The Discovery of France

by Graham Robb

  When Vigny wrote his poem, ‘La Maison du berger’, in 1844, he was living in a Paris apartment, a few minutes’ walk from several omnibus lines, three railway stations29 and one of the busiest rivers in France. He had to be careful when crossing the road. The fact that he imagined himself travelling with his mistress in a ‘fragrant’, four-wheeled shepherd’s hut suggests that he had already lost sight of the world beyond the city. He lived in the metropolitan France whose express roads and canals were universally admired as engineering marvels, but not in the other France, which was still recovering from the fall of the Roman Empire.

  The changes in French society described in the second part of this book were accelerated by the expanding infrastructure, but the experience of individuals was not arithmetically linked to increasing road length and diminishing journey times. Historical dramas usually show the most efficient technology of the period – healthy horses pulling shiny carriages on slightly bumpy roads – but not the most ordinary scenes of daily life: a cow munching peacefully on a main road near a city; two carriages stuck facing each other for hours on a road so narrow that the doors could hardly be opened; a horse, with wooden planks placed under its belly, being hoisted out of a mud-hole; a farmer ploughing up the road to plant his buckwheat and potatoes.

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  ONE OF THE BEST short guides to the experience of travelling in post-Revolution France is a French–German phrase book published in 1799 by Caroline-Stéphanie-Félicité Du Crest de Saint-Aubin, who is usually known as Mme de Genlis. Her pedagogical bent became apparent when, at the age of six, she delivered a series of lectures to local peasants from the balcony of the family château near Autun. She later became a governess of the future King Louis-Philippe. She was an accomplished seamstress, surgeon, horse rider, harpist and billiards player. Her historical novels are resolutely inaccurate, but her Traveller’s Manual for French Persons in Germany and German Persons in France is a first-rate historical document. The following phrases are taken from the sections on ‘Planning the journey’, ‘Speaking to postilions during the journey’ and ‘Talking at staging posts while the horses are being harnessed’. They may sound slightly melodramatic, but similar phrases were used every day on the roads of France.

  Listen, postilion, if you drive at a good speed when the road is good, and slowly on corners and bridges or in towns and villages, then I shall give you a good tip. Otherwise, you shall have only the fare.

  Your carriage is heavy and over-loaded.

  Not at all. I assure you that it is neither heavy nor over-loaded.

  This horse is worthless. It is restive. It is skittish. I am decidedly loath to take it. Please give me a different one.

  Can one place a harp in its carrying case on the luggage rack?

  What kind of road is it?

  It is very sandy.

  It is strewn with rocks.

  It is full of mountains, forests and precipices.

  One must avoid passing through forests at dusk or at night.

  Postilion, I do not wish to leave the main road. I am absolutely set against it.

  But the sand is over-tiring my horses.

  I do not wish to leave the main road, and you may not leave it without my permission, for the mail coach must follow the main road unless the passengers agree to leave it.

  Postilion, stop; the brakes must be attached.

  The descent is quite steep, I wish the brakes to be attached.

  Please ensure that the trunk is properly attached and that nothing has come undone.

  I believe that the wheels are on fire. Look and see.

  Postilion, a man has just climbed onto the back of the coach. Make him get down.

  Postilion, allow this poor man to climb onto the seat.

  He is so tired! Leave him alone. He is an old man!

  Climb up, my friend. Climb up, my man.

  Do not fall asleep on that seat, my man, you might fall off. . . . Keep yourself awake.

  The kingpin has fallen out.

  The suspension has snapped.

  The coach has overturned.

  The horses have just collapsed.

  Is anyone hurt?

  No, thank God.

  The horse is badly wounded. It is dead.

  The postilion has fainted, administer the eau de Luce.30

  Gently remove the postilion from beneath the horse.

  There is a large lump on his head. Should we not apply a coin to the lump in order to flatten it?

  By no means. What you are proposing is very dangerous and one should never do such a thing.

  I shall simply put salt and water on the contusion or some eau de Cologne thinned with water.

  Poor man! Be assured that I sympathize with your suffering.

  Most of the roads on which these little dramas were acted out had been created by slave labour. The dreaded corvée, instituted in 1738, was the main road-building scheme until the Revolution. In some parts, almost the entire male population between the ages of twelve and seventy – when life expectancy was less than forty years – could be forced to work on the roads for up to forty days a year. The national average was one week. The only people who did not have to break stones, cart rubble and dig ditches were lords, the clergy and their servants, and a few essential workers: the teacher, the doctor and the communal shepherd. Invalids were excused but they had to pay for a replacement if they had any money. If the gang was one man short, two women took his place. Horses and carts could be made to travel up to four leagues (eleven miles) to the worksite. Shirkers were fined, imprisoned, given extra work or driven to the site by armed guards.

  The blatant unfairness of the corvée was a constant irritation. Rich people’s carriages came charging along, gouging up the road surface, and went merrily on their way. Many of the road-builders had no idea where the road went and never used it. The main beneficiaries were merchants and nobles. Fenimore Cooper, who travelled through northern and eastern France in 1832, rightly supposed that the corvée had often coincided with a visit from the local seigneur:

  Thus, whenever M. le Marquis felt disposed to visit the château, there was a general muster, to enable him and his friends to reach the house in safety, and to amuse themselves during their residence; after which the whole again reverted to the control of nature and accident. To be frank, one sometimes meets with by-roads in this old country, which are positively as bad as the very worst of our own, in the newest settlements.

  The effects of aristocratic influence can still be seen: an unexpected detour that takes the road past a château or a seemingly needless cutting that gives a splendid view of a bishop’s palace. The chaˆteaux of the Loire Valley are so easy to reach on minor roads partly because their owners knew how to take advantage of slave labour.

  It would be hard to exaggerate the inefficiency of the corvée. Often, the road was divided up between parishes, which meant it was unusable until every parish had finished its section. Some parishes sub-divided their stretch of road into individual segments and turned it into an obstacle course of tiny worksites. A procrastinating peasant with a persistent pothole and a broken shovel could hold up the traffic of an entire region for years. When the summer’s work was done, many villages allowed their work to go to waste. A good road might allow producers from a neighbouring town to come to market and undercut the local farmers. Even if the village had wares and produce to export, the corvée was a crippling expense. By vigorous lobbying on behalf of the townspeople, the magistrates of La Souterraine in the Creuse managed to deflect the road from Toulouse to Paris. La Souterraine still lies six miles from the main road and is forced to promote itself with a slightly misleading map as ‘the naturally enterprising town at the crossroads of major axes of communication’..

  With a few spectacular exceptions, the roads themselves were crudely made – usually flattish rocks between embankments, loaded with stones, then covered with an extra layer of crushed stones or gravel, creating a thick, unstable cake of rubble. The innovat
ion of the Limousin engineer Pierre Trésaguet in 1775, who halved the usual thickness to nine or ten inches, was widely ignored until the 1830s, when it was adopted along with other improvements devised by the Scottish engineer John Loudon McAdam. Most French roads were designed by architects rather than road engineers; many bridges were beautiful works of art until they collapsed into the river. A free national school, the École des Ponts et Chaussées (Highways and Bridges), was founded in 1791, but expertise on a national scale could not be created overnight. Even a century later, the roads lecturer at the École des Ponts et Chaussées could take nothing for granted:

  Setting aside the depths that are covered by the waters of the sea, the surface of the Earth can be seen to have a large number of protuberances, separated by hollow sections called valleys. The protuberances are called mountains, when they rise more then five or six hundred metres above the surrounding land, and hillocks or hills when the height is less. These terms are not absolute: a mountain in the Beauce would scarcely be a hill in the Alps. . . .

  The road is said to be en rampe when it rises, and en pente when it descends. These terms are relative to the direction in which one supposes one is advancing along the road. If one turns around in order to pursue the road in the opposite direction, the pentes turn into rampes, and vice versa.

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  WITH POOR TECHNIQUES, lack of expertise and a self-sabotaging workforce, it is no wonder that road building was so painfully slow. In 1777, in the Généralité of Rouen (equivalent to the Seine-Maritime and parts of the neighbouring départements), thirty-seven thousand unpaid workers and twenty-two thousand horses worked for seven days each and produced twenty miles of road. This was fast. In the Landes, where carriages sank in the sand up to their axles, the engineer Chambrelent calculated that once a road had reached a certain length it would be destroyed by the process that built it: ‘In travelling to the point where it will be used to prolong the road, one cubic metre of stone or gravel wears out more than one cubic metre of road.’ In this case, physical reality was equal to the most perverse superstition: the more work done on a road, the shorter it became.

  The main problem was that before the advent of railways, road-builders were dependent on local materials. In the late eighteenth century, carters who brought wine to Paris from Orléans were obliged to carry sandstone slabs on the return journey to help repair the road, but the Paris–Orléans road was exceptionally well maintained. In limestone regions like Burgundy and Languedoc, people and animals coated in dust travelled along blinding white roads. In granite regions like Brittany and the Auvergne, uncrushable, sharp stones made the roads less comfortable than the natural surface. The richer the soil, the worse the road. Rain turned dusty roads into quagmires, carriage wheels carved the quagmires into ruts, which the sun then baked into a chaotic, miniature landscape of ridges and gullies. Sometimes, the only part of the land that was permanently devoid of traffic was the road itself. In 1788, no one would have been mystified by the sight of the equestrian statue of Louis XIV passing through fields and hedges on its way to the main square in Beauvais.

