The Discovery of France

by Graham Robb

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  IT SEEMS TO BE a law of social history that the greater the number of people with a particular experience, the less evidence remains of that experience. There are hundreds of pointlessly detailed accounts of banal coach journeys made by tourists, but the odysseys undertaken by migrants have vanished like most of the routes they walked.

  The account written by one of the thousands of stonemasons who left the Limousin every year is a priceless exception. Martin Nadaud, who later became a socialist politician, described the gruelling journey to Paris in his memoirs. His account is brief, especially after Orléans, but the scenes he saw along the way can be recreated from other sources.

  Nadaud was born in a Limousin hamlet called Martineiche. He was fourteen years old when he left home with his father and uncle. On the day of departure (26 March 1830), his tearful mother dressed him in a top hat, new shoes and a sheep’s-wool suit as stiff as cardboard. The suit was made from drugget, which is now used for coarse rugs. Martin was going to walk most of the way to Paris, but he had to look respectable, marching down a main street two hundred and forty miles long.

  At the first stopping point, Pontarion, they were joined by other migrants from all over the Creuse. They drank some wine and then the old men who had walked with them on the first part of the journey turned for home, ‘telling us always to be well behaved and to keep a fond memory of the the pays’.

  Soon, they lost sight of the ‘Druid stones’ that stood on a hill behind the village. For Nadaud, these stones stood for his pays and the Gallic masons who had ‘reconquered the fatherland’ from the Romans. Since there was still no road to Guéret, the route ran through the forest on muddy tracks. Raindrops sprang from the branches and soaked them to the skin. By the time they reached Bordessoule on the borders of the département, the young masons’ feet were sore and bloody: Nadaud’s father helped him peel off his stockings and rubbed his soles with fat. The inn was a typical migrants’ dosshouse – cheap, hospitable and filthy. The innkeepers along the route put fresh sheets on the beds in November and changed them in March. The trick was to slip into the envelope of grime, fully clothed, and to wrap one’s head in a cloth. Sleep came quickly, despite the fleas.

  The long march north was an apprenticeship in itself: learning to walk on wet and blistered feet and to keep up with the older migrants, learning to stomach mouldy food when the body was exhausted and above all to defend the honour of the pays. As they set off from villages at daybreak, the migrants sang and yelped as though they were at a barn dance. It was their way of keeping their spirits up and warning off the natives. Sometimes, there were pitched battles and the outcome was soon known all along the migration routes and in the masons’ colony in Paris. Young Nadaud had often heard about these battles at the village veillées, and so, when local peasants shouted at them from the hedgerows, calling them geese and turkeys, ‘I was more curious than upset. . . . The boldest in our band grouped together, and you could see from their faces that the insults would not go unpunished.’

  On the third day, at Salbris, gendarmes were waiting to escort the migrants to their dosshouse. On the fourth day, after stumbling over the stones and puddles of the cheerless Sologne, they looked across the river Loire and saw the towers of Orléans cathedral. From here, they would travel by coach.

  With its forty thousand inhabitants, Orléans was the biggest town the young masons had ever seen. The old story about the peasant who went to Poitiers but never saw it ‘because the houses were in the way’ might not have seemed so ludicrous to them. For the first time, they would have witnessed the strange phenomenon of a crowd of people all engaged on separate business and moving in different directions. This was part of the new world that the masons were helping to create. At Orléans, there were encouraging signs of a building boom. Town planners had been waging war on the past for forty years. The medieval gates and fortifications had gone, and so had almost every trace of the city’s saviour, Joan of Arc. The new Rue Jeanne d’Arc had obliterated a mass of ancient slums, but at least it allowed the cathedral to be seen to full advantage.

  The offices of the coach company were filling up with migrants bound for Paris. Liveried employees turned their noses up at the smelly peasants from the south. There were never enough carriages to take them all. Instead, they were piled into tiny coaches known as cucous – probably because they looked like giant cuckoo-clocks. The coucous, which were also known as ‘chamber pots’, were notorious for their asthmatic horses and sarcastic drivers. They bumped about so much that passengers were sometimes thrown out. Most of these death-traps raced along the roads near Paris and cluttered up the Place de la Concorde. It was unusual for a coucou to make such a long journey. Orléans was seventy-five miles from Paris, and on a good day, the mail coach took eight hours. In a ramshackle contraption like the coucou, with a mulish driver who stopped to drink at every inn and refused to be rushed, the masons would be lucky to leave at dawn and arrive before dark.

  Like the matatus of modern Kenya, a coucou was never considered to be full. Extra passengers were crammed onto the driver’s seat and attached to the rear of the coach. The former were known as ‘rabbits’, the latter as ‘monkeys’. The Orléans coucou was even more accommodating. Four young masons travelled together in the coucou equivalent of steerage: a wicker basket slung under the body of the coach, supposed to be used for luggage.

  From here on, the view was severely restricted. Through the spray of mud and grit, the seasick human cargo would have seen the walls of Orléans run past for more than two miles. Then the road climbed out of the valley of the Loire to the hamlet of Montjoie and into the Orléans forest. They might have caught a smell of the woodcutters’ hamlet at Cercottes but they probably saw no trees since the forest had been cut back a long way from the road to make life hard for highwaymen.

