The Discovery of France

by Graham Robb

  I celebrate those calamitous canines who wander alone through the sinuous ravines of immense cities, or who say to the abandoned man, with twinkling, intelligent eyes, ‘Take me with you, and perhaps we shall fashion a kind of happiness out of our two miseries!’

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  THAT DELICATE KIND of happiness was more common then than it is in the age of production-line livestock. Cows and horses lived next door to their owners. Sometimes large holes were cut in the wall between the stable and the house so that the animal could see what was going on and the humans could converse with their workmates. The tall and bristly pigs of Brittany played with children and were given names. In 1815, in central France, the Scottish writer Sir Archibald Alison was surprised to find in every cottage ‘a very motley and promiscuous set of beings’: ‘The pigs here appear so well accustomed to a cordial welcome in the houses, that when by chance excluded, you see them impatiently rapping at the door with their snouts.’

  Animals that were christened, dressed for church and welcomed into the home were, not surprisingly, well treated, or at least treated no more roughly than their owners treated themselves. Many animals that had outlived their usefulness in the fields were fed until they died. Manure, in any case, was more valuable than meat. Their owners talked to them and sang to them. In some parts, a strange chanting could be heard when the fields were being ploughed. To keep the oxen at a steady pace, a good ploughman would sing songs so old they sounded out of tune: each phrase ended with a very long, quavering note that rose a quarter tone.

  Though the singing was very similar in different regions, there were many different words for it. None of these words appear in dictionaries: kiauler, tioler, brioler, hôler, roiler, bouarer, arander. By the end of the nineteenth century, the singing was confined to ‘backward’ regions like the Berry and the Morvan, and the word quiaulin (from kiauler) had come to mean a country bumpkin. All this suggests a very ancient origin. Perhaps these were the last surviving human sounds of pre-Roman Gaul. The popular notion that there was once a time when animals conversed with humans was not as fantastic as it seems.

  The most spectacular creature to share the lives of human beings was the Pyrenean brown bear. Visitors to the remote valleys of the Couserans region were often alarmed to see children playing with bear cubs. The cubs were always orphans. The hunter would wrap himself in a triple layer of sheepskins and arm himself with a long knife. When the bear reared up and hugged the woolly human, the hunter pushed its jaw aside with one hand and stabbed it in the kidneys with the other, remaining locked in the embrace until the bear collapsed. The cubs were taken to the village where they grew up with the children and the livestock until they were old enough to be trained. A captive bear never hibernated but it ate surprisingly little and was cheap to maintain.

  The bears in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, having been trained by a cosmopolitan crowd, performed an amazing variety of tricks. The Pyrenean dancing bears had a smaller repertoire. They danced with the aid of a staff and sometimes acted out little scenes: a military parade or a firing squad. The peasants of the Couserans valleys had probably learned from gypsies how to make a bear respond to the sound of a flageolet (the small, high-pitched flute) and then made minor improvements to the original trick. There was even a village school for bears at Ercé, where an older bear acted as ‘monitor’. The process lasted about a year. On the day of its graduation, the bear was strapped to a tree while an iron ring was passed through its jaw behind the teeth.

  Some of these shambling, muzzled parodies of human beings made horrendously long journeys – to Germany and Britain, and even to

  South America. For the people who watched these sad performances, part of the attraction was undoubtedly the handler himself: an example of a primitive species from the edges of France. ‘Built like a bear-handler’ was a proverbial expression for a weak and shabbily dressed little man.

  These one-sided feudal relationships were more important to the humans than the tiny income provided by the bear. In towns and villages that were cut off for part of the year, cowering from the threat of avalanches and the crushing weight of boredom, even a dangerous wild animal was welcome company. An official who visited a mountain village in the Pyrenees was taken to see an old woman in need of charity. She and her husband had raised a dancing bear, but bears are prone to fits of anger and the husband had been mauled to death.

  ‘I have nothing, sir, nothing at all – not even a roof for me and my animal.’

  ‘Your animal? You mean the one that ate your husband?’ ‘Oh, sir, it’s all I have left of the poor man.’

