The Discovery of France

by Graham Robb

  Two of the map-makers had promising careers as painters before they were recruited by Cassini. One man left the Church to join the expedition and another gave up writing plays. Some became teachers and professors; one became a general. The man who left the Church later died of a contagious disease in southern California where he went to observe the transit of Venus in 1769. The ‘modest and tireless’ scholar taught the future Louis XVI the art of map-making and thus helped to ensure that the meridian expedition of Delambre and Méchain would have royal support.

  It is sadly appropriate that the team who put half a million obscure hamlets on the map has been wiped from the record of French history. Their adventures have left no trace other than the map itself. Under a magnifying glass, Cassini I’s 1679 map of the Moon turns out to contain a secret message to a woman who was probably his wife: a heart-shaped feature in the Sea of Serenity and a beautiful angelic face with flowing hair formed from the mountains of the Heraclides Promontory. No such secrets are hidden in the map of France. Nothing shows, for instance, that the village of Les Estables was the grave of the man who came to put it on the map.

  *

  IF ALL THE ADVENTURES of Cassini’s surveyors had been recorded, the seventy-year history of his map might have been the Thousand and One Nights of French exploration. It might have given a true sense of the size and unpredictability of the country. It would have shown that the provinces were not just the hinterland of Paris, just as the map itself depicted every farm and hamlet on the same scale as the capital and the royal estates.

  Not all the stories would have been tales of ignorance and hostility. In the region in which the wild boy Victor de l’Aveyron was discovered in 1799 (p. 11), the 113th sheet of the Cassini map shows a church called Saint Cirice. The tower that represents it is placed on a promontory of hatching and shade between a dark-green wood and a bend of the river Tarn. The busy landscape of farms and villages is deceptive. The effects of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes were still evident. Most of the Protestant population had fled and more than half the inhabitants of the region lived in isolated cottages and hamlets. If they had been able to decipher the forest of pictograms and read the place names, they would have been amazed to see their home surrounded by so many places of which they had never heard – almost three thousand on this sheet alone.

  Some of those hamlets no longer exist, but the cemetery of Saint Cirice is still there, clinging to a cliff between Broquiès and Brousse-le-Château, above an unlit tunnel, built in the late nineteenth century for a railway that was never laid. Here, the river Tarn has dug itself a deep canyon in the limestone. In autumn and winter, a person walking along the north bank would see a misty river as broad as the Rhône flowing softly past the orchards and the vines, but as the sun warmed up the valley and dispelled the mist, a torrent would appear far below. Sometimes, after heavy rain, calcareous rocks came loose and went crashing down to the bottom of the gorge.

  On the edge of the chasm, an iron cross with a skull-and-crossbones stands on top of two gravestones placed back to back. Some of the inscriptions in the little cemetery are misspelt. Even today, for some local people, French is still an awkward, foreign language. But this particular memorial is impeccable. It bears the names of a man and a woman who died within a month of each other in 1843. One of the names is too grand and French to be native to the region. Jacques-Franc¸ois Loiseleur-Deslongchamps came from a family of drapers in the comfortable market town of Dreux, a long day’s walk from Paris. He was twenty-two years old when he arrived in the region in the spring of 1769. His journey ended ten miles north of the river Tarn by a small farmhouse at the foot of the Lagast hill.

  This remote prominence was well known in the world of geometers. From its grassy summit, the volcanoes of the Cantal can be seen to the north, the Montagne Noire to the south and, beyond, the blue haze of a Mediterranean sky. In 1739, when Cassini II was surveying the Paris meridian, a signal had been placed there. Deslongchamps’s first job was to build a new one. A reconstruction stands on the summit today – a truncated pyramid of planks on four wooden stilts. It looks like a primitive space rocket. Next to it, the aluminium struts of a radio mast hum with the gales and the static whisper of voices in the ether.

