by Graham Robb
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WITH AN ENTIRELY law-abiding population, much of France would have been cut off from the outside world. Smuggling, too, was a major industry that kept the tiny channels of communication open. In some parts, it was practically the only industry. The inhabitants of frontier towns such as Le Pont-de-Beauvoisin, which straddles the France-Savoy border, did little else. Some Provençal villages abandoned agriculture for contraband, and some monasteries had suspiciously large stores of alcohol and tobacco. Nice, which was a separate state until 1860, could export east into Italy and west across the river Var into France.
The frontier between France and Spain was like a sieve. In the west, the hills of the Basque Country were criss-crossed by the smugglers’ paths that were later used by guerrillas, Résistants and Basque terrorists. In the east, Catalans and Roussillonnais ran a thriving criminal economy. A report to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1773 complained that ‘you can’t put one foot in front of the other without running into a band of armed smugglers’. These were not furtive figures creeping about in the undergrowth. They moved in platoons of fifty, with another platoon behind to provide backup. They were fed, paid a salary and divided into ranks like soldiers.
In Brittany, thousands of heavily laden women carrying cakes of salt and over-salted butter poured into Maine, pretending to be pregnant. More than twelve thousand children were tried for smuggling at the salt court in Laval in 1773. This figure included only children who were caught with contraband weighing fifteen pounds or more. When they grew up, some of them would join what was practically an Anglo-French common market. Breton sailors carried brandy to Plymouth while Cornishmen brought tobacco to Roscoff.
The sea lanes used by Gallo-Roman traders and Norman invaders remained as busy as ever, especially when Napoleon imposed the Continental System (1806–13). A smugglers’ slang is said to have been in use on both sides of the Channel. Smugglers from Saint- Malo and Granville could converse with Channel Islanders in Norman French. An American visitor to northern France in 1807 found suspicious signs that, despite Napoleon, Calais and Boulogne were still on excellent trading terms with Dover and Hastings:
Eggs, bacon, poultry, and vegetables, seemed in great plenty, and, as I understood, composed the dinners of the peasantry twice a week at least. I was surprised at this evident abundance in a class in which I should not have expected it. Something of it, I fear, must be imputed to the extraordinary profits of the smuggling which is carried on along the coast.
All this suggests that, while customs barriers stifled trade, they did not necessarily increase isolation. The ‘fortress’ of France was remarkably porous. Any commemoration of European unity should remember the smugglers and pedlars who helped to keep the borders open.
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IF THE WELL-BEING of a nation is defined by industrialization and investment, the to-ing and fro-ing and scrimping and saving of half a million migrant workers and petty criminals looks like the feeble activity of a backward economy. But if the entire land mass is taken into account, it seems to indicate a state of health that France has never completely recovered. Maps of the population by département seem to show the country entering a new Dark Age in the late nineteenth century. Between 1801 and 1911, when the total population of France increased by more than ten million, the population of nineteen départements fell, including several départements close to Paris. In another fourteen de´partements, it increased by less than fifty thousand. Today, thirty-six départements, representing 40 per cent of the surface of France, have fewer inhabitants than they did a century and a half ago. Seasonal migration may have involved less than 2 per cent of the population but it had a vital effect. It prevented the haemorrhaging of the land by allowing wealth to reach less productive parts.
The results can still be seen in some parts of France: the twostorey ‘maisons de lait’ (milk houses) in Burgundy villages that were built with money earned by wet-nurses; the summer villas of retired water-carriers in the remote Cantal; the incongruously grand mansions that began to appear in Barcelonnette and Aiguilles when umbrella salesmen returned to the Alps from South America and when local cheeses began to reach the Mediterranean and even crossed the Atlantic in lead-lined boxes.