  After the forest, for several hours, there were only sandy plains and the windy wheatfields of the Beauce. They rattled across the Roman road from Sens to Chartres. Signs of wealth began to appear: a well-tended orchard, an avenue leading to a château. They passed through Arpajon and Longjumeau, deafened by the clatter of cartwheels in the tunnel of walls, then Antony and Sceaux, where cattle gathered before being driven into the city. When they saw a passenger waiting by the road, the drivers always shouted ‘Encore un pour Sceaux!’ (another one for Sceaux) because it sounded like ‘Encore un pourceau!’ (another swine). After Bourg-la-Reine with its potteries and Arcueil with its aqueduct, the road surface improved and the traffic increased. At Montrouge, roads from Versailles and the west joined the road from Orléans. Heavy carts with sleepy drivers were leaving Paris for the country.

  They reached the edge of the city at the Barrière d’Enfer. It was hardly a triumphal entry. From the basket under the coach, they saw the blur of boots and bare feet, carriage wheels and dog-carts, and the lower part of posters advertising auctions, books, baths and dental treatment. They rattled down the Rue Saint-Jacques, past the Observatory and the Sorbonne, to the Pont Neuf. There was the sudden smell of the river, then skirts and petticoats and patent-leather boots on the more salubrious Right Bank, the cacophony of street cries in a hundred different accents, smells of fried food, and all the multicoloured urban luxury of trash: scraps of paper, bits of bouquet, apple cores and cabbage stalks, and enough horse manure to keep a village for a year.

  When they staggered out of the coucou, the masons would have been as white as ghosts. Nadaud was to travel on to Villemomble in the eastern suburbs to work on his uncle’s building site. First, his father took him down to the sloping strand by the Hôtel de Ville to wash his black hands in the Seine. Tall houses bristling with chimneys ran along both banks as far as the eye could see. Each of those grand, dilapidated buildings contained more people than a Limousin hamlet. From some windows, lights were shining blearily as though a thousand tiny veillées were taking place in a thousand tiny rooms.

  Across the river, on the hill called the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, the grey
dome of the Pantheon stood out against the clouds. It loomed over the hovels of the Latin Quarter like an unlit lighthouse. Until the Eiffel Tower was completed in 1889, the Panthéon was the highest point in Paris. Every mason who arrived in the capital knew that this impressive, spectral monument was the work of his compatriots. After 1855, its name was familiar from the song that the masons sang like a national anthem:

  Etc.

  [. . .]

  Les canaux et les ponts

  Canals and bridges

  De la Seine à la Meuse

  From the Seine to the Meuse

  Pourraient citer les noms

  Could cite the names

  Des maçons de la Creuse.

  Of the masons of the Creuse.

  Voyez le Panthéon,

  The Pantheon and the palaces

  Voyez les Tuileries,

  Of the Tuileries and the Louvre,

  Le Louvre et l’Odéon,

  The Odéon and pretty Notre- Dame:

  Notre-Dame jolie:

  De tous ces monuments

  Those monuments are the pride of France,

  La France est orgueilleuse,

  Elle en doit l’agrément

  And for every one, she has to thank

  Aux maçons de la Creuse.

  The masons of the Creuse.

  The Panthéon had started life as a church. It was dedicated to Genevieve, the fifth-century patron saint of Paris, whose prayer campaign had caused Attila the Hun to bypass the city and attack Orléans instead. It had been completed in 1789, just in time for the Revolutionary government to rededicate it to the secular heroes of the modern state. Masons from the Creuse had carved the gigantic letters that proclaimed the fatherland’s gratitude to the ‘great men’ who were buried in its vault: ‘AUX GRANDS HOMMES LA PATRIE RECONNAISSANTE.’

  From the top of the Panthéon, masons had looked out over slate roofs that ran to the horizon like one row of hills behind the other. At a glance, they could take in a hundred urban hamlets whose inhabitants spoke a hundred different languages and knew little of each other’s lives. That vision was filled with painful knowledge of all that lay between Paris and home: the roads intersecting on the edge of the city, the wheatfields of the Beauce and the plains beyond the Loire with their gravelly tracks and hostile tribes, and then, five days to the south, the gentle highlands where Druid stones carved by Gallic masons guarded the view of the Limousin plateaux and the mountains of the Auvergne.

  Soon, those distances would be telescoped by trains. The stonemasons, nurses, chambermaids and pedlars would be transported across the country as if by magic, and the little corners of land where saints held sway over tiny kingdoms would vanish from sight. New mysteries, stranger than miracles, would replace the old. Many more people than ever before would leave home on great adventures and never return.

  Interlude

  The Sixty Million Others

  LIKE THE STONE SPIRITS and the fairies (Chapter 7), a huge population has disappeared almost entirely from daily life. Several species have already made brief appearances in this book; many others will appear before the end; but without this interlude they might vanish into the landscape like a herd of chamois in the high Alps. Sixty million domestic mammals (according to the 1866 census) and countless wild animals shared the land and the lives of people and had a profound but incalculable effect on human existence. They, too, discovered France and made its exploration possible. Many of them hastened the changes that removed them from French history.