  The magnificent system of main roads that eventually came into being was a triumph of administrators and engineers who had worked in conditions usually associated with trench warfare. Baron Hauss-mann, who bulldozed a large part of Paris in the 1850s and 60s and turned it into a hygienic city of broad boulevards and capacious, high-speed sewers, had suffered years of provincial misery as a sub-prefect. He had served in Poitiers, where one part of the town was almost cut off from the other by a steep hill, shoe-piercing cobbles, bad lighting and a lack of taxis. The following year, he left Poitiers for Yssingeaux in the Haute-Loire. It took him six days to reach it, by a series of increasingly antiquated carriages. In 1833, he was sent to take charge of the arrondissement of Nérac, where horses had been known to vanish into mud-holes and the entire road network measured less than thirty miles. ‘It did occur to me to go back to Paris and say, “Couldn’t I be sent somewhere else?” ’

  This is why so much of the Roman infrastructure was still in use at the dawn of the industrial age. Some Roman roads had been marked on maps since the seventeenth century, not for antiquarian interest, but because they were the best roads available. Locally, they were known as the ‘camin ferrat’ or ‘chemin ferré’ (the metalled way), the ‘chaussée’ (the surfaced road), the ‘chemin de César’ or the ‘chemin du Diable’, since only Caesar or the Devil could have built a road that lasted so long. As the Marquis de Mirabeau observed in 1756, Roman roads had been ‘built for eternity’, while a typical French road could be wrecked within a year by ‘a moderate-sized colony of moles’.

  The very large number of places called ‘Le Grand Chemin’ or ‘La Chaussée’ shows that the Roman contribution to the development of modern France was not confined to the trade routes through Provence and the Rhône valley. There were long stretches of Roman surface or base layer on the roads from Arles to Aix, Clermont-Ferrand to Limoges, Arcachon to Bordeaux, the old salt route from Saintes to Poitiers, the left bank of the Lot between Aiguillon and Lafitte, and the road that wound up from the Alsace plain to Mont Sainte-Odile with an impressive top layer of nicely squared stones. There were Roman roads in remote parts of Poitou, Champagne and the Morvan. In 1756, a stretch of road from Besançon to Langres was ‘so complete and solid, between Chalindrey and Grosses-Saules, that the weight and movement of carriages make no impression on it’. In 1839, Mérimée found the same road quite busy and ‘in fairly good condition though it has never been repaired’. In Brittany, the ‘chemin de la duchesse Anne’ north of Quimper remained in use until the early twentieth century. Popular admiration for ‘good old Caesar’ was not entirely misplaced.

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  UNTIL THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, the best modern roads were those intended for the King: the ‘Route du Sacre’ (Coronation Road) to Reims and the paved roads from Paris to Versailles and Marly. They were referred to as ‘the avenues of the city of Paris’. Louis XIV’s chief minister, Colbert, pursued what seemed to be a logical policy of centralization. In 1680, he instructed the intendants of the pays d’élection (provinces taxed directly by the state) to ‘consider the main route from the provinces to Paris as the principal and most important . . . because Paris is effectively the centre of all consumption’. A road that pointed straight at the capital was more likely to be funded than a road that served the nearest town.

  The effects of this persistent policy of centralization can be seen on the maps of the developing road and rail network. The lower halves of the maps seem to belong to a different country in a different era: while Paris surrounds itself with vessels like a fertilized egg, the older urban centres – Lyon, Marseille, Montpellier, Toulouse and Limoges – remain almost unchanged. Even in the mid-nineteenth century, a person in Moulins could see the mountains of the Auvergne but be unable to reach any town in the region because all the diligences left from Paris and were usually fully booked. It still takes hours of ingenuity to plot a north–south or west–east route from a Channel port – especially by train – that does not pass through the capital. Paris is the only city in France that cannot be crossed on a long-distance train and the only city that forces all travellers to tread its pavement before continuing their journey. (It is hard to see why so much ridicule was heaped on Ferdinand Lop, the repeatedly unsuccessful presidential candidate of the 1920s and 30s, who was simply following national policy when he proposed extending the Boulevard Saint-Michel to the sea.)

  The royal roads, according to an edict of 1607, were at least seventy-two feet wide, which is the same as a modern six-lane autoroute. They ran through great swathes of baldness, extending sixty feet on either side of the road, in which all plant-life was hacked down every six months. There is a good indication of the normal state of these gravelly routes royales in the fact that Louis XIV always travelled with his own crew of road-menders. The same edict ordered crosses, posts or pyramids to be erected as signposts at all junctions. Towns usu
ally chose posts; villages preferred crosses. Many of the old stone crosses that stand at junctions and crossroads in the French countryside appeared at this time. Local custom might have turned them into religious monuments, but they began life as road signs and are still quite useful aids to navigation.

  The first serious attempt to create an integrated network was made in 1738, when the Finance Minister, Philibert Orry, and the future director of the Ponts et Chaussées (Highways and Bridges), Daniel Trudaine, launched a road-building programme based on the corvée. Instead of simply patching up the old highways, they created new roads with separate carriageways. In this way, repairs could be carried out without stopping the traffic. Most of the stunningly long, straight French roads that are usually thought to be Roman were built in this period. They were often lined with trees, not, as legend has it, to provide shade for marching troops, but because they looked nice. Trees were impractical: they prevented the road from drying out; they blocked the ditches and gave cover to highwaymen. In Normandy, travellers were often snagged by the straggly branches of apple trees. But the beautiful avenues of elm, ash, sycamore and beech relieved the terrible monotony of an arrow-straight road. These avenues were renewed, and others created, in the nineteenth century, using poplars and plane trees planted ten metres apart. Many of them are now being cut down because cars sometimes crash into them.