The Discovery of France

by Graham Robb

  Aubervilliers: The inhabitants decided that vegetables would be more profitable than wine, because of the proximity of Paris. Thus, almost all their land is under cultivation. . . . All the inhabitants are very hard-working.

  Vaubuin [Vauxbuin, a suburb of Soissons]: Its position is somewhat aquatic as it is surrounded by mountains [sic] on almost all sides.

  Sermoise and environs: The eye scarce has time to rest on an object in the landscape ere it spies another no less worthy of attention.

  Typically, the ‘eye’ had seen very little of what was shown on the map. Until Cassini, much of what appeared to be known about the provinces was based on second-hand reports. Even the government inspector of historic monuments, Prosper Mérimée, was partly dependent on hearsay when planning his tours of inspection in the 1830s:

  I have often heard tell of a very ancient monument that lies somewhere in the mountains to the south-west of Perpignan. Some say that it is a mosque, others that it is a church of the Knights Templar. I have also been told that it’s a hovel in such a ruinous state that no one can tell when it was built. Whatever the case, it must be worth an excursion of three or four days on horseback.

  Thanks to Cassini, Mérimée could at least confirm the existence and check the location of this mysterious temple. (It was the star-shaped eleventh-century church at Plane`s, known locally as ‘the Mosque’.)

  Few people actually owned the Cassini map: it was very expensive,28 and only a few hundred copies of each sheet were printed. Map-reading was a rare skill: no one felt that their intelligence was insulted if a geographical writer pointed out that two places which lay close together on the map might in reality be several hours apart. The important thing was the knowledge that the map existed. Many of the professional and accidental explorers who appear later in this book had traced the meandering rivers, spelled out the unfamiliar names and peered at the little symbols. Some of the sheets were cut into rectangles and pasted onto a piece of cloth that could be folded up. They could then be stored in small boxes and kept in a bookcase.

  A complete set can be seen in the library of the Château de Vizille near Grenoble, disguised as a row of books. The folded sheets could also be taken on journeys. In his account of a trip to the Rhineland in 1839, Victor Hugo proudly mentions his portable Cassini: ‘I took the diligence to Soissons. It was quite empty, which, between ourselves, did not displease me. I was able to spread out my Cassini sheets on the seat of the coupé.’

  In a poet’s mind, the map itself was a luminous landscape. Without his Cassini sheets, Hugo’s account might have lacked some of its picturesque details. The sheet for Soissons gave him the name of the tiny hamlet of La Folie. It also showed the steel-blue bend of the river Aisne and the little clumps of red paint that made Soissons look like an exotic flower head. When he wrote up his account by the light of a candle in the inn, the landscape he had seen through the twilight gloom would rise from the map like a vision:

  As I drew near to Soissons, it was growing dark. Night was already opening her smoke-filled hand in that enchanting valley where the road dives down after the hamlet of La Folie . . . Yet through the mists that lumbered across the countryside, one could still make out the clump of walls, roofs and buildings that is Soissons, half-inserted in the steel crescent of the Aisne like a sheaf that the sickle is about to cut.

  Cassini’s geometers marked the end of the pioneer stage of French exploration and helped to launch the age of mass discovery. Like the fleeing heroine of George Sand’s Nanon, who memorizes the Cassini map she sees in a house at Limoges before venturing into the wilderness of the Brande, travellers could now strike out across country and know more or less where they were going. Gaps and errors inspired new maps, and by the mid-nineteenth century there were signs of map mania, with popular magazines explaining how to chart one’s own little corner of the country. The English custom of wandering about the countryside, getting pleasantly lost among the hedgerows, was catching on in France.

  Village steeples were no longer just the totem poles of tiny pays. They were coordinates in a network that stretched beyond the horizon, and marked a more lively relationship between the landscape and the mind. The steeple at Illiers, in the plains south-west of Chartres, which had served as a triangulation point in the early 1750s, reappeared in fictional form in Marcel Proust’s Combray. Triangulation had drawn new lines across the land and prepared the way for other, less definable explorations:

  At a bend in the road, I suddenly experienced that special pleasure that resembles no other when I saw the two steeples of Martinville lit by the setting sun and apparently being moved about by the motion of our carriage and the twists and turns of the road, and then the steeple of Vieuxvicq which, though separated from the other two by a hill and a valley and placed on higher ground in the distance, appeared to be standing right next to them.