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  THE SCENE IS PÉ RONNE, a fortified town on the river Somme, a few years before the Revolution. In a house on the edge of town, a small, well–trained band has gathered to make the final preparations for a long and dangerous journey. Each member of the band has a tightly packed bale strapped to his back. They know only the law of blind obedience, not the law they are about to break for the umpteenth time. The leader of the band has served an apprenticeship and is now allowed to make the journey without a load. Responsibilities, of course, are a burden in themselves. The rules of the business are few and simple, but they call for skill, experience and courage. In this respect, the little band would be the envy of a military commander. Despite the dangers that lie ahead, all the tails are wagging.

  The caravan of smuggler dogs sets off to the crack of a whip while the master goes back indoors to sleep. Somewhere in the night, where

  Picardy meets Artois, it will cross one of the frontiers that divide France into zones of taxation. At the barriers, excise duty must be paid on almost everything that humans desire: tobacco, alcohol, leather, salt and iron. Guards patrol the borders. If smugglers are caught, men are sent to the galleys, women and children to prison. Dogs are executed on the spot.

  The lead dog sniffs out the route. Human smell means dive into a ditch and stay down until the patrol has passed. Dog smell – it could be an excise hound – means change the route, head out across the marshes or scatter over the moor.

  After several hours of excitement and delays, the expedition reaches the other village and the second part of the plan comes into operation. While the carriers lie low in cornfields and hedgerows around the village, the lead dog trots up to a house and scratches softly at the door. The man inside is not alone. Excise officers have been known to visit in the night, to sniff out the contraband and push their noses into every nook and cranny. The door opens. The dog pads across the room like the family pet and curls up in front of the fire. At last, the visitor leaves. A few more minutes pass, then the man looks out into the darkness and gives a whistle. Dogs coated with mud and briars come running in. With their last ounce of energy they leap at the man to congratulate him on another successful mission. Since the humans eat the same food as the animals, there will be a well–earned feast followed by a long and lazy day.

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  SOCIALLY AS WELL AS genetically, the smuggler dogs of northern France are a vanished breed. There are now more domestic dogs per person in France (one for every seven) than in the midnineteenth century (one for every seventeen). But for all their physical diversity, twenty-first-century dogs have a tiny sphere of activity. The pre-Second World War canine population was agricultural and industrial, leisured and self-employed. It worked in public service, transport, entertainment, security and crime. With only a slight stretch of the imagination and the normal canine lifespan, a dog might have been the hero of a nineteenth-century education novel, rising from a life of beggary and mange to a position of responsibility in a rural factory or an urban business, and eventually – if the business prospered – attaining the idle luxury of bourgeois retirement, occasionally fetching the newspaper and enjoying a balcony view of the boulevard below, where its former associates pull carts, hold out begging bowls, perform tricks and scavenge at the back doors of restaurants.

  In many parts of France, dog-power was vital to the early industrial revolution. In the Ardennes, where nail-making was a major domestic industry, a passer-by who peered into one of the nail-makers’ low stone cottages would see a small dog scampering inside a wheel to keep the bellows blowing. In the Jura, villages without a water supply used wheel-spinning dogs to run machines. The usual stint was two hours, after which the dog, slightly singed by flying sparks, went to wake its replacement and could then do as it liked. The humans worked for up to fifteen hours a day and were often stunted, myopic and claw-fisted. The dogs seem to have been better adapted to the work. Like a hired labour force, they took responsibility for their own training. Old dogs taught young dogs the trick. Bitches suckled their puppies as they skittered about inside the wheel and learned the family trade. These working dogs were valued members of the family and were often included in family photographs.

  The other main canine industry was carting. Long after dog traction was banned in some départements, milk, fruit and vegetables, bread, fish, meat, letters and sometimes schoolchildren were delivered by dog-cart. The dog-cart was the poor man’s bicycle and motor car. As late as 1925, well over
a thousand dogs in harness were still running about the Loiret département, south of Paris. The flatter the terrain, the more dog-carts there were (the practice had spread from the Low Countries), though they also managed to take machine-guns to the trenches and bring back the wounded in the First World War. Like other quiet forms of transport, the dog-cart was driven off the roads by the motor car. The sudden roar of an engine was too much for a responsive dog.

  City dogs today are thought of mainly as an excremental menace: over eight million dogs in France – two hundred thousand in Paris – produce eighty tons of excrement a day and cause thousands of broken limbs. In the days when manure was gold, this was not a major complaint. The dogs themselves were a cheerful part of city life. Even that cat-worshipping aesthete Charles Baudelaire loved the sight of working dogs going about their business, ‘driven by fleas, passion, need or duty’: ‘those vigorous dogs hitched to carts . . . show by their triumphant barking how pleased and proud they are to rival horses.’ The ‘heroism of modern life’ was not peculiar to the human race: