The Discovery of France

by Graham Robb

  Nothing more is known about this animal resistance movement. Napoléon may have died in the dunes, or he may have ended his life in a city. By the middle of the century, there were more white horses working in the army and pulling taxicabs in Paris than living free in the Landes.

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  THESE CHANGES OCCURRED so quickly that they made no distinct impression on the human population. Rather than dismay at the extinction of species, there was a gradual, creeping disappointment, a dull awareness that wildness had only to be discovered to disappear. In 1910, when the Tour de France first crossed the high Pyrenees, newspaper reporters imagined, half hoping, that marauding bears might affect the outcome of the race by eating some of the riders. The riders flogged themselves across the mountains on rocky roads long since deserted by the bears.23 At Nîmes, on the seventh stage of the Tour, a frisky dog caused a serious accident, but the only lethal animal attack came from a jelly-fish during the rest day at Nice.

  As animals collectively played a smaller role in human society, individual animal heroes came to the fore. Sympathetic acquaintance with a separate species was replaced by the projection of human traits onto animals. The movement of human beings to towns and cities was mirrored by the exodus of animals to the countryside. In the mid-nineteenth century, for the first time, thousands of people were being born who would almost never see a living cow.

  The most famous animal hero produced by this colonization of the animal kingdom was a dog called Barry who worked at the monastery on the Great Saint Bernard Pass. As early as the eighth century, the Saint Bernard dogs had been trained to find travellers who were lost in the fog and snow, which makes their paramedical profession one of the oldest in Europe. All but one were wiped out by an epidemic in 1820. The sole survivor was mated with a breed related to the Pyrenean sheepdog. Unlike most dogs, the Saint Bernards yearned to go outside when a storm was brewing and when drifting snow was reinforcing the grey walls of their fortress. They not only patrolled the pass and sought out helpless travellers, they also took preventive action: they had been known to set off in pursuit of people who passed the monastery and who seemed, in the dogs’ estimation, to be unlikely to complete their journey.

  Most engravings show the Saint Bernard dogs carrying a neat little brandy-cask on their collar. In fact, they carried a complete survival kit: a basket of food, a gourd of wine and a bundle of wool ets. They had a precise knowledge of the whole region long before it was accurately mapped by humans and were capable of running for help to the nearest village if the monastery was further away.

  Strictly speaking, Barry, whose name means ‘bear’, was Swiss-Italian, but he was born in the French Empire and became a French national hero. He had saved a monk by warning him of an avalanche; he had rescued a small child by persuading it to climb onto his back and carrying it to the monastery; in 1800, he came close to changing the course of European history by refusing to allow Napoleon’s soldiers to pass until they put away their muskets. In 1900, eighty-six years after his death, he was given an impressive memorial at the entrance to the dog cemetery at Asnières-sur-Seine on the edge of Paris. The inscription says, ‘He saved the life of 40 people and was killed by the 41st!’ The story of this forty-first rescue turned him into a canine martyr. One wintry night, an exhausted man was struggling up the mountain when a huge, powerful animal suddenly bounded towards him through the blizzard. The man managed to crack its skull with his stick, and although Barry was taken to the hospice, he died soon after.

  This was the legend of Barry the Saint Bernard. In reality, he retired happily to Berne in 1812 and died of old age two years later. To honour his extraordinary career, he was stuffed and given pride of place in Berne Museum where he stood in a glass cabinet filled with stoats and topped with a spread-eagled owl. Later, his skull was modified to make him look more like a modern Saint Bernard, just as his acts were altered to make him as human as possible. Barry had worked in the wild but after his death he became a hero of the pet age. He showed that, like savages and peasants, animals could be trained to accept the moral values of French civilization.

  The Dog Cemetery at Asnières-sur-Seine was created in 1899 when a new law allowed animals to be buried ‘a hundred metres from human habitation and under at least one metre of earth’. Barry’s monument now towers above all the Fifis, Kikis and Poopys who provided psychological support rather than milk, warmth and manure. These were humanimals rather than creatures of the untamed land. By then, wealthy French dogs could travel in special railway carriages. In 1902, the Paris depositary for sick animals that had turned into a festering heap of vermin was replaced by a proper hospital on the edge of the city at Gennevilliers. Three years later, the dogs of Paris had their own ambulance. An Anti-Vivisection Society was founded in 1903, and in 1905, one of the proudest symbols of the new relationship between animals and humans appeared in the streets of Paris: dogs wearing special goggles and riding in the passenger seats of automobiles.

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  FAR FROM THE dog-fouled streets of modern Paris, something still remains of the world where humans and animals lived in harmonious independence.

  Sixty thousand horses, cows and sheep still migrate in spring to the Pyrenees. In autumn, large flocks can be seen flowing down from the Alps towards the plains of Provence. Transhumance – the movement of livestock to summer or winter pastures – is now seen as a precious reminder of a heroic past. Government funding is available for farmers who move their herds and flocks across the land. But today’s Alpine sheep rarely travel more than five miles downhill. They complete their journey in trucks and often suffer from the sudden change in temperature.

  A century ago, some of these journeys lasted for weeks. The length of the journey was determined by the configuration of the land. The high summer pastures of the Jura and the Vosges and the empty plateaux of the Aubrac and the Causses could be reached in a few days from towns and villages. Much longer journeys were made from the southern Landes and northern Spain into the Pyrenees, from Languedoc north into the Cévennes, and from Provence into the Alps.

  The main animal watershed was Provence. Ancient routes fanned out from the desert of the Crau like a river system. Some went west to Languedoc, where grassland was rented out after the grape harvest. Others headed up into the Cévennes and the Cantal for more than two hundred miles. Most of the Provençal routes were aimed at the distant Alps: up the Rhône, across the Pont du Gard, then east towards the glaciers of the Oisans; around the north face of Mont Ventoux or up the valley of the Durance towards Gap; east across the wild plains of the Var towards Digne, or further south, within sight of the sea, through Nice and on to Piedmont.

  These are probably the oldest routes in France. The drailles or drove roads were zones of transit rather than roads. Some were more than a hundred feet wide. In the first century AD, Pliny the Elder observed that ‘sheep in their thousands come from remote regions to feed on the thyme that covers the stony plains of Gallia Narbonensis’. The beasts had shaped the landscape and trodden out a network of long-distance tracks long before they were joined by upright apes. Some of the old pilgrim routes probably predate the saints. The annual miracle of fresh growth had drawn creatures in their thousands long before humans visited shrines and spas.

  When the sun began to shrivel up the grass, almost a million sheep, goats and cows poured out of the plains of Provence. These enormous caravans created their own travelling atmosphere, filling the air with dust and leaving a trail of half-eaten vegetation. Several thousand sheep and goats, moving at an average speed of less than one mile an hour for two or three weeks, could bring a large part of the country to a halt. Coach companies retimed departures to miss the flocks and herds that might occupy a bridge for half a day or block the narrow corridor along the Rhône.

  Tales of transhumance tend to stress dramatic conflicts. There were some hostile villages whose land was laid waste by hungry sheep and trampled by cows, and where gardes champêtres were paid to walk alongside the an
imals until they left the region. When shepherds were prevented by epidemics from making the journey, some farmers ploughed over the drove roads and tried to claim the land. But when, in the early nineteenth century, proposals were made to impose legal restrictions on the herdsmen, very little evidence of animosity could be found. The benefit to communities along these routes is still evident in the hundred and nine place names that contain the word fumade (an area on which manure is spread): all these places occur along the drove roads and transhumance zones leading from Langue-doc and Provence, up into the Rouergue and the Auvergne.

  Even without the passing tribute of manure, transhumance was not a curse. These land-going ocean liners of livestock were a magnificent sight. The National Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions in Paris has a beautiful display of bells and embroidered collars worn by the leading sheep of a transhumant flock (collected on a mission to the Alps in the early twentieth century). The most prized animals were decorated and dressed when they left for the mountains or when they were taken into church to be blessed. Cows were adorned with headdresses, flowers and flags, and sometimes with little wooden towers containing tiny bells that were thought to protect the herd from lightning.

  A few sheep and cows strayed onto fields and gardens, but transhumant flocks were not a rabble. A strict order was observed. In front went the menoun (castrated male goats), then came all the other long-haired goats, the countless troop of sheep or cows and the magnificent white sheepdogs whom, it was said, ‘it is an honour to know’. Bringing up the rear were donkeys, carrying the shepherds’ belongings aand the lambs that were too small to keep up with their mothers.

  On the summer pasture, the shepherds lived in burons – small chalets or stone huts, most of which were abandoned when irrigation, winter feed and the introduction of more specialized breeds put an end to the prehistoric practice. Many stone burons can still be seen, but the commonest type of shepherd dwelling has disappeared entirely: a conical thatched hut on two or three wheels, as long as a man and slightly wider, with a shaft that was propped on a forked stick. This mobile haystack was turned so that the man could watch the animals with his rifle at the ready. Sometimes, a lone sheep was added to a herd in the hope that wolves would make off with the easy prey and leave the cows alone. But the sacrificial sheep was often protected by the herd, which formed a defensive circle when it smelled a wolf. By all accounts, the sheep themselves were not the aimless, skittish creatures of today. They were tough, scrawny, rough-woolled beasts who knew how to defend their mountain territory. In the high passes above Chamonix, opposing flocks of sheep had been known to form battle lines and to launch savage attacks on the enemy flock.

  In early autumn, the herds and flocks returned to Provence and brought ‘a smile of life to the immensity of the desert’ (Mariéton). In the Pyrenees, the shepherds, ‘sun-tanned and looking more like Arabs than Frenchmen, walked along in groups in their picturesque costume’ (a wide beret, a bright-red vest or belt, a monkish cloak or a bulky sheepskin), ‘with ponies or mules transporting their equipment – a few ets, ropes and chains, and those big gleaming copper kettles in which they collect and curdle the milk’ (George Sand).

  This descent from the mountains was the only time when chaos threatened the herds. Animals born in the high pastures had their first sight of the human world. As they funnelled into the teeming maze of a hamlet, they broke into a sweat and charged through the streets in a panic. Even Pyrenean sheepdogs, which were known to attack bears, found the discovery of civilization traumatic. In 1788, the scholar and politician Jean Dusaulx was exploring the Pyrenees. One morning, he was about to leave the village of Barèges when he was invited to watch a typical scene. A sheepdog had just been brought in from a remote district:

  The owner of this beautiful animal had made it enter the house backwards. It looked as though it had walked into a trap. We saw it digging its nails into the floor in bewilderment, staring in terror at the windows, the walls and all that surrounded it. . . . Savages are said to experience the same sensations when first they enter our artificial dwellings.

  The nomadic instinct was stronger than fear. The declining sun and the lengthening shadows were shepherds that could not be disobeyed. In the Jura and the Vosges, where mountain people rented cows for the cheese-making season, it was often said that the animals knew exactly when to leave. City-dwellers who were accustomed to the feckless herds of northern fields or who had never seen more than half a dozen animals at a time thought this a charming peasant legend, but there are enough detailed descriptions of self-governing herds to suggest that the animals were more familiar with the geography and climate of the land than most human beings.

  One October morning, when the air was colder and the grass less tender, a cow would start to amble down the mountainside. The cowherd packed his belongings and hung his bundle from the horns of the most trusted beast. One cow would take the lead and the rest would follow without trying to overtake. When the herd reached the valleys, and tracks began to appear to left and right, some of the animals would wander off towards a hamlet. As the herd thinned out, the cowherd stayed with the animals that came from his own village. And so it went on, until each animal had returned to its home and entered its part of the dwelling, like a farmer after a long day in the fields, to heat up the house for winter and to keep the humans company with its munching and snorting and its mighty smell, settling in for half a year of sloth and rumination, until something told it that the mountains were turning green and luscious again.

