The Discovery of France

by Graham Robb

  Higher ground slowed the rumours but did not stop them. The lofty Massif Central, bypassed by travelling apprentices, kings and theatre companies on tour, Napoleon Bonaparte, several epidemics and, until 1951, the Tour de France, was infiltrated from the north, the east and the west. From one day to the next, a rumour that the King of Sardinia had launched an invasion left Briançon and crossed the 8,000-foot Col d’Izoard into the Queyras and the Ubaye before rushing down into Mediterranean Provence and, incredibly, across the tight, plunging valleys to the west. The rumours died out only when faced with the combined passive force of sparse population and difficult terrain (the Plateau de Millevaches, some of the highest Alpine massifs, the Sologne, the Dombes and the Landes).

  This mysteriously efficient network was still functioning after the fall of Napoleon. In 1816, the deposed emperor was rumoured to have escaped from St Helena and returned to Paris. One such rumour sprang up – simultaneously, it seemed – in Nemours and parts of Burgundy and the Bourbonnais. The authorities understandably suspected a well-organized plot. Agents provocateurs were active, but not necessarily in this case. News that spread like a stain instead of travelling from A to B could cover vast areas in very little time. The scattered sources of rumours reaching the little market town of Charlieu, in the hills between the Forez and the Beaujolais (reported at a public meeting on 28 July 1789), indicate a rumour catchment area of three thousand square miles. This particular area included five or six major dialects and the three main language groups of France. No pigeon, horse or locomotive could have disseminated news so quickly.

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  A PARTIAL EXPLANATION of these coincidences and connections could be found by following some of the thousands of migrant workers who ranged across the land.

  The aspect of their world that now seems most conspicuously exotic was not officially discovered and described until the early nineteenth century. When Napoleon’s statisticians first surveyed the westernmost Breton département, Finistère, they were startled to find that almost one-fifth of the total surface was taken up by ‘roads and byways’ – ruts, paths, cartways and great trampled swathes of land that were lost to agriculture and often unusable even as tracks. Paradoxically, this inaccessible part of France was riddled with routes. Further studies confirmed the incredible figures. Finistère was an extreme case, but many other départements turned out to be crazed with tiny roads: 12 percent of the Bas-Rhin, 4 percent of the Vienne, 3 per cent of the Nord, just under 2 per cent of the Haute-Marne, 1.4 per cent of the Pas-de-Calais. The effect can still be pictured in some parts of France. So many different roads once ran from Beauvais to Amiens that six of them still exist, all more or less the same length (thirty-five to thirty-nine miles) and sometimes close enough for a person on one road to wave to someone on the other.

  The huge discrepancy between the trifling amount of traffic on main roads and the quantities of goods delivered to markets and ports suggests that three-quarters of all trade in the early nineteenth century passed through this all-encompassing web. This was the system of fragile capillaries that carried the rumours and news. Many of these paths had no visible existence, even to a person standing on one. The French word route, which means both ‘route’ and ‘road’, preserves the ambiguity. Some routes, like smugglers’ paths in Brittany and the Basque Country, were little more than memories passed on from one generation to the next. A featureless meadow on the high plains of Provence where a stranger would see nothing but grass blowing in the wind might be a major European crossroads between the Alps, the Mediterranean, the Rhône Valley and northern Italy. When he was trudging south through the Cévennes from Le Monastier to Saint-Jean-du-Gard in 1878, Robert Louis Stevenson imagined himself a hundred miles from civilization:

  My road lay through one of the most beggarly countries in the world. It was like the worst of the Scottish Highlands, only worse; cold, naked, and ignoble, scant of wood, scant of heather, scant of life. A road and some fences broke the unvarying waste, and the line of the road was marked by upright pillars, to serve in time of snow.