  Surveying the area would take several weeks. The village of Saint-Martin-de-Carnac, where one of Deslongchamps’s colleagues was savagely attacked a few years later, lay behind the gorse-covered hills, forty miles away in a different pays. Here at Lagast, though the original signal had been destroyed, the population was slightly more amenable. A farmer called Boudou, who lived at the farm of Le Vitarel at the foot of the hill, offered the stranger board and lodging. Conversation would be difficult since no one in the region spoke French, but the man from the north might have interesting tales to tell, and an extra hand was always welcome. For Deslongchamps, surveying the Rouergue (as the Aveyron was known before the Revolution) was a journey back in time. He had arrived in a world without clocks and calendars, where the women looked like Joan of Arc with their capes, surcoats and pointed clogs.

  During that long summer, Deslongchamps came to know the lie of the land better than any native. He also came to know Boudou’s daughter, Marie-Jeanne, who looked after her father’s flock of sheep. She watched the lodger taking measurements, tinkering with tools that were never allowed to become dirty, caring for his sheets of paper like a priest. She might have shown him the dolmens that gave shelter from the squalls and how delicious last year’s chestnuts were when cooked with salt and fig leaves or mixed in a pot with prunes, dried pears, turnips and potatoes. He told her the names of things that she had known only as the forest, the river or the pile of rocks. A dot on the lens of the telescope was the cathedral at Rodez; the Pole Star indicated the direction in which Paris lay. The hill behind the house where she was born was a milestone on an invisible road that encircled the Earth.

  In a land where girls were little more than serfs and even ladies in the towns were separated from their husbands in church, a shepherdess who knew about triangulation and degrees of latitude was a rare and unnatural creature. It was probably just as well that they fell in love. After two seasons of surveying, Deslongchamps, who must have been an able mountaineer, was sent to work in the Pyrenees and then the Alps. He helped to chart the glaciers and the snow-bound valleys. But then, no doubt at his own request, he was sent back to the Rouergue in 1774 to survey the region further up the Tarn, around Nant and Millau. It was close enough to Lagast for an occasional visit to the farm. It seems to have taken him as long to map this area as it took him to map the high mountains on the Italian border.

  Five years after first arriving in the Rouergue, Jacques-François Loiseleur-Deslongchamps married Marie-Jeanne Boudou, who had just turned eighteen. They bought a small property ten miles to the south, following the line of the meridian survey, by the banks of the Tarn near the church of Saint Cirice. The name of the property was Puech Cani, which means ‘steep hill’. Later, when Marie-Jeanne’s father died, her husband became the owner of the farm at the foot of the Lagast hill. The isolated farmhouse is still there, unrestored and uninhabited.

  Very little is known of their long life together. Deslongchamps became involved in politics. He survived the Revolution and returned to the Tarn where the winters were long and the summers dry, and vines grew well in the stony soil. When Méchain’s assistant on the meridian expedition reached the Lagast hill in 1797, he was delighted to find that the owner of the farm was the fifty-year-old veteran map-maker, Deslongchamps. Any historian would happily give up several years of research to hear the stories that were exchanged that night in the farmhouse.

  When Deslongchamps was ninety years old, still living with his wife at Puech Cani, he invented a portable barometer that was presented to François Arago, Director of Observations at the Paris Observatory. Deslongchamps had lived to see the last sheets of the Cassini map appear. The metal plates on which his wife’s home had been engraved were almost worn away and othe
r maps were being made. But Deslongchamps knew that the charting of France was still a long way from completion. The barometer measured air pressure, which made it possible to calculate altitude. With a barometer that was portable but accurate, a third dimension could be added to the map: the heights of mountains, which remained as constant as the meridian. Those inaccessible parts of France would at last be mapped for future generations, while the land that was inhabited by people changed with the passing years and turned even the most reliable chart into a picture of the past.

  10

  Empire

  IN 1804, THE HORRORS OF the Revolution were over: the guillotine had been replaced by the machinery of war. Napoleon was about to crown himself emperor. Most of the colonial empire in North America and the West Indies was lost between the Seven Years War and the Louisiana Purchase (1803), but France itself was now expanding to the north, the east and the south. Several new départements had been added to the original eighty-three. Some of the names dreamt up for these new départements made them sound like distant colonies rather than neighbouring states: Mont Terrible, a misinterpretation of Mont Terri in Switzerland; Jemmapes, which misspelt the name of the Belgian town Jumape (in Picard) or Jemappes (in French); and the unimaginative but picturesque Forêts ((Forests), formed from the Duchy of Bouillon and a densely wooded part of Luxembourg.

