The Discovery of France

by Graham Robb

  The social and political development of France owes a great deal to the supernatural acts of inanimate objects. By stubbornly remaining on common ground, the saints not only helped safeguard gleaning and grazing rights, they also acted as a link between communities. And while the saints were rooted to the spot, their mortal devotees travelled great distances to seek their help and advice. A pilgrimage could bring together the inhabitants of a whole group of villages or of two divided valleys. In the hilly diocese of Le Puy-en-Velay in the Haute-Loire département, sixty-three statues of the Virgin Mary are still the objects of large annual pilgrimages. The diocesan guide talks appropriately of particular Marys ‘draining’ a particular region. Many of them occupy key geographical positions. They are often found along the line of watersheds, with splendid views in all directions.

  The souvenir shops, the tour buses and the blundering amateur army of camper vans that now seem to spoil the high passes of the Alps and the Pyrenees are just a faint reflection of the pilgrim shantytowns that sprang up every year. The pilgrimage to Notre-Dame de Héas in a desolate part of the Pyrenees once attracted twelve thousand people at a time. The pilgrims arrived on foot, camped in fetid shacks, drank all night and told tales of Our Lady of Héas and how the masons who built the chapel were sustained by the milk of goats that mysteriously ran away before they could be eaten. At daybreak, mass was held and the priest’s assistant would beat the surging crowd away from the altar with a stick. Meanwhile, other pilgrims swarmed over the rock where the Virgin had appeared, hammering away like blacksmiths to dislodge a sacred fragment that would later be ground to dust and swallowed with holy water.

  Many attempts were made to end these rowdy festivals. A righteous holiday crowd that could fill a small town was an obvious threat to order. Three times, between 1798 and 1800, policemen and soldiers came to stop up the sacred well of Saint Clotilde, which was built on the site of a dolmen at Les Andelys on the Seine. Every year, on 2 June, the town was invaded by a ‘savage horde’ of pilgrims from all over Normandy. They took off their clothes and slithered into the water, holding onto their baskets and umbrellas – because Saint Clotilde also attracted thieves. After bathing, they snatched flaming branches from a bonfire and were sometimes badly burned. Children had been known to die after falling into the freezing waters of the healing spring. On the final attempt to close the shrine, two thousand stone-wielding bathers made the soldiers run away and then unplugged the well and wallowed in the water ‘with frenzied cries of triumph’.

  Whatever their therapeutic value, these pilgrimages were vital to the wealth and happiness of many regions. While fairs were primarily attended by men, pilgrimages involved whole communities. They were a chance to exchange news, to see another place and to take a holiday, which is partly why the people of Lourdes always went somewhere else to be healed by the Virgin Mary. Before bicycles and railways, pilgrimages expanded and consolidated areas of trade, which might explain why so many Virgins appeared between regions that offered different kinds of agricultural produce. Just as fairs made it possible to improve livestock, pilgrimages – which some observers crudely described as ‘orgies’ – had a similar effect on the human stock. At the pilgrimage to Sainte–Baume in southern Provence, each village had its own defensive encampment in the woods, but lovers came in the night and the saint’s reputation for making marriages was never seriously threatened.

  A pilgrimage was above all a rite of passage and something to look back on with pride. In Restif de la Bretonne’s part of Burgundy, a boy who had never gone to Mont-Saint-Michel (three hundred miles away) ‘was considered a coward’, and a girl who had never visited the tomb of Sainte Reine (forty miles to the east) ‘seemed to lack modesty’. It might be the only long journey a person ever made. On many of the Provenc¸al mountains, these voyages of a lifetime had been marked for countless centuries by little piles of stones and votive offerings that littered the otherwise deserted land. Now that most pilgrim sites have been tidied up, the best place to see the poignant, personal effect of these offerings is on the lunar upper slopes of Mont Ventoux, where, all summer long, a stream of quietly exhilarated cyclists deposits water bottles, inner tubes and stones at the foot of the memorial to the British rider Tom Simpson who collapsed and and died there during the 1967 Tour de France. The jersey he was wearing at the time can be seen with other relics at a chapel in the Armagnac dedicated to Notre–Dame des Cyclistes.

