The Discovery of France

by Graham Robb

  Principal roads of Roman Gaul

  Post-roads, 1643

  Post-roads, 1748

  Post-roads, 1810

  Railways, 1854

  Autoroutes, 1986

  Ironically, the great advances that gave France the finest roads in Europe originated in provinces that would later suffer from the increasing centrality of Paris. The provincial government of Languedoc had already shown that local funding was more effective than slave labour. In Toulouse, between 1750 and 1786, spending on the roads increased from 1,200 livres a year to 198,000 livres. By the end of the century, the elm-lined avenues of Toulouse ran to the foothills of the Pyrenees and the Cévennes. Small grain merchants and their clanking mule trains were replaced by fast, heavy wagons and a commercial mail service that operated up to ninety miles from the city.

  Flanders, too, had some lovely smooth roads, partly because tax concessions encouraged the use of vehicles with broad-rimmed wheels. In Alsace and Lorraine, where the economy was largely dependent on haulage, light chariots went racing towards Strasbourg at over 8 mph. But the model for the rest of the country was the Limousin, where the free-trade economist Turgot and his chief engineer Trésaguet created the roads which Arthur Young found ‘incomparably fine, and more like the well-kept alleys of a garden than a common highway’. Travellers who passed through the poverty-stricken province were amazed to find themselves skimming along a beautiful road on which even the smallest ruts had been filled with nut-sized bits of marble. In 1789, François Marlin found the contrast exasperating:

  Soon after Bourganeuf, an irksome signpost informs you in great big letters that you are leaving the Généralité of Limoges . . . What is the point of this signpost? The merest carter could hardly fail to notice that he was no longer on a Limousin road.

  When he became Finance Minister in 1774, Turgot urged the abolition of the corvée. (It was finally abolished throughout the kingdom in 1787.) In 1775, he allowed public coaches – but not private carriages – to use the system of staging posts, which until then had been reserved for the royal mail. The cost of a journey could now be worked out in advance and travellers could be certain that they would never be more than twenty miles from a fresh team of horses. The resulting small increase in the average speed of long journeys was the first significant acceleration since the Middle Ages.

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  BEFORE HE WAS FORCED out of office, Turgot also oversaw the two most telling advances in road engineering. His chief engineer in the Limousin, Pierre Trésaguet, had insisted that a limit should be placed on gradients. Impressively boring in the plain, the relentlessly straight roads of the earlier eighteenth century were a nightmare in the hills. The old road east from Morlaix still includes a needless climb of 15 per cent (1 in 7) because the blundering military Governor of Brittany, the Duc d’Aiguillon, preferred straight lines to the more accommodating curve of the older road that ran alongside. Thanks in part to Trésaguet, it is unusual now to find a climb in excess of 8 per cent (1 in 12). This was thought to be the steepest gradient that a fully laden mule could manage.31 British mountain roads tend to rise in fits and starts like step pyramids. French mountain roads go much higher, but more steadily, and can comfortably be climbed for hours by a fully laden cyclist.

  This simple innovation revolutionized travel. The names of certain hills crop up again and again in travellers’ accounts like monsters in The Odyssey: ‘the famous Reventin slope [near Vienne], which used to stop the big Provençal carts for hours’; ‘the terrible Laffrey incline’ near Vizille where Napoleon addressed the regiment that was sent to stop him on his return from Elba and which is still marked ‘dangerous’; and the fearsome Tarare hill which lay on the shortest of the main routes from Paris to Lyon and the south. It took two hours to climb the Tarare and just as long to descend. Even the smallest carriages had to be emptied out and pulled up the hill by oxen. For centuries, travellers endured a baptism of mud as they entered the Rhône valley. The engineers who flattened these monsters were hailed as national heroes. Though all its seventeen bridges were invisible from the carriageway, the road that zigzagged over the Col de Saverne on the main route from France to Alsace became a tourist attraction in its own right:

  The road that descends from the Vosges to Saverne is one of the masterpieces of man. . . . Snaking skilfully along the dizzying escarpment, its unnoticeably gentle incline seems to mock the rocky steepness and to offer the traveller consolation for the obstacles that Nature tried to place in the way of his pleasure. (Joseph Lavallée, Voyage dans les départements de la France, 1792.)