  In noticing and registering the shape of their spires, the shifting of their lines and the lighting of their surface by the sun, I felt that I was leaving part of my impression unexplored and that something lay behind that movement and that light – something that they seemed at once to contain and to conceal.

  *

  UNLIKE THESE TOPOGRAPHICAL journeys into the mind, the great scientific expeditions that followed Cassini’s and Delambre’s are known only from their findings: maps of agricultural practice in the different pays of France, collections of folk songs and tribal lore and catalogues of ethnic types (see p. 316). The Swiss botanist Pyrame de Candolle spent six years (1806–12) studying the flora of France and discovered hundreds of plants that were previously unknown in France and hundreds more unknown anywhere in the world. Charles de Tourtoulon and the Languedocian poet Octavien Bringuier travelled one thousand miles in circles and cul-de-sacs to trace two hundred and fifty miles of the line that divided Oc and Oïl (p. 60), from a hamlet near Soulac on the Atlantic coast, to the region of Guéret, on the masons’ route to Paris.

  The greatest expedition of all – in size if not in brilliance – was the successor to Cassini’s seventy-year-long survey. In 1818, military surveyors started work on the new map of France known as the Carte de l’état-major ((equivalent to the British Ordnance Survey, which began in 1791). It employed seventy-five officers at a time, plus a small army of draughtsmen, engravers and, eventually, photographers. The first sheet (Paris) appeared in 1821 and the last (Corte, northern Corsica) in 1880, by which time the first sheets were out of date. Army officers working in teams and in a slightly more cosmopolitan world were less vulnerable than Cassini’s pioneers, but since many of the officers had never wanted to be assigned to the map in the first place, it was still a heroic undertaking. They braved the heat of the treeless Landes and squinted through the haze at hills of sand that changed position from one month to the next; they bivouacked on freezing mountains, waiting for the clouds to lift; they lay in bed with dysentery and fever in places where nothing ever happened, and devoted months of work to measurements they knew might turn out to be less than accurate. Not all those explorers knew the satisfaction of a job well done.

  If enough information had survived, one expedition in particular would deserve a book to itself. It was described in suitably epic terms in 1843, eight years after the ground work was completed:

  Always on foot, heading out across country in all weathers, exposed to every sort of misadventure, following the capricious trail of subterranean strata and unable to devise their itinerary, as ordinary tourists do, according to the availability of accommodation, even the most intrepid mineral hunters were exhausted after a few months of this arduous pursuit. MM. Dufrénoy and Élie de Beaumont, resting only in winter to organize their materials, withstood the ordeal for ten years, from 1825 to 1835. In the course of their minute investigations, they traced out on French soil a route of more than twenty thousand leagues [fifty-six thousand miles]. And they not only studied France to its limits, they tracked the mineral formations that extend across our territory into neighbouring lands –
England, Belgium, Germany, Italy and Spain.

  The geological map of France had its origins in a faintly disturbing discovery made by the naturalist-Étienne Guettard. In the 1740s, he had noticed that the ‘subterranean geography’ of northern France appeared to be very similar to that of southern England. Deep down, the Channel was not the great barrier that it seemed. Guettard then formed a bold hypothesis: northern terrains formed ‘broad, continuous bands arranged concentrically around the capital’: ‘If my conjecture was correct, I should find in other provinces, at roughly the same distance from Paris, what I had seen in Lower Poitou and the intervening provinces’.

  A series of circular journeys from the capital confirmed his theory. Guettard’s Carte minéralogique of 1746 was a partial description of this unexpectedly coherent subterranean world. It showed two broad belts labelled ‘Bande marneuse’ and ‘Bande sablonneuse’ (marly and sandy) that crossed the English Channel between Bayeux and Boulogne. On Guettard’s map, Paris looks like the capital of an underground kingdom with London at the extreme northern tip.