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  VISITORS TO THIS LAND of independent saints and pilgrims might reasonably have asked: Where was the Church in all of this? Where was that religious golden age when humble peasants looked to the priest for guidance and salvation?

  The beloved village priest, that staple figure of Romantic fiction, was a very rare breed. In most people’s minds, the man in black was supposed to be useful, like a doctor, a snake-catcher or a witch. He should be willing to write inaccurate letters of recommendation, to read the newspaper and to explain government decrees. He should also be able to pull strings in the spirit world, influence the weather and cure people and animals of rabies. (This partly explains the godlike status of Louis Pasteur, who developed a vaccine for rabies in 1885.) Naturally, this put the priest in a tricky position. If he refused to ring the bells to prevent a hailstorm, he was useless. If he rang the bells and it hailed anyway, he was inept. In 1874, the curé of the Limousin village of Burgnac refused to join a ‘pagan’ harvest procession. It duly hailed, the harvest was lost, and the curé had to be rescued from an angry crowd. To the poor sharecropper who led the crowd, this sort of behaviour made no sense at all: ‘Why would a priest who preaches religion try to do away with it?’

  If his magic powers were weak, the priest would be seen as a busybody and a kill-joy. No one took kindly to an outsider who tried to stop people feasting in the cemetery, chatting and walking about during mass and bringing their animals into church to be blessed. The curé of Ars, Jean-Marie Vianney (1786–1859), who became the object of a pilgrimage, is the only priest who managed to make his parishioners give up dancing and drinking. He did not become the patron saint of parish priests because he was typical. Most other priests who won the hearts of their parishioners did so by reaching a quiet compromise with the pagan world. Since the majority of priests were the sons of artisans and peasants, many of them shared the fears and visions of their flock. In the 1770s, a curé near Auch was heard to call out before mass, ‘Sorcerers and sorceresses, wizards and witches, leave thou the Church ere the Holy Sacrifice commence!’ –at which some of the congregation stood up and went out.

  No one can say exactly what the Church meant to people who lived in fear of evil spirits, lit candles to their saint and sprinkled holy water on their fields. Statistical maps of the spiritual life of France seem to show a persistent pattern. In 1790, priests were required to swear an oath declaring their loyalty to the Constitution and acknowledging that they were first and foremost employees of the state. Over half of all parish priests swore the oath, but in some parts, over threequarters refused, presumably with the support of their flock. The areas of greatest resistance – the west of France from the Vendée to Calvados, the north and north-east, the southern Massif Central and much of the south – are also the areas where, a hundred years later, church attendance was highest.

  The implications for the Church, however, are far from obvious. Simply attending a service was no more proof of religious fervour than it is today. In the Var, in south-eastern Provence, many priests swore allegiance to the state, and church attendance was poor, but attendance at popular festivals and pilgrimages was very high. In the neighbouring département, the Basses-Alpes, church attendance was high but, considering the congregations’ behaviour, only the most optimistic bishop could interpret this as a sign of popular devotion to the Church. In 1759, a chaplain at Ribiers threatened his flock with excommunication if they failed to cooperate with a police investigation. Women in the congregation stormed the altar, tore off his wig, destroyed the processional crosse
s and beat him with the broken pieces. Apparently, they were concerned, not about their eternal souls, but about the possible effect of this priestly magic on the harvest. Not all anti-clerical violence was perpetrated by atheist revolutionaries.