The ant-like movements of the migrant minority not only spread wealth but also delayed the growth of the cities. Until permanent migration became the norm in the late nineteenth century, Paris was not the all-consuming gravitational centre of France. The capital was well served by the major rivers of north-eastern France – Yonne, Seine, Marne, Aisne and Oise – but not by the rivers that rise in the Massif Central. The best roads out of the Auvergne all led south. A trade route to Bordeaux, Toulouse, Montpellier or Marseille, busy with mule trains and pilgrims, was preferable to an obscure track that led north into lands where people spoke a different language. Even in the early twentieth century, many villages in the southern Auvergne and Périgord had closer ties with Spain than with the northern half of France. Basque families were just as likely to have relatives in Buenos Aires and, eventually, Manhattan, as in Paris.
If all these routes could have been plotted on a map, the picture would have looked more like Roman Gaul than the Paris-centric road and rail systems of the twenty-first century. Early maps of literacy show the same unexpected pattern. Some regions that were supposed to be far from the light of civilization turned out to have surprisingly high rates of literacy: the Cantal, the Isère, the Drô me, the Alpine départements and Savoy. When Balzac described a cultural missionary in The Country Doctor (1833), ‘improving an uncultivated corner of the world [in the Dauphiné] and civilizing its inhabitants who have been deprived of intelligence’, he was transposing his largely illiterate native province of Touraine to the Alps, about which he knew very little. Many Alpine villages had been running their own schools for decades, not to provide a general education but to train the next generation of pedlars. They taught arithmetic, account-keeping and business French. Children in the Oisans region east of Grenoble copied out and memorized model letters. The following example was supposed to be sent by a successful pedlar who had escaped the drudgery of home and was living it up in the capital:
And so, dear friend, as you can see, we have many more pleasures than at home, where all we do is go from one relative to the next to bid them good day. I strongly urge you to come and live in Paris so that you might taste its delights.
The idea that the salvation of communities depended on smallscale, individual efforts is still apparent in French agricultural policies. Some attitudes that seem parochial and protectionist reflect an accurate perception of French rather than Parisian history. In Victorian Britain, the catastrophic coincidence of urbanization and industrialization created vast polluted zones of misery and disease. In France, most industrial workers were either domestic, like the weavers of Normandy and Lyon, or seasonal, like the mountain people who sweated for six or seven months in the oil-, soap- and perfume factories of Aix and Marseille before returning home to buy a plot of land. Most mills and factories were small enough to ignore the law on child labour that, until 1874, applied only to workshops employing more than twenty people. Unlike British industry, French industry was devoted predominantly to the production of so-called articles de Paris – luxury goods such as clocks, jewellery, furniture, fashion accessories, domestic utensils and artificial flowers. As the Larousse dictionary boasted in 1872, France may lag behind Britain and Germany in heavy industry, ‘but it has no equal in all industries which demand elegance and grace and which are more concerned with art than with manufacture’.
Apart from a few industrial boom towns like Roubaix and Montluc ¸on (pp. 264, 346), French cities remained within their old walls. In 1860, when the boundaries of Paris were extended to include some outlying villages – Montmartre, Grenelle, Vaugirard, etc. – Honoré Daumier published a caricature of a clumpy peasant couple in clogs and smocks standing in a ploughed field with a Paris skyline in the distance, saying, ‘To think we’re now Parisians!
’ The suburban ocean of mud and the tiny island-city were just a slight exaggeration. In most parts, a migrant worker entering a town would be announced by the echoing clatter of his hobnail boots on the cobbles. In 1839, Balzac described a sixteen-year-old travelling apprentice arriving one October morning in the town of Provins (Seine-et-Marne). Provins stood on one of the main roads to the east and had mills, tanneries, brickworks and a sugar-beet distillery. It produced roses for nurseries and chemists (the petals were used in cordials and lotions) and had a healthy trade in grain, flour, wine, wool and mineral water. It held four big fairs a year and was just seven hours from Paris on the mail coach.
He stopped in a little square in the lower part of Provins. At that time of day, he could examine, without being seen, the various houses that stand on the square, which is oblong in shape. The mills along the rivers of Provins were already turning. The sound of their wheels, repeated by the echoes of the upper town, in harmony with the keen air and the sparkling light of morning, only intensified the silence in which it was possible to hear the clanking of a diligence a league away on the high road. . . . There were no signs of commerce, and hardly any of those luxurious carriage-gates of the rich. What few there were rarely turned on their hinges, except those belonging to M. Martener, a doctor who was forced to keep a carriage and to use it.