  It so happens that Paris really does lie at the heart of concentric bands of sedimentary rocks and escarpments, but it is significant that Guettard formed his Paris-centric hypothesis at such an early stage. It is also significant that the achievements of the Belgian geologist Omalius d’Halloy, who spent six years mapping the subterranean French Empire at Napoleon’s request, were largely ignored. Geological formations might have disregarded political boundaries, but the map itself had national implications. The École des Mines in Paris finally agreed to support the project, not because it might show where the valuable coal seams of Belgium and Saarland extended into French Flanders and Lorraine, but because it had become a matter of patriotic pride. In 1822, Britain produced the first reliable geological map of a whole country. It was only then that the eleven-year-old proposal of the Professor of Geology Brochant de Villiers was approved and the fifty-six-thousand-mile expedition could begin.

  In the introduction to their twenty-four-foot-square, colour-coded Carte géologique de la France (1841) – ‘‘one of the finest scientific monuments on which our country prides itself ’, according to the Larousse encyclopedia – Dufrénoy and Élie de Beaumont drew some comforting conclusions. The old provinces and pays were not arbitrary divisions but ancient, ineradicable truths. To generations that had seen the end of the monarchy and the fall of the empire, it was a consolation to know that France and its capital would always exist:

  The limits of these natural regions remain constant amidst political revolutions, and they may well survive a revolution of the globe that would shift the bounds of the Ocean and change the course of rivers, for they are profoundly inherent in the structure of the Earth.

  As roads and railways spread across the land, ‘the suburbs of Paris would extend to the very frontiers of the kingdom’ and ‘make it possible to gain a firmer grasp of the peculiarities’ of each pays. This was to be an increasingly common theme in the development of a national identity: the celebration of home-grown diversity and the supreme importance of Paris as the guardian and regulator of that diversity.

  *

  THE CHARTING OF France had turned out to be a much bigger task than anyone had supposed: seventy years for the Cassini map and then another seventy years to produce a map that was notoriously incomplete. Half a century after the first lines were drawn, the Carte de l’état-major still lacked basic information. Railways were drawn onto it in a haphazard fashion, roads were misplaced, missing details were slotted in from cadastral surveys which had followed different conventions. Heights were shown, often inaccurately, with rough hatchings instead of contour lines. By 1865, levelling (the operation that determines the heights of objects and points) had been carried out in only two départments: the Cher and the Seine. Civil engineers were forced to conduct their own local surveys, and sometimes, inevitably, chose the wrong course for a new road or railway.

  Even when the hexagonal shape of France had become a familiar sight, few people had a clear impression of the topography of the country. In 1837, in an attempt to form a coherent picture in his mind, Stendhal wrote a description of ‘the five mountain ranges of France’. ‘It was only after writing these pages for myself that I understood the soil of France.’ But if his mountain ranges are plotted on a map of France, the result is about as accurate as a medieval chart.

  Such was the state of geographical knowledge in 1838 that the Société de Géographie thought it worth sending a learned deputation to no. 8, Chaussée du Maine, on the southern edge of Paris. A retired teacher, M. Sanis, had painstakingly created a three-dimensional model of France on an acre of land. Apart from relief models of the Alps commissioned by wealthy British tourists, nothing like it existed anywhere else. This forerunner of the ‘France Miniature’ theme park boasted riverbeds carved in stone and a complicated irrigation system. Two flat-bottomed boats holding six passengers each plied the three-foot- deep Mediterranean and sometimes realistically ran aground on the rocks of the Breton coast. There were pieces of apple tree in Normandy and pine tree in the Landes. Geology was represented by thumb-sized cavities into which M. Sanis had pushed a piece of coal, a cube of peat or some other appropriate specimen. The mountains were made of earth and had to be remoulded after rainstorms. As the Society’s report rather needlessly pointed out, ‘The Vosges, the mountains of the Auvergne, the Pyrenees and the Alps lose their picturesque effects when reduced to miniature proportions’. M. Sanis was intending to remodel them in asphalt and to add roads, boundaries and street plans. The Society suggested that this proliferation of detail might ‘obscure the overall picture’, but praised him for showing such ‘zeal for the advancement of science’.