  The only certainty seems to be that France was a Catholic country, in the sense that it was not a Protestant country. Even this distinction is not as illuminating as it sounds.17 The military campaign against the Protestants of the Cévennes after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) had some popular support, and at the time of the Revolution there were people in the regions of Toulouse and Nîmes who believed that the Edict of Toleration (1787) and the oath to the Constitution (1790–91) were part of a Protestant plot. Fifty years later, in Nîmes and Montpellier, particularly among the bourgeoisie, the old religious divide was reflected in political allegiance, place of residence and choice of wife or husband. But there are just as many signs of religious tolerance and indifference. In the early 1800s, priests in the Bordelais and the Périgord were distressed to see Catholics and Protestants ‘showing mutual affection’. ‘Mixed’ churches in Alsace, where the choir was reserved for Catholics and closed off with a curtain or a grille during the Protestant service, were still in use in the 1860s. Several Catholic communities in the Auvergne, the Limousin and the Périgord converted to Protestantism overnight when the Church became too demanding, meddlesome and expensive.

  The history of persecution has dates and memorable scenes. The history of indifference is harder to trace, except through the occasional observations of outsiders. In 1878, Robert Louis Stevenson arrived with his donkey at Florac (Lozère), which had been a frontier town in the days of Protestant persecution. Coming from a land where sectarian violence was common, he found the combination of long memories and religious tolerance extraordinary:

  I observed that Protestant and Catholic intermingled in a very easy manner; and it surprised me to see what a lively memory still subsisted of the religious war . . .

  Later in the day one of the Protestant pastors was so good as to visit me . . . Florac, he told me, is part Protestant, part Catholic; and the difference in religion is usually doubled by a difference in politics. You may judge of my surprise . . . when I learned that the population lived together on very quiet terms; and there was even an exchange of hospitalities between households thus doubly separated. . . . They had all been sabring and shooting, burning, pillaging, and murdering, their hearts hot with indignant passion; and here, after a hundred and seventy years, Protestant is still Protestant, Catholic still Catholic, in mutual toleration and mild amity of life.

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  MANY OF THE MISSIONARIES who set out to ‘reconvert’ the population, in the early Middle Ages or the early twentieth century, did not automatically assume that France was a Christian country. The religion known as Druidism had been eradicated, at least in its established form, by the Romans, but ‘pagan’ gods – the gods of a pagus or a pays – seemed to carry on much as before. Even in Brittany, which was supposed to be a bastion of Catholicism, the Church was important in the same way that a shopping mall is important to shoppers: the customers were not especially interested in the creator and owner of the mall; they came to see the saints, who sold their wares in little chapels around the nave. New saints were still being created in the nineteenth century in total disregard of Church dogma: the well-preserved corpse of a long-suffering wife, a victim of the Chouan rebellion who had died on a suicide mission, a hairy hermit living in a tree and even some popular priests on whose tombstones sick children were laid. Even more recently, the ruined prehistoric chamber advertised to tourists as ‘Merlin’s Tomb’ in the Paimpont forest in Brittany has become a religious site. Prayers to Merlin the Enchanter, written on paper, are regularly deposited around the tomb and inserted in a cleft in the rock.

  These beliefs thrived on the established Church like mistletoe on an oak. They had no religious institutions of their own, but they were consistent enough, throughout France and much of Western Europe, to be described as a form of religion. The nameless faith borrowed elements of Christianity but dispensed with most of its moral and theological foundations, and reorganized the hierarchy of sacred beings. The Virgin Mary was always more important than God. Like his son, God offered neither redemption nor forgiveness. He had been known to destroy towns and to cause serious road accidents just to make his point. He was no more popular than a bishop. In 1872, a woman in Chartres who was standing in the way of a church procession was asked to make way for le lion Dieu’. She retorted, ‘Huh! I didn’t come here for him, I came for her’ (pointing at the Virgin).

  The Devil was almost as powerful as God and far more accommodating. Not all of the forty-nine ‘Devil’s Bridges’ in France should provoke a feeling of satanic dread. Any stroke of luck – finding buried treasure, coming into an inheritance, not losing livestock to an epidemic, or a rockfall that conveniently bridged a torrent – was probably the Devil’s work. Despite his power, the Devil, who usually looked like a gentleman or a wealthy farmer, was notoriously gullible and had sometimes been tricked into building churches and abbeys. He built most of his bridges on the understanding that he would be given the first soul to cross the bridge, only to be fobbed off with a cat.