  The biggest of these ‘obstacles’ was the Alps. The route taken by Hannibal and his elephants in 218 bc was one of the commonest subjects of archaeological speculation, for the purely practical reason that, until 1810, the only Alpine crossing for wheeled vehicles was in the far south, over the Col de Tende, where mules and their drivers were sometimes blown over the edge by the howling Mistral. In 1800, losing a great deal of equipment on the way, Napoleon had crossed the Alps by the Great Saint Bernard – not on the prancing white charger shown in David’s painting (1801) next to a stone carved with the names ‘Napoleon’ and ‘Hannibal’, but on a mule borrowed from a local peasant. After the Battle of the Nile, when the Mediterranean ports were blockaded by the British fleet, the main route into Italy was the Mont Cenis Pass. In 1810, a new road was opened and the cavalcade of sedan chairs, stretchers and mules was replaced by carts and carriages. Until the end of war reopened the sea route, about fifty vehicles a day wound their way up to the 6,800-foot summit of Mont Cenis en route from Lyon to Turin – a climb of six miles on a gradient of 7 per cent. The official bulletin, État général des routes de poste de l’Empire Français, announced the opening of the pass to encourage merchants to use it:

  In execution of His Majesty’s orders, the Mont Cenis pass has been rendered practicable and convenient. Carriages are able to cross the mountain in all seasons and without danger. Twenty-five refuges have been built at various points. They are occupied by cantonniers who serve as inn-keepers and who sell comestibles and other items at prices set by the Mayor of Mont-Cenis . . . Some are permanently engaged in walking the road in order to keep it clear and to assist travellers with their needs.

  The later painting by Delaroche of a bedraggled mule carrying Napoleon across the Alps (figure 19) is hardly less heroic than David’s mythical horse, but an Alpine scene of snack bars and souvenir shops with regulated price lists would have ruined the glamour completely. Napoleon himself knew the economic value of natural beauty and would not have been surprised by the spreading ski-stations of the modern Alps. One of his first instructions to the Prefect of the Hautes-Alpes département was ‘to have drawings made of the most beautiful views of your Alps for the porcelain factory at Sévres’. Once the war was over, Italian pedlars and beggars would flow over the pass to pester foreign tourists and thus ensure that commerce kept the arteries of the empire open.

  The cantonniers or road-menders who patrolled the pass represented the other main innovation of Turgot and Trésaguet. Each road-mender was responsible for about three miles of road. According to nineteenth-century regulations, he had to be present on the road for twelve hours a day from April to September and from dawn to dusk during the other six months. Meals were to be taken on the road at set times. ‘Rain, snow and other bad weather’ did not excuse absence, though the cantonnier was allowed to make himself a shelter ‘provided that it not obstruct the public highway and be visible from the road, so that the worker’s presence might be registered at all times’. He had to supply his own tools but he was given a special steel ring with which to check that the stones spread on the road had been smashed to the regulation size. The ring had a diameter of six centimetres, which roughly corresponds to McAdam’s rule that no stone should be too big to fit inside the mender’s mouth.

  Apart from its obvious value, the creation of the cantonnier had an invigorating effect on daily life in rural France. Like a hermit with
shovels and a wheelbarrow, the cantonnier was a colonist of remote areas. Little round stone huts and lonely houses marked CANTONNIER in fading paint can still be seen on many roads. As salaried workers, they helped to generate village economies. They served as messengers and relayers of gossip. Bourgeois travellers and social reformers saw the rain-soaked man at the roadside fighting Nature with a bucket and spade as the personification of proletarian misery, but for the road-menders themselves, security and self-respect, not to mention the blue jacket and the brass hat-badge punched with the word ‘Cantonnier’, were priceless assets. A grenadier from the Vivarais who distinguished himself at the crossing of the Beresina during the retreat from Moscow in 1812 was asked by Napoleon to name his reward. ‘Well, sire,’ he replied, ‘since you have it in your power, after the war I’d like to be made cantonnier for life in my pays.’ Unlike his officers, Napoleon did not find the man’s request amusing.