  M. Sanis, whose heroic retirement project now lies somewhere beneath the Gare Montparnasse, showed considerably more zeal than the surprisingly incurious governments of the nineteenth century. The urge to discover seemed to be countered by an equal and opposite force. It was not until 1857 that another epic expedition began to dot the entire country with the circular metal plaques that appear like numerical clues in a gigantic treasure hunt, embedded in the parapet of a bridge, the wall of a church or the plinth of a roadside cross. These were the points required for a complete geodesic survey. The expedition was led by the surveyor of the Suez Canal, Paul-Adrien Bourdaloue. Within eight years, survey points 1,000 metres apart formed a preliminary network of 15,000 kilometres, at which point the French government withdrew 50 per cent of the funding.

  Napoleon would not have been surprised to learn that this official indifference to geographical truth had disastrous consequences. On the misty morning of 1 September 1870, French troops commanded by General Ducrot were retreating under heavy fire along the road where Empress Joséphine’s coach had come to grief in 1804. Napoleon III, nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, had lost the Battle of Sedan even before the first shots were fired. One of the reasons cited for the humiliating defeat of France by Prussia was a shortage of maps and the inadequacy of the Carte de l’état-major. It was impossible to tell, for instance, by looking at the map, whether the woods that the Prussian artillery was reducing to a wasteland of mud had once been scrubland or plantation, evergreen or deciduous.

  Twelve years later, the lessons had still not been learned. A correspondent of the Bordeaux Geographical Society was walking through the hills of the Entre-Deux-Mers region north of Saint-Émilion. The French army was conducting a training exercise. Through the gun smoke that drifted across the countryside, the geographer could see men in red trousers and képis wandering about in confusion, trying to identify hills and valleys from the map. Only the soldiers who came from the region could find their way. Others were trying to navigate by roads, but years had passed since the original survey, and even a simple training exercise was likely to turn into a journey of discovery. ‘In this respect’, said the geographer, ‘the map is absolutely incomplete. It has not changed at all.’

  11

  Travelling in
France, I:

  The Avenues of Paris

  EXCEPT FOR FUGITIVES, armies and professional explorers, discovering France – with or without a map – was largely a matter of negotiating the network of roads, rivers, canals and railways. From the distant present, this looks like a tale of steady progress: the speed of travel increased, people and merchandise moved about the country with growing ease and social and economic change arrived by carriage and locomotive instead of on the back of a pedlar or a mule. In the century that followed the Revolution, the national road network almost doubled in size and the canal network increased five-fold. There were fourteen miles of railway in 1828 and twenty-two thousand in 1888. By the mid-nineteenth century, a high-speed goods vehicle could cover fifty miles a day. On well-maintained surfaces, working animals became more efficient by the year: the average load pulled by one horse in 1815 was fourteen hundred pounds; in 1865, it was three thousand.

  Roads improved more quickly than at any time since the conquest of Gaul. Tracks that had wandered across country like a peasant returning from a feast were straightened, steep hills were flattened by hairpin bends, violent rivers were tamed or bypassed by imperturbable canals. One day, people would have to travel hundreds of miles to have the thrill of crossing a rickety plank bridge or seeing a carriage wheel skittering on the brink of a precipice. When the poet Alfred de Vigny watched the plume of a steam engine crossing a landscape at more than 10 mph, he dreaded a future of endless, predictable change where ‘everyone will run smoothly on a line’ and the world would be reduced to a monotonous blur: ‘Farewell, slow journeys and distant sounds’, ‘the twists and turns of varied hills’, ‘the axle’s delays’, ‘a friend encountered and the hours that slipped away’, ‘the hope of arriving late in a savage place’.