  Jesus Christ was a relatively minor figure. In the not-so-distant past, he had walked the land dispensing practical advice. He was known to have been a beggar, which explained his resourcefulness and cunning. In pseudo-Gospel stories – told as though they were local events – Jesus would try to beat some sense into his muddleheaded sidekick, Saint Peter: ‘You fool! You never blab about an animal’s faults at the fair before selling it and getting your hands on the money!’

  God, the Devil and Jesus, like Gargantua and the fairy Mélusine, were the protagonists of folk tales who had been active in the recent past. They were the stuff of veillées and chambrées – the informal assemblies where villagers got together to frighten each other, or to conjure away the fear of night, with tales of weird beings: the heavenly hunt that passed overhead in the evening sky with strange cries; werewolves, the Devil’s Cow, the vouivre (a flying snake with a carbuncle for an eye), the lupeux (a gnarly creature often seen sitting on a twisted tree trunk), hornèd men who stole young girls because there were no hornèd women, mermen who broke fishing nets and green men who were harmless, and of course the Beast of the Gévaudan, which really existed.18 The main difference between the Christian figures and the pagan fairies is that the fairies were generally expected to return in the next century or as soon as Christianity came to an end.

  These legendary or part-legendary figures were spectacularly outnumbered and out-performed by saints. Unlike God and the fairies, saints belonged to everyday life. On his own ground, a saint was more effective than God. As the curé of Étaples near Le Touquet reported to his bishop, referring to the local miracle-working saint, ‘There are two “dear Lords” at Étaples: the real one and Saint Josse, and I’m not at all sure that Saint Josse isn’t number one.’

  Saints were associated with solid facts like an attribute or a name. Saint Anthony is often depicted with the pig of gluttony, which made him popular with swineherds; John the Baptist held the Lamb of God and was the favourite saint of shepherds. Saint Pissoux was supposed to be good for urinary infections, Saint Bavard (‘chatty’) for mutes and Saint Clair (‘clear’) for the short-sighted. Where no suitable name existed, a new saint was created. ‘Saint Sourdeau’ cared for the deaf, ‘Saint Plouradou’ dealt with crying children and ‘Saint Sequayre’ (as in sec) caused one’s enemies to shrivel up and die. In Normandy, reciting the service of the Toussaint (All Saints’ Day) was thought to be good for people with a cold because Toussaint sounds like tousser (to cough).

  The great advantage of the saints was that they actually existed in the material world. Some of them can still be seen in churches, where they often have a dual audience: a parishioner or a pilgrim communicating with a real being, and a tourist looking at an example of religious ar
t. A saint was not a theological concept or an artistic representation. The statue or figurine was the saint. This is why people were so upset when their curé tried to replace a filthy, shapeless and sometimes partially incinerated lump of wood with a shiny new saint fresh from the factory. The new Saint Aygulf at Notre-Dame de Brusc near Grasse (a Christianized pagan deity who could make it rain and whose petitioners always carried umbrellas when they came to pray) had a golden crosier, a coat and a lily and pink complexion and was completely useless. The new Black Virgin at Le Puy-en-Velay was known to perform fewer miracles than the old one, despite the fact that the latter had been denounced as a statue of Isis brought back from the Crusades.

  The life of the saint was determined, logically, by the physical composition of the effigy. A certain Saint Greluchon started life as the funerary statue of a lord at Bourbon-l’Archambault. (Other Greluchons or Guerlichons – from a word for a little boy’s penis – were popular throughout the Berry and the Bourbonnais.) Infertile women came to scratch away his genitals and drink the dust in a little white wine. The more determined women, who wanted twins, came with rasps and knives. When the genitals had gone, they started on his chin, and by the time he was placed in the local museum in 1880, he was just a mutilated bust. A museum employee was later sacked for scraping at the replacement chin.