Most French towns and cities effectively had huge, sparsely populated conurbations of several thousand square miles from which people commuted for several days, weeks or months. Even if the working ‘day’ lasted several years, it almost always ended with a return to the pays. Nîmes and Lyon both drew textile workers from very distant mountain villages. Most migration was rural, and most of the migrants who went to cities were not fodder for satanic mills: they provided services and were self-employed. In 1838, of almost twenty-three thousand Savoyard migrants in France, only two thousand worked in factories, which is to say, from their point of view, in warm, dry places with food and lodging and a steady wage.
Foreigners who go to live in French towns today usually hope to be integrated and accepted by the community. This was not usually a preoccupation of the French inhabitants. By the mid-nineteenth century, half the inhabitants of Paris came from the provinces and most of them did not consider themselves Parisian. Migrants spent as little money as possible while away from home. Mentally, they never left their pays. They were insulated from the lands through which they passed and, once they reached the city, they lived, like the chimney sweeps, in miniature versions of home. In certain Paris streets, the sounds and smells of villages and provincial towns drowned out the sounds and smells of the capital. For many, their street cry was the only French they spoke. Tinkers and scrap-metal merchants from a particular valley of the Cantal were concentrated around the Rue de Lappe near the Bastille. Water-carriers and labourers from the neighbouring valley lived in the same quartier, divided from their compatriots by a street instead of by the river Jordanne. All the people involved in the conspiracy on which Alexandre Dumas based The Count of Monte Cristo came from the same part of Nîmes and lived in the same quartier of Paris, between the Place du Châtelet and Les Halles. They met and exchanged news of home in a cafe run by a compatriot in the Place Sainte-Opportune. Traces of these urban villages are still visible, especially near the big railway stations: the name of a cafe or restaurant, a regional dish, a waiter’s accent or a photograph of a cow in a mountain meadow.
France itself was like a giant city in which every district had its own speciality. Horse-dealers came from Normandy, mole-catchers and their apprentices from the Orne, lace-makers from Caen and Beauvais. Chambermaids came from Brittany and Guyenne. In the eighteenth century, the sculptural, starched head-dresses of Norman women were a common sight around the Bureau of Wet-Nurses in the Rue Sainte-Apolline in Paris; in the nineteenth century, they were replaced by the black hoods of Burgundian women who followed the timber that was floated down from the Morvan..
Most of these migrants could reach Paris in a few days. Others trekked across the country for weeks: porters and locksmiths (and, supposedly, lock-pickers) from Lyon, second-hand-clothes dealers from Alsace, singers from the Haute-Marne, doormen (known as ‘suisses’) from Switzerland, glaziers from Piedmont, cooks from Montpellier, bear-handlers and knife-grinders from the Pyrenees. The Auvergne sent hatters and sawyers from the Forez, rag-and-bone men from Ambert and Le Mont-Dore, and furriers from Saint–Oradoux who walked the streets under a mountain of rabbit-skins, frightening children and skinning stray cats. The Auvergnat coal merchants called bougnats sailed down the Allier and the Canal de Briare. Most of them also sold wine. Some of the best-known cafes in Paris were founded by bougnats – Le Flore, Le Dome, La Coupole, Les Deux Magots. There are still a few coal-selling barkeepers, and almost three-quarters of the cafés-tabacs in Paris are still run by Auvergnats and their descendants.