  It was Napoleon who consolidated the advances of the eighteenth-century engineers by placing all two hundred and twenty-nine routes impériales under the control of central government. Later, in 1836, the state would assume responsibility for the upkeep of the meandering chemins vicinaux that ran between villages. There was little fundamental change in this road system until the 1960s. A dynamic map of the network over two centuries would show a gradual thickening of the main inter-city routes and a flickering mass of smaller lines between. Fourteen ‘first-class’ roads ran from Paris to the frontiers and were numbered clockwise as they radiated from the capital. These were the great ‘avenues’ that helped Paris to grow more quickly than any other city in France. They spread the Parisian empire through France and the French Empire through Europe. They also helped the Allies to overrun the country in 1814 and to rush the deposed emperor by carriage to the Mediterranean port of Fréjus in exactly seven days. From Fréjus, Napoleon sailed to his tiny island kingdom of Elba, where, shocked to find hills that even mules could barely climb, and determined to turn the island into ‘the warehouse of universal commerce’ and ‘a point of contact for all nations’, he immediately launched a sixty-thousand-franc road-building programme.

  12

  Travelling in France, II:

  The Hare and the Tortoise

  EVEN THE MOST ENTHUSIASTIC road-builders would have been surprised to see how much roads came to dominate and overwhelm the country. Until the advent of railways, the key to national prosperity was thought by many to lie with canals and canalized rivers. In the first century BC, Strabo had written of ‘the harmonious arrangement’ of the rivers of Gaul. This famous passage of his Geography haunted progressive minds. It seemed to describe a super-efficient France of the future, and it suggested that after almost two millennia the country had still not fulfilled its destiny:

  The whole of this country is watered by rivers: some of them flow down from the Alps, the others from the Cemmenus [Cévennes] and the Pyrenees; and some of them are discharged into the ocean, the others into Our Sea [the Mediterranean]. . . . The river-beds are by nature so well situated with reference to one another that there is transportation from either sea into the other; for the cargoes are transported only a short distance by land, with an easy transit through plains, but most of the way they are carried on the rivers – on some into the interior, on the others to the sea.

  France had over four thousand miles of navigable river. It also had six hundred miles of canals by the time of the Revolution and over three thousand before the end of the nineteenth century. Another six hundred miles of river were considered navigable at certain times of year, if only in one direction. Much of the wood that was used to build and heat Paris had been floated down from the Morvan by wild-looking flotteurs in straw hats and wolfskin coats who spoke a dialect peculiar to the river. From the Auvergne, wood bound for Bordeaux was loaded onto plank boats which were caulked with moss and survived the spring torrents just long enough to reach Libourne, where they were sold as firewood.

  Tiny rivers that are now used only by anglers and timid canoeists carried flat-bottomed boats in water so shallow that the boatmen could walk alongside them in the river. A report on the Dordogne département in 1810 described the course of thirty-eight rivers but added that there were also five hundred and sixty other ‘principal streams’ and eight hundred and fifty ‘little streams’. Even some scarcely visible riviérettes were treated as valuable trade routes and had their banks repaired and strengthened. Many quiet streams in rural parts are still cluttered with brickwork and stone facing, as if they had once flowed through industrial towns. In the Lot and the Tarn, the river was the only lifeline of many villages. Their tiny harbours and landing stages were strung out along the banks like trading posts in the Amazon. Some medium-sized rivers like the Vienne are like the deserted autoroutes of an earlier civilization. Little lanes run down to them like sliproads, leading only to the river and a clutch of houses often called ‘Le Port’.

  The fact that sixty-one of the original eighty-three départements were named after rivers – even if the river was destructive and torrential or obstructed by boulders and cataracts – shows how much importance was attached to water transport. Statistical studies of the new départements typically devoted ten times as much space to watercourses as to roads. Great hopes of wealth and vitality were placed in rivers and canals, and there were some astounding examples to inspire the engineers: the Roman Pont du Gard and the aqueduct system that had watered Nîmes until the ninth century, or the unfinished Maintenon aqueduct (1685–88), which was designed to take the waters of the river Eure fifty miles to feed the fountains of Versailles.

  With its hundred and twenty miles of water channels, Versailles itself was a showcase of hydraulic marvels. While the townspeople made do with brackish ponds, expensively imported water created glassy parterres that prolonged the mirrors of the Galerie des Glaces, and fountains that decorated the air with musical arabesques. Nature was made to recognize the political centre. The Seine was diverted by the gigantic pump at Marly known as ‘the Machine’; the Eure was to be brought from Maintenon. There was even a plan to bring the waters of the distant Loire to Versailles. Statues in the palace gardens represented the great rivers of France as calm, recumbent giants accompanied by cherubic little affluents.32

  The grandest project of all was the Canal du Midi, which is now the oldest functioning canal in Europe. It runs for a hundred and fifty miles, through sixty-three locks and under a hundred and thirty bridges, from Sète on the Mediterranean, via Béziers, Carcassonne and the geological gap between the Pyrenees and the Montagne Noire known as the Seuil de Naurouze, all the way to the heart of Toulouse. This beautiful open-air museum of engineering masterpieces was the brainchild of a retired tax-farmer from Béziers, Pierre-Paul Riquet, who spent on it the entire fortune he had made collecting salt tax and died of exhaustion eight months before it was opened in 1681. It employed up to ten thousand men and women at a time and brought forty-five thousand cypresses and plane trees to the Lauragais plain, as well as millions of irises to protect and beautify the banks. This was one of the biggest movements of population and plant life in peacetime history.

  Horse-drawn barges carrying oranges, wine and oils from Italy and Spain, grain and cotton from Languedoc, and drugs and spices from the Levant and the Barbary Coast were unloaded at Toulouse onto smaller river boats that negotiated the watermills and shoals of the lower Garonne. At Agen, they took on prunes and other dried fruit for the Atlantic ships at Bordeaux. They returned from Bordeaux with sugar, coffee and tobacco from the Americas. The dream was that, one day, the French isthmus would enjoy the advantages of an island. If the Garonne could be cleared and canalized, ocean-going vessels could sail directly from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic without having to round the Iberian Peninsula. Languedoc and Aquitaine would lie at the centre of a global river of trade and Strabo’s description of a naturally efficient, inter-oceanic river system would come true.

  Work finally began on the unexcitingly named Canal Latéral à
la Garonne in 1839 during the July Monarchy (1830–48), when more canals were built than in all other periods combined. The Canal des Deux Mers – the name given to the entire stretch from Sète to Bordeaux – was completed just as the new Bordeaux–Sète railway opened for business in 1857. The railway company acquired the lease on the Garonne canal and stifled the canal and river trade with extortionate taxes. The Canal du Midi had turned the Lauragais and Toulousain regions into the bread-basket of the south. It had eliminated the devastating annual floods and, in conjunction with the road system, opened up vast new markets. Grain speculators had covered the land with wheat fields and châteaux. But when the railway arrived, wheat from the Paris Basin was suddenly cheaper than the local grain. For centuries, invaders had passed through the Seuil de Naurouze. Now, after the Celts, the Romans, the Visigoths, the Arabs, the Albigensian crusaders, the Black Prince and the Duke of Wellington, came modern capitalism, the unconscious hypocrite, which took away with one hand what it gave with the other.

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  CANALS, WHICH WERE once seen as the highways on which civilization would reach remote parts, came to be associated with sluggishness and constraint. The drunken boat of Rimbaud’s poem ‘Le Bateau ivre’ (1871) begins its adventure only when its haulers have been slaughtered and it leaves the ‘impassive rivers’ for the open sea. Many tales of the heroic age of canal building and the taming of rivers will never be told. Even the pioneering voyage of Baron Boissel de Monville has passed into almost total obscurity, though he was the first person in history to descend the Rhône from the Swiss border to the point where the river becomes clearly navigable again. He wanted to show that the Rhône could be a major trade link with Savoy and Switzerland. During the Terror, in the autumn of 1794, disguised as a peasant, the Baron passed the cataracts with his ironclad boat and a jittery crew, who baled out before the boat reached the Perte du Rhône, where the river used to disappear through a fissure into a subterranean cavern. The boat was wrecked and spat out by the resurgent river three hundred and fifty feet downstream. Two weeks later, the Baron rebuilt his boat and sailed it all the way to Surjoux.