  At the height of the empire, there were a hundred and thirty départements stretching from Hamburg (Bouches-de-l’Elbe département) to Rome (Tibre département). Maps of Europe were out of date as soon as they were published. Napoleon was well aware that the land would not conveniently pose while cartographers mapped it. Cassini may not have shown detail on the same scale as the maps of cadastral surveys, which established property lines and tax liability, but a complete map was better than a patchwork of minutely embroidered squares and empty spaces. Napoleon wrote to General Berthier on 26 October 1804:

  The ingénieurs-géographes are being asked to make cadastres instead of military maps, which means that, twenty years from now, we shall have nothing. . . . If we had stuck to making maps on Cassini’s scale, we should already have the whole Rhine frontier . . . The geometers began a cadastre in Corsica which was considered by people who live there to be a very poor job. . . . Surveyors are left too much to their own devices. All I asked was that the Cassini map be completed. . . . Experience shows that the biggest mistake in general administration is trying to do too much. The result is that one lacks the essential.

  Napoleon knew, of course, that Cassini was not infallible and that, while geometers were busy on the battle-scarred frontier, the heart of the empire was still not fully charted. Only a few months before, his wife had confirmed the unsatisfactory state of the national map. That summer, the northern parts of the empire had seemed sufficiently safe for Joséphine to take the waters at Aix-la-Chapelle. Since Aix had been Charlemagne’s capital, Napoleon was thinking of using it as the venue of his coronation. Joséphine might provide some useful information on the route. He plotted an itinerary for her on the map. It would take her north-east to Sedan, then over the ‘Wolf’s Back’ hill (Le Dos du Loup) and on to Liège through the Forêts département.

  The nineteenth-century route still exists. A few hundred yards east of the N58 autoroute, the old road crosses the unmarked Belgian border in the forest, then drops down to Bouillon by a hair-raising descent. The Cassini map shows the route as two shaded lines with dots on either side. This was the symbol for a surfaced, tree-lined road. The Emperor’s valet remembered the journey for years to come:

  In the Ardennes, we ran into danger. The Emperor had planned the route we were to take. Unfortunately, the road existed only on the map. It became so bad that, on a very steep descent, we were forced to restrain the carriages with ropes. In fright, Joséphine decided to decided to abandon the coach, despite the rain and the mud. . . . The carriage in which the first lady-in-waiting Mme Saint-Hilaire was travelling tipped over. She reached Liège a day after the rest of the party. Riders of the escort were sent out to see what was causing the delay and to offer protection, but these attentions appeared insufficient to Mme Saint- Hilaire, who was most offended that the entire court was not thrown into confusion by her absence.

  A representative tableau of France in 1804 might show Napoleon at Notre-Dame in Paris, taking his crown from the hands of Pope Pius VII, or the hundred thousand soldiers of the Grande Armée waiting on the coast at Boulogne for the order to invade England, but it would be just as representative if it showed the imperial party wading through a quagmire somewhere north of Sedan.

  Long after the country had been mapped, getting lost or stranded in the heart of the French empire was a common experience. Dozens of nightmare journeys can be recreated by comparing Cassini’s charts to contemporary accounts. A young army officer called Paul Thie´bault, who was in the crowd that stormed the Tuileries in 1792, was travelling from Paris to Millau with two fellow officers in 1795. At this point in his account, they had reached a part where the map showed a ‘metalled, tree-lined road’:

  Having no paths to follow but the beds of torrents, and finding no habitation, we became lost after passing the spot where our guide informed us that the Beast of the Gévaudan had been killed.27 Meanwhile, the light was failing and we were beginning to wonder how we would spend the night among these arid hills when we spotted a house on the far side of a deep gorge.