  PART TWO

  9

  Maps

  ON THE EVENING OF 10 August 1792, a forty-two-year-old man was standing in the belfry of the collegiate church at Dammartin-en-Goële surrounded by various pieces of scientific equipment. He had been working steadily, hoping that no one on the square below would look up and see the glint of glass and metal. There was no time to lose. Like thousands of other monuments to tyranny and superstition, the church at Dammartin had been sold by the state. Any day now, it might be turned into a pile of masonry and antiques.

  The man in the condemned belfry attached a blue and curiously lashless eye to his telescope and peered across the space now occupied by the Charles de Gaulle airport at the distant smudge of Paris. By now, his assistant should have left the city and climbed up through the vineyards and quarries to his roof-top observatory among the windmills of Montmartre. At a distance of twenty miles, the hill of Dammartin would appear as a tiny island in the darkening plains. The assistant should now be lighting a flare that would be projected across the intervening space by a parabolic mirror of the kind recently installed in the Cordouan lighthouse at the mouth of the Gironde.

  The sky grew dark, but no light appeared. This was not a good start to one of the great expeditions of the new age. Yet there was a light, too reddish and diffuse and too far to the south to be coming from Montmartre. Something was burning in the heart of the city. An army of apprentices, artisans and National Guards, fuelled by rumours of conspiracy and invasion, and encouraged by the support of Citizen Robespierre, had marched from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and the ruins of the Bastille to the Tuileries Palace. As the palace courtyard filled up with pikes and red bonnets, shots were fired from the windows and the demonstration turned into a massacre. Eight hundred Swiss guards, palace servants and aristocrats were killed. Fire broke out in the Tuileries, and the red sky sent out its uninterpretable message to the surrounding countryside. In the circumstances, lighting a flare on Montmartre would have been an act of madness. It might be taken as a sign that the invading army of Prussians and Austrians was massing on the hills to the north of Paris.

  After ordering his guards to cease fire, the King had walked down the garden steps at the rear of the palace and delivered himself to the Legislative Assembly. To comply with the obvious will of the people, the Assembly suspended him from duty. This ‘Second French Revolution’ was the end of the ancient monarchy. Five months later, in January 1793, just beyond the bottom of
his garden, Louis XVI would be decapitated on the Place de la Concorde.

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  FOURTEEN MONTHS BEFORE, a small group of scientists and map-makers had gathered in a room at the Tuileries Palace. Louis XVI had known that this might be his last meeting. The coach that was to take him and his family to safety was being secretly prepared by a few trusted servants. They were to leave for Lorraine the next day. But an engrossing hobby has its own sense of time. The King was a skilled watchmaker. He was fascinated by the precision of maps and the modern art of cartography, and he knew the lasting importance of the project.

  The scientists had come to explain and seek His Majesty’s approval for a truly revolutionary act. One of the scientists, Charles de Borda, had invented a repeating circle – two small telescopes fixed to independently rotating rings – which made it possible to measure the angle between two points with unprecedented accuracy. With this instrument, the meridian of the Paris Observatory was to be remeasured, all the way from Dunkirk to Barcelona. Once the latitudes of the starting and finishing points had been determined by astronomical observation, the size of the Earth itself would be known. A universal standard measurement would exist for the first time in history. This holy grail of the Age of Reason would be France’s gift to the world: a single unit of measure which, as Condorcet said, would be ‘for all men, for all time’. The metre would measure exactly one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator. The ‘king’s foot’ and all the other cranky measures that varied from one village to the next would be swept away forever. The free world and all its wares and produce would be measured only by the eternal laws of Nature, not by the length of a man’s arm, the appetite of a cow or the arbitrary decision of a despot. Louis XVI gave his blessing to the project and went back to preparing his escape.