  In fact, much of the ‘Stevenson Trail’, as it is now known, runs along the 140-mile route known, for part of its length, as the Voie Regordane (the origin of the name is obscure). This had been a major north–south route since pre-human times, when a fault line opened up a succession of passes linking the Massif Central with the Mediterranean. In the mid-eighteenth century, a hundred mule drivers regularly plied the Voie Regordane with their clanging mule trains, taking metals and materials down to the inland port of Saint-Gilles and returning with produce for the Auvergne and the main road to Paris in baskets and goatskins. In some of those desolate highland towns, Stevenson could have bought wine, olive oil, salted fish, almonds, oranges, figs and raisins, not to mention salt, soap, paper and a proper packsaddle for his donkey.

  Stevenson actually saw a relatively dynamic part of the Auvergne. He was able to pay for things with money and stayed in inns that had ticking clocks. He enjoyed luxurious breakfasts of chocolate, brandy and cigarettes. When he walked along the road, he heard the sound of the wind in telegraph wires. Bands of harvesters watched him pass as they walked across the fields. On the high road, for the twelve miles between Le Bouchet-St-Nicolas and Pradelles, the only other travellers he saw were ‘a cavalcade of stride-legged ladies and a pair of post-runners’, but he also saw some of the million tendrils of the other network that carried most of the traffic:

  The little green and stony cattle-tracks wandered in and out of one another, split into three or four, died away in marshy hollows, and began again sporadically on hillsides or at the borders of a wood.

  There was no direct road to Cheylard, and it was no easy affair to make a passage in this uneven country and through this intermittent labyrinth of tracks.

  This labyrinth is the reason why the towns and villages of France were both cut off and connected. Wares and produce travelled through the system of tracks and tiny roads by something akin to Brownian motion, changing hands slowly over great distances. When the main roads were improved and railways were built, trade was drained from the capillary network, links were broken, and a large part of the population suddenly found itself more isolated than before. Many regions today are experiencing the same effect because of the TGV railway system.

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  IT WOULD TAKE a thousand separate maps to show the movements of the migrant population through this labyrinth of tracks, but an excellent overall view can be gained from any large–scale relief map or satellite photograph.

  At this height above the land, a diagonal line can be seen running from the western Pyrenees to the Vosges, marking off the highest ground and dividing the country roughly into two. Migrants originating south and east of the line flowed from the highlands like melting snow while transhumant animals headed for the mountains. A saying in western Languedoc described it nicely: ‘Crabas amont, filhas aval’ (‘Goats go up and girls go down’). In this half of France, the main watershed was the ancient collapsed volcano called the Cantal. It covers an area of almost a thousand square miles, which makes it the largest volcanic structure in Europe. From the to département which the Cantal gave its name, thousands of men, women and children descended every year to the plains of Gascony and Spain, to the Mediterranean and Marseille, to Lyon and the Rhône valley and to Poitou and the Paris Basin

  This was the zone of long-distance migration. North and west of the line, seasonal migration tended to be shorter. In this half of France, people were more likely to die within sight of their village steeple, and their knowledge of the outside world was more likely to be passive. They heard about events from the semi-nomadic individuals who moved about the country: bell-founders, knife-grinders, distillers and pedlars; wine- and corn-brokers; wandering singers, circus acts and quack doctors; hair-harvesters who collected raw material for wig-makers, clog-makers who set up temporary villages in forests, and beggars who made themselves welcome by bringing news and gossip and sometimes love letters.
Some of these shortrange nomads were listed in an army handbook of 1884 as a vital source of information on a region:

  Deserters, strangers passing through, homeless people arrested by the police . . . hunters, poachers, shepherds, charcoal burners, woodcutters . . . It is best to take several and to question them separately. . . . Smugglers and pedlars make particularly good spies.

  Mass movements in this lowland half of the country were comparatively modest, though they were still great odysseys to the people who undertook them. In spring, long processions of young girls followed by pack donkeys carrying luggage and the weary headed for the Brie, the Beauce and the Gâtinais, where they hoed the fields before returning to Burgundy in time for the wine harvest. The wheat fields of the Paris Basin also drew huge bands of farmworkers from northern France. Groups of migrant harvesters still appear in late summer and early autumn, travelling in trucks or living in caravans, attaching little suburbs of washing lines and satellite dishes to the edges of vineyards. Occasionally, a family of migrant agricultural workers can be seen walking one behind the other, intent on the road ahead, and moving at a pace that seems slow only at a distance.