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  A SENTIMENTAL, pet-centred view of the animal kingdom began to prevail in the mid-nineteenth century. With it came the notion that peasants who depended on animals in daily life were always cruel to them. Routine cruelty was certainly common. Hens and geese were used in bloody games of target practice. Poultry in general seems to have been treated as insects are treated today. Some horses were used in coal mines, like those of Rive-de-Gier, in the black valley north-east of Saint-É tienne, which was known as ‘the purgatory of men, the paradise of women (because the women stayed at home) and the hell of horses’. The smuggler dogs of Brittany and Maine were not treated as kindly as their Picard counterparts. A family in Maine, where salt was taxed, would leave its dog with a family in Brittany, where salt was free of duty. The dog was tethered, starved and then released with a pack of salt. Only the most intrepid excise man would try to stop an angry, famished dog heading for home. Until 1850, on the Place du Combat in Paris, on the seedy side of the Canal Saint-Martin, every Sunday and holiday afternoon, dogs were pitted against any animal that could be found – bulls, bears, wolves, stags, wild boars, donkeys and other dogs – while savage human beings placed bets and revelled in the gore. At the Saint-Germain market – the roughest of Paris’s dog markets – mongrels were bought for experiments at the nearby É cole de Médecine.

  Perceptions of suffering change with every generation and from one country to the next. Many foreign visitors were struck by the gentleness of French coach drivers and sometimes cursed them for not whipping their horses into a gallop. Horses suffered more from stupidity, ignorance and inefficiency than from deliberate cruelty. As long-distance coaches travelled south, the sturdy Percheron horses for which the coaches were designed were replaced by spindly nags who found the lumbering vehicle a cruel burden. The same fate befell the little Cossack horses left behind after the Allied invasions of 1814 and 1815. Horses were expected to share their owners’ discomfort. The patient mares of market-gardeners from Roscoff on the Breton coast were known as ‘thirty-league beasts’ because they carried the cauliflowers and artichokes for thirty leagues (eighty-three miles) without stopping, just as their owners went without food until the load was sold at Rennes or Angers.

  The brutal, horse-torturing peasant was more common in bourgeois moral myth than in reality. From the mid-eighteenth century, being kind to animals was a standard injunction in books for children. The object of concern was not the welfare of the animal but the social status of the child. The implication was that a well brought-up child did not behave like a vulgar peasant who slept with his animals and made them work for a living.

  The animals themselves were depicted as saintly creatures who existed for the moral benefit of Man. Popular journals like the Le Magasin pittoresque published heart–warming tales of philanthropic beasts: ‘The Skill of a Goat’ (1833), ‘Animals’ Affection for the Poor’ (1836), ‘Human Beings Fed By Animals’ (1841), ‘Maternal Love in Cats’ (1876), ‘The Language of [Mules’] Ears’ (1884), etc. ‘To moralize the working classes’ was the aim of the Society for the Protection of Animals, founded in 1848, sixteen years before the Society for the Protection of Children. The first law against cruelty to animals, the Grammont Law of 1850, outlawed animal fights in towns and cities, not primarily because the animals suffered but because violent sports were thought to give the proletariat a taste for bloody revoluti
on.

  Just as a World Wildlife Fund sticker on a car window does not prevent it from leaving a trail of flattened corpses on the tarmac,21 so was sentimental concern able to coexist quite happily with unconscious cruelty. Bourgeois passengers on Mediterranean ships amused themselves by shooting dolphins. Hunters on holiday could be indescribably sadistic in disposing of their prey. The idea that hunters had a special understanding of the animals they killed is extremely dubious. Even at the end of the nineteenth century, some hunters believed that marmots pulled each other along like carts and that chamois and bouquetins (ibex) swung themselves headlong down sheer cliffs by stabbing their horns into the earth. Many of the wild inhabitants of France were no better known than the human inhabitants of the French colonies.

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  ROADKILL AND URBAN SPRAWL are modern innovations, but even two centuries ago there were signs that the discovery and colonization of France would bring devastation and death to animals. Domestic animals in towns were protected by the Grammont Law, but the only protection for animals in the wild was provided by occasional hunting restrictions, and most hunters found that these only enhanced the thrill of the chase.