There is no apparent logic to the map of migrations. Once a route had been pioneered, a colony established and a clientele created, these trades had a momentum that ensured their long-term survival. Customers came to associate the product or the service with a particular style of regional dress and a particular accent. But there are few signs of sensitivity to economic change. In the late eighteenth century, cities on the edges of Lorraine – Strasbourg, Troyes and Dijon – were inundated with starving cobblers, most of whom had no raw materials and few skills. Poor regions like the Vercors and the ‘pré-Alpes’ from Digne to Grasse, which might have benefited from migration, remained cut off until the late nineteenth century, when their populations suddenly began to flow away forever. No one knows why thousands of stonemasons and building labourers left the Limousin every year. There was no shortage of land and their skills were needed in the region. The only obvious reason is that men who had lived away from home made better husbands: they had more money, more prestige and, above all, more interesting stories to tell.
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THE DESIRE TO DISCOVER the country is usually associated with explorers, scholars and tourists, not with migrant workers. Yet curiosity was clearly one of the main forces behind migration. At a time when most people were afraid to set foot out of doors after dark, the routes forged by migrants provided a comparatively safe passage to the world beyond the pays.
The classic example of this organized discovery of France is the apprentice’s Tour de France. The expression dates from the early-eighteenth century, though the practice is much older. It was once confined to Provence and Languedoc but eventually included the Loire Valley, Paris, Burgundy and the valley of the Rhône. Avoiding Brittany (apart from Nantes), Normandy, the north and north-east, and the mountains, it described a rough hexagon around the Massif Central. Each trade had its own society with a network of ‘Mothers’ who provided lodging and employment opportunities in each town on the itinerary.19 The apprentice was renamed after his pays – ‘Libourne’, ‘Bordelais’, ‘Landais’, etc. He then spent a few weeks or months in the town, working long hours, acquiring local techniques and learning to work with local materials. He also had to learn the secret laws of the Order or ‘Devoir’ to which his guild belonged. When the time came to leave, a noisy procession with drums and fiddles accompanied him to the edge of town.
A typical tour lasted four or five years, covered more than fourteen hundred miles, usually in a clockwise direction, and included a hundred and fifty-one different towns (to judge by an ‘Ordinary Route of the Tour de France’ published by a baker from Libourne in 1859). Certain towns were obligatory and, for masons and carpenters, certain works of art in abbeys and cathedrals. During the Tour, the apprentice was inducted into the guild. He then became a ‘Compagnon du Tour de France’ and was given a second name which reflected his official worthiness: ‘Lyonnais-la-Fidélité’, ‘L’Estimablele-Provençal’, ‘Angoumois-le-Courageux’, etc. Agricol Perdiguier, a cabinetmaker from the suburbs of Avignon who published his memoirs of the Tour in 1854, was named Avignonnais-la-Vertu. The Compagnon was also presented with a special walking stick
festooned with ribbons to make him recognizable on the road. When he completed his Tour and returned home, he was awarded a certificate and remained a Compagnon for the rest of his life.
With the Tour de France, village rivalries and feuds took to the road. Members of the different orders would try to beat each other senseless when they met on the road or when one guild tried to set up a new ‘Mére’ in a town. Apprentices quickly learned to use their tools as weapons. A handbook of laws and regulations for workers, foremen and Compagnons published in 1833 devoted seven of its thirty pages to seditious assemblies, insults and defamation, perjury, threats, bodily harm and homicide. When the baker from Libourne interrupted his tour in 1840 to visit the venerable bearded hermit on the Sainte-Baume massif, the hermit understandably had a few sharp words to say on the subject of the Tour de France.20 He saw this sectarian aggression as a sign of backwardness and cited the fact that three out of every four Compagnons who had visited his grotto had been unable to sign his visitors’ book.
Still, these bloody battles, like the songs that were written by Compagnon poets, created a powerful sense of community. One day, the workforce would be concentrated in factories and cities, confronted with the faceless enemy of economic change and political repression. In those circumstances, solidarity would be a precious weapon. The population in general would come to adopt a view that was once peculiar to police ministers: ‘winter swallows’ would be seen as aliens and subversives. The village mentality that set one tiny pays against another would be applied to entire nations – Italy, Spain, Portugal and Algeria – and some migrant workers would make journeys that would have appalled their nineteenth-century predecessors, crossing the Mediterranean in rowing boats, riding in refrigerated trucks or clinging to the underside of high-speed trains.