  These seasonal migrants were once a more obvious presence, in towns as well as in the countryside. On certain days, the main squares of towns and cities filled up at dawn with hundreds of families who had walked through the night with their sickles wrapped in spare clothes. The markets were known as loues or louées. Harvesters wore ears of corn, shepherds sported tufts of wool and carters hung whips around their necks. Domestic servants wore their best clothes and carried a distinctive bouquet or some foliage to serve as identification. The employer would make them walk up and down to prove that they were not crippled and inspect their hands for the calluses that showed that they were hard workers. A coin placed in the hand sealed the contract. As the day wore on, the crowd of hopefuls became smaller, older and more decrepit. Those that remained at the very end of the day might follow the harvest anyway as gleaners, covering hundreds of miles in a month or two before returning home.

  In the highland half of France, the trade in human beings took more dramatic forms. Well into the second half of the nineteenth century, travellers heading east in the autumn would see large bands of little boys – and some girls in disguise – dressed in coarse brown cloth and wearing broad-rimmed hats and hobnail boots, marching towards Paris from Dauphiné, Savoy and Piedmont. Some were only five years old. In the capital, they were known as ‘winter swallows’ because they appeared in the streets just as the birds were flying south and the weather was turning cold.

  A month before, children from different villages had gathered in the plains below the Alps. Their parents gave them a little money, two or three shirts wrapped in a handkerchief, some stony black bread, a passport and sometimes a crude map showing the location of relatives or friends along the route. They walked up to fifty miles a day, sleeping in barns and supplementing the everlasting loaf with stolen eggs and apples. On the long route from Savoy to Lyon and on to Paris and the north, they had time to rehearse their songs and street cries and perhaps some conjuring tricks. The boys from Piedmont often had a triangle or a hurdy-gurdy; others carried a marmot in a cage or a ferret for catching rats. Most of the boys from Savoy were destined to spend the next ten years scraping soot from Parisian chimneys or carrying water up to apartments in tin buckets. Many of them would also work as messengers, boot-blacks and shop-boys.

  Child migration came to be seen as a form of slavery and a threat to public order, though there was no effective legislation until the 1870s. To the people themselves, it was a highly organized, respectable and necessary activity. In Dauphiné villages where land and resources were scarce, many children were rented out to employers who paid the parents between fifty and eighty francs a year. The boys had to deliver themselves to the city – Paris, Lyon or Marseille, sometimes Turin or Milan. In Paris, they found their way to the squalid area around the Place Maubert in the Latin Quarter or to the Rue Guérin-Boisseau near the Porte Saint-Denis. There, they were given a bed and instructed in the art of begging. Next morning, they went out with their marmots and begging bowls in groups of three or four. This was their life for the next three or six years, depending on the contract signed by their parents. If they returned at night to the hostel with less than a franc, they were given nothing, but for anything over a franc, they received a commission of 10 or 20 per cent. As part of the deal, every afternoon, they were given reading and catechism lessons. These arrangements were well known to middle-class Parisians who generally considered it the done thing – until immigrant workers became a political issue – to help these little creatures from the furthest corners of France.

  The Savoyard chimney sweeps lived under a slightly different regime. On reaching the city, they split up into village groups. Each had its own dormitory and canteen. A spartan building in a particular street might look like a part of Paris when in fact it was a colony of Savoy controlled by a Savoyard sweep-master. The master might also sell pots and pans or rabbit-skins and keep an eye on the boys as they went about the city shouting, ‘Haut en bas!’ (‘Top to bottom!’) If a boy stole money or misbehaved, he was punished according to Savoyard tradition. Boys who fled into the back streets were always found: chimney sweeps knew the city as well as any policeman and better than most Parisians. In severe cases, the culprit was expelled from the community.