  In the early 1780s, while ominous rumblings were threatening the monarchy, the geologist Horace–Bénédict de Saussure became one of the first people to notice a quiet catastrophe in the animal kingdom. In the 1760s, he had made a series of daring expeditions into the Alpine massifs. Twenty years later, he returned to find that the ubiquitous furry spirit of the mountains was now a rarity:

  Though the profit is small, the people of Chamouni hunt the marmot with passion, and so these creatures are diminishing in number in the most noticeable fashion. On my first journeys, I encountered so many of them that their whistles, echoing around the mountains, their leaping and running away under rocks, were a constant amusement. This year, I heard an occasional whistle at distant intervals but I saw not a single marmot. The hunters of Chamouni have already utterly destroyed or driven away the bouquetins, which once were common on their mountains, and it is likely that in less than a century neither chamois nor marmots will be seen.

  This is one of the earliest signs that anyone was saddened by the disappearance of a species. For a long time, the seemingly obvious idea that a species could become extinct, first proposed by Georges Cuvier in a paper on the mammoth in 1796, was an obscure, scholarly notion. In 1825, at the age of twenty-one, George Sand showed no particular concern when she wrote in her Pyrenean diary, ‘We are living on bear and chamois, but we see hardly any’. (In fact, she was probably eating disguised goat.) The chamois had played an unwitting role in the exploration of the Alps. In 1844, a chamois disappearing over a distant ridge revealed to a botanist the existence of an unknown pass between the Simplon and the Great Saint Bernard.22 A hundred years before, herds of chamois were a common sight. Now, like the izard (the Pyrenean chamois), they were seen only in summer, through telescopes, on the edge of glaciers and snow-fields. The bouquetin was almost extinct in the Pyrenees by the mid-nineteenth century and confined to the slopes of the Maladetta. Sightings of the mouflon – the wild sheep with huge curly horns – were increasingly rare, except in Corsica. Bears were practically extinct in the Jura by 1800. By the end of the nineteenth century, Pyrenean showmen were importing their bears from Russia and the Balkans.

  Some sub-species probably died out before they were discovered. Shortly before the Revolution, hunters captured a young lynx near Luz-Saint-Sauveur after killing its mother. Until then, few had suspected that lynxes lived as far south as the Pyrenees. The animals were still being shot in the Vercors in 1820 but disappeared before the end of the nineteenth century. Wild cats were rare by the 1830s, though surprisingly common in the Bois de Boulogne on the edge of Paris. Rhône beavers – and home-grown beaver hats – were on the verge of extinction in 1840.

  More cunning and determination were deployed in the eradication of species than in the extermination of Protestants in the Cévennes. Eagle hunters had themselves lowered on plank swings until they were level with the eyrie. A blazing torch disposed of the parent and the eaglets were stuffed into a bag. When Chateaubriand reached the foot of the Mont Cenis pass in 1803, he was offered an orphaned eaglet:

  A peasant was holding it by its legs . . . it died of the mistreatment it had received before I could set it free. It put me in mind of poor little Louis XVII. . . .How swiftly majesty falls into misfortune!

  Edible migrating birds were trapped in nets throughout Gascony and Provence. At the end of September, while flocks of doves from Scandinavia and the Jura were heading for the Basque Country, villagers in the Pyrenees were erecting giant poles. In a tiny crow’s nest on top of the tripod of poles, a man scanned the horizon. The other catchers hid behind leafy screens. The man in the crow’s nest held a flat piece of wood carved into the profile of a flying bird of prey. When the flock was a hundred yards away, he hurled the wooden bird into the air: the flock dipped and flew into the nets. The job of killing was left to women, who could exterminate several hundred birds in a few minutes by biting their necks.

