always on the verge of collapse – not just because of war or anarchy but also because of hunger, disease, bad weather, bad luck, ignorance and migration. Poverty pushed his family onto the road; fear and envy turned his neighbours into enemies; fire and feudal privilege destroyed his livelihood.

  There is something beautifully appropriate in Déguignet’s circular career. The boy who began his professional life as a beggar and ended it as an insurance salesman is a better symbol of his age than all the famous parvenus who left their place of birth and returned – if they returned at all – decades later, as a bust in the town hall or a statue in the square. As a beggar boy, Déguignet worked for a single mistress, lived from day to day and exploited the superstitions of his clients: they gave him the customary measure of oats or buckwheat flour because ‘they were convinced that they would get it back a hundredfold’, not in heaven, but quite literally, in the next few weeks or months. As a fire-insurance salesman, he worked for a company with offices in a city, followed set procedures and exploited his clients’ rational fears.

  It was thanks to innovations like insurance that families were able to plan for the future and to treat the next generation as something more precious than a source of cheap labour. In ‘traditional’ society, fairy tales presented child labour as something normal and necessary. In ‘The Three Spinners’, a father quite rightly decides to get rid of his daughter because ‘she ate [crêpes] but did no work’. Tearful tales of devoted children and family reunions were popular with bourgeois readers because they reflected aspirations, not because they were true to life. In Burgundy, until the eve of the First World War, relations between parents and children were distinctly unsentimental, according to a local historian: ‘The son was usually treated as a servant, minus the wages.’ Until the Second World War, peasant photograph albums almost never contained pictures of children.

  Déguignet was fortunate in having parents who wanted to keep him. Thousands of children – like Tom Thumb in the French fairy tale – were abandoned every year. At Provins, between 1854 and 1859, 1,258 children were deposited in the rotating barrel built into the wall of the general hospital. (It can now be seen in the local museum.) These tours d’abandon, which contained a straw bed and some ets, made it possible for mothers to abandon their babies anonymously and safely. They were outlawed as a public disgrace in 1861, which simply meant that more babies than before were left to die on doorsteps. In 1869, over 7 per cent of births in France were illegitimate, and one-third of those children were abandoned. Each year, fifty thousand human beings started life in France without a parent. Many were sent to the enterprising women known as ‘angel-makers’ who performed what can most kindly be described as postnatal abortions. A report on the hospice at Rennes defined them as ‘women who have no milk and who – doubtless for a fee – feloniously take care of several children at the same time. The children perish almost immediately.’

  Before 1779, the nuns who ran the foundling hospital in Paris were obliged by law to take the infant overflow from the provinces. This emergency regulation produced one of the strangest sights on the main roads of France. Long-distance donkeys carrying panniers stuffed with babies came to the capital from as far away as Brittany, Lorraine and the Auvergne. The carters set out on their two-hundred-and-fifty-mile journeys with four or five babies to a basket, but in towns and villages along the route they struck deals with midwives and parents. For a small fee, they would push in a few extra babies. To make the load more tractable and easier on the ears, the babies were given wine instead of milk. Those that died were dumped at the roadside like rotten apples. In Paris, the carters were paid by the head and evidently delivered enough to make it worth their while. But for every ten living babies that reached the capital, only one survived more than three days.

  These tiny, drunken creatures made epic journeys that dwarfed the journeys of most adults. The part they played in the history of France is microscopic and immense. Some of the few that survived would have joined the army of vagrants and labourers that eventually swelled the suburbs of industrial cities and helped to fuel a more stable French economy. Life for these landless servants of industry would be even more precarious than it had been for their parents in the fields.

  6

  Living in France, II: A Simple Life

  THE FEW TRAVELLERS who explored this suffering land of fragmented village states inevitably came to wonder how the geographical entity known as France could function as a political and economic unit. Perhaps, after all, things were not as bad as they seemed? As French historians have been pointing out ever since the English farmer Arthur Young made his agricultural tours of France in 1787, 1788 and 1789, not everyone was drowning in poverty
. Not all French towns were full of ‘crooked, dirty, stinking streets’ (Brive) and ‘excrementitious lanes’ (Clermont-Ferrand). Some of them, as Young observed, had ‘foot-pavements’ or trottoirs (Dijon and Tours). Not every tavern toilet was a ‘temple of abomination’ and not every serving-girl a ‘walking dung-hill’. Sometimes the traveller was spared the agony of eating his meal on a straight-backed, straw-bottomed chair, and sometimes a glimpse of the greasy, dog-fouled kitchen did not instantly remove his appetite. Many rural houses had windows, quite a few peasants wore shoes and stockings, and if the women of Languedoc went barefoot, at least they had the ‘superb consolation’ of walking on magnificent new roads.

  The lasting value of Arthur Young’s accounts, which were translated into French and widely read, lay in the fact that he confronted his agronomic theories with the evidence of his senses. The discovery of France by educated people made it possible to place the fragile existence of the majority in a wider picture, though the colour of individual lives was often lost in the landscape of economic abstraction. Those ‘walking dung-hills’ were, after all, human beings. They lived by the habits and beliefs of a particular society which had, however implausibly, survived for centuries. This society may not have matched the aspirations and convictions of middle-class observers, but it had a logic and efficiency of its own. The population of France was never a shapeless mass of human raw material, waiting to be processed by the huge, mutating machine of political interference and turned into the people conveniently known as ‘the French’.