  A boy who suffered this banishment within exile might be able to find work if he stood with his kneepads and scraping tool in the crowd of unemployed urchins who gathered at the Porte Saint-Denis and the Rue Basse-du-Rempart, on the site of the future Place de l’Opéra. If he was lucky, he might be adopted by a benevolent society and given a proper apprenticeship. If not, he might be trained and dressed by a pimp and turned into one of the hundreds of ‘petits jésus’ (rent-boys) who worked on the Champs-É lysées and other parts of the city’s perimeter.

  The sweeps who avoided asphyxiation, lung disease and blindness, and who never fell from a roof, might one day set up on their own as stove-fitters. Nearly all of them returned home to marry. Their tie to the homeland was never broken. When he emerged from the chimney onto the roof of a Parisian apartment block, a Savoyard sweep could always see the Alps.

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  THE BANDS OF HARVESTERS and the armies of children account for something like 15 per cent of the half million or so people who moved about the land. Theirs was a relatively concentrated and gregarious form of migration. Other migrants, like the pedlars and smugglers mentioned by the army handbook, covered the ground more thoroughly, moving through the labyrinth like sap through a tree.

  Every year, until the 1870s, thousands of colporteurs (pedlars) left mountain villages with hundred-pound baskets or pine-wood chests strapped to their backs. A stick at the rear allowed them to rest without removing the load. Inside, the merchandise was arranged in smaller baskets and covered with spare clothes. Weight was obviously critical. The pedlars’ baskets were masterpieces of packing. One man’s basket in 1841 contained 9,800 pins, 6,084 bobbins, 3,888 buttons, 3,000 needles, 36 thimbles, 36 combs, 24 lengths of cotton, 18 snuffboxes, 96 pens and pencils, 200 quills, 40 pairs of scissors and an assortment of hooks-and-eyes, knives, notebooks, suspenders and cakes of soap. Other popular items included religious trinkets, herbal remedies, anything made of silk and, once botanizing tourists had shown there was a market for them, Alpine plants and seeds. A colporteur from lower Normandy who died at Longpont in the Perche in 1788 had left his trunk with the curé for safe keeping. It measured three foot by one and a half and was fitted with leather backstraps. The trunk was divided into seven boxes and seven drawers, containing three hundred and eighty-two samples of forty-one different items (two of the drawers were empty), including watch-chains, scissors, seals, earrings, spectacles, razors, knives, ribbons, gloves, stockings and an IOU for a silver watch.

  Some of the most profitable merchandise weighed nothing. Longdistance pedlars took advantage of a beli
ef that mountain folk had magic powers. A spell uttered in a strange and incomprehensible dialect could be very convincing. Some pedlars offered medical and veterinary services. They pierced ears, extracted teeth and told fortunes. Even after the practice was outlawed in 1756, Bearnese pedlars in Spain castrated boys whose parents hoped to secure them a place in a cathedral choir. On the return journey, if they followed the routes from Santiago de Compostela to Rocamadour and Le Puy-en- Velay, they could pretend to be pilgrims and beg their way home from one abbey to the next.

  Deceit was a particular speciality of pedlars from the Auvergne. A single piece of cloth could be made to last a whole season if it was sold with the promise that a tailor would come the next day and make up the clothes for nothing. The tailor would arrive, measure the customer, take the cloth and never return. The drawback was that a dishonest salesman had to cover vast areas compared to a pedlar who earned the trust of his clientele.

  One form of deceit, known as ‘la pique’, was a major industry. A sympathetic village priest would sign a letter explaining that the bearer had suffered terrible calamities and was a worthy object of charity: his farm had burned down, his animals were diseased, his wife was on her deathbed and someone had stolen all their money

  The person who wrote the letter took a share of the proceeds. Apparently, old women made the best pique writers. A priest who was questioned after the arrest of two pedlars on the pique freely admitted that he had signed the bogus document. Even if the details were false, the poverty was real, and a man who was prepared to walk hundreds of miles to make a living from sympathy was at least relieving pressure on village resources.