  In Provence, where songbird stew was a popular delicacy, nightingales and warblers, tied together by the beak, could be bought at market. Birds were thought to devour olives and other crops. Until the public-information campaigns of the mid-nineteenth century, and the law against stealing birds’ eggs and destroying nests (1862), no one seems to have realized that birds ate harmful insects. Some people planted berry bushes at the door so that they could lean out of the window and kill the birds with a stick. As early as 1764, on a tour through southern France, Tobias Smollett noticed something like an ecological disaster:

  You may pass through the whole South of France, as well as the county of Nice, where there is no want of groves, woods, and plantations, without hearing the song of blackbird, thrush, linnet, gold-finch, or any other bird whatsoever. All is silent and solitary. The poor birds are destroyed, or driven for refuge, into other countries, by the savage persecution of the people, who spare no pains to kill, and catch them for their own subsistence. Scarce a sparrow, red-breast, tomtit, or wren, can ’scape the guns and snares of those indefatigable fowlers.

  Most large wild mammals were doomed, long before the human population increased. Deforestation and hard winters drove huge packs of wolves down from forests and mountains, well into the parts of France that were supposed to have been tamed and civilized. They moved in single file, which made it hard to guess their number from the tracks in the snow. The peninsula formed by the winding Seine between Rouen and Jumièges in Normandy was inundated with wolves in the late summer of 1842: they could be heard from the hills above the industrial city.

  Tales of werewolves reflected real fears. In Madame Bovary, ‘wolves running in the fields at night’ are one of the reasons why young Emma finds the countryside ‘somewhat less than amusing’. A law passed after the Revolution put a price on every wolf, payable to the hunter on presentation of the animal’s head to the Prefect: twenty livres for a cub, forty for an adult, fifty for a pregnant wolf, and a hundred and fifty for a known man-killer. In the 1880s, more than a thousand wolves were still being killed every year. Groups of parishes organized battues, thrashing through the undergrowth with pikes and staves to chase away the wolves and boars. These beats continued even when the threat was past, and they are still important social events: in autumn in the Jura, the entire male population of some villages can be seen posted at regular intervals on a winding hill road, waiting, gun in hand, for the boar to be flushed from the forest.

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  IN THE MOUNTAINS, the greatest threat to wild animals was not self-defence or sociability but the human propensity for self-destruction. Chamois hunters clearly suffered from a kind of addiction. ‘A wild and haggard air makes them stand out in a crowd, even when they are out of costume. It is probably this evil physiognomy that makes some superstitious peasants believe them to be sorcerers’ (Saussure). Like the hunters of precious stones and crystals, who scrab
bled about in fresh landslides, chamois hunters risked their lives for almost nothing. They started up the mountain after dark, teetered across the groaning glaciers and tried to climb higher than the chamois herds before the sun came up. Some men were gone for days, with just a pocketful of cheese and some bread, drawn further and further into the snowy wastes by the fleeing chamois. Often, the climb was so long and hard that only the skin of the animal could be brought back.

  Every year, men fell to their death or perished on the ice. Some were found, years later, perfectly preserved. Most of them expected to die young. Saussure met a hunter from Sixt in Savoy whose father and grandfather had died while hunting and who called his game-bag his ‘shroud’. Two years later, he fell off a precipice. Down in the village, frightened wives tried to stay awake because hunters who died on the mountain were thought to appear in dreams to ask their loved ones for a proper burial.

  Some wild animals survived because humans wanted them to remain wild or found them too small and troublesome to be worth taming: the black Camargue bulls, which became more lucrative in the mid-nineteenth century when Napoleon I I I’s empress Eugénie lent her support to Spanish bullfighting, and the small, speedy white horses that lived in herds of thirty or forty in the dune-deserts of the Landes, the salt delta of the Camargue and on the plains near Fréjus.

  By 1840, when roads, pine plantations and irrigation channels were eating away at the wilderness, only a few hundred wild horses remained in the Landes. Did the threat of extinction sharpen their wits, or was it simply that the most intelligent survived the longest? A horse who was known to the villagers of the Arcachon Basin as ‘Napoléon’ had spent two years in captivity. He escaped to the land between the sea and the marshes where the fine dune-grass grew and applied the skills he had learned from humans to a herd of his own. Napoléon’s horses watched for invaders from the heights of the dunes. When the hunters approached, the herd moved to a higher ridge which the domesticated horses, weighed down by riders and slowed by sand, could never climb. When the humans encircled the sandy fortress, the herd arranged itself into a wedge formation, with foals in front and mares behind, and charged downhill towards the weakest point of the circle.