  The house was called La Bastide. It appears on the Cassini map, on an isolated stretch of road, as a little square building marked ‘la Bastide – cabaret’. Though the roof was blown off by gales in 2004, the sunken stone vaults of the original ground floor can still be seen. It was here that Thiébault and his comrades spent the night. The inn was deserted apart from two shifty-looking women. After discovering a trapdoor in the floor of their bedroom, the officers barricaded themselves in and slept in their clothes. At daybreak, they asked for the bill and were charged one louis (twenty-four francs) for bed and a stingy omelette. (Twenty-four francs would have bought a cow’s milk for a year.)

  ‘One louis! Are you mad?’

  ‘Faith, you have no cause for complaint. No one did you any harm.’

  ‘Who the devil’s talking about harm? I was referring to the price.’

  . . . As we were leaving through the courtyard gate, we found ourselves face to face with two armed men coming along the route we had taken the day before. Behind them, at a thousand paces, were several other men, also armed. . . . We spurred our horses and set off at a full trot. The walls of the house covered our departure and we were out of range before they could decide what to do.

  Despite the map’s misleading and potentially lethal depiction of the road system, Cassini was criticized – presumably by people who never left home – for showing only major highways and omitting all the secondary routes. He explained that roads ‘changed with the seasons’. A map that claimed to show everything was a public menace, encouraging travellers to venture where none should go without a guide to point out ‘the hollow ways and the precipices’. Yet Cassini’s own geometers were clearly over-optimistic. People travelling from Toulouse to Bordeaux must have wondered what had happened to the (fictitious) bridges at Verdun and Tonneins, and some travellers in the Alps must have been disappointed when they found that the only way to continue on the road marked ‘Grand Chemin de France au Piémont’ was to have the carriage dismantled and loaded onto the back of a mule.

  *

  THIS, THEN, WAS THE visible state of France at the dawn of the nineteenth century: a slightly misleading cartographic masterpiece produced by expeditions that had set off from Paris more than half a century before. Cassini IV was never able to revise the map on which his family had spent part of its fortune. The plates from which it was printed were confiscated by the Revolutionary government and never returned. Cassini was evicted from his home, the Observatory, accused of aiming cannon (telescopes) at the people of Paris and sent to prison, where he described himself as ‘an ex-living person�
�. He might have agreed with Baudelaire that ‘nations have great men only in spite of themselves’.

  Though it expropriated the map of France, the state showed little interest in charting its domain. The chief concern of the military surveyors was the perimeter of the country. This, however, presented two serious problems. The first was the lack of reliable measurements of altitude. The 1659 Treaty of the Pyrenees defined the frontier between France and Spain as ‘the crest of the Pyrenees’, but more than two centuries passed before the snowy battlements were measured accurately and the people of the high Pyrenees found out whether they were Spanish or French.

  The second problem was a fear that frontier maps would effectively hand the keys of the fortress to the enemies of France. This is why the Cassini map ends abruptly at the old borders, omitting Nice (the homeland of Cassini I), Savoy, Corsica and, because it lay too far off the Vendée coast to fit onto the sheet, the Île d’Yeu. France itself looks like an island. Beyond the borders, apart from a few Notre- Dames floating in space, a tiny spit of land labelled ‘Douvres’ (Dover) and some loose ends of road, there is nothing. In the Alps, the edge of the world is hemmed with mountains. The only hints of the other side are a few intriguing captions: ‘[Col de la] Traversette: hole made by human hands which passes through the mountain’. In the Pyrenees, the land drops suddenly into a bottomless abyss and a line of jagged peaks guards the perimeter like a row of fence posts.

  However, these shortcomings were trivial compared to those of earlier maps. Despite official interference and lack of funding, the Cassini map was a national treasure. It shed light on the dark domestic interior and had a huge effect on French society. It replaced the Parisian image of a featureless expanse of fields and forests with a Romantic sense of la France profonde. It opened up the country to the imagination and provided clues to the worlds that lay beyond the road network. Before Cassini, most maps for travellers covered only a narrow strip of land a mile or two on either side of a river or a road. Most of them, like the 1775 Paris–Reims ‘historical and topographical description’, showed little more than a traveller would have seen through a carriage window on a rainy day. The idea was simply to provide some instructive entertainment on the long journey. The map was not allowed to speak for itself; it was an illustration of the text: