The Discovery of France

by Graham Robb

  Walking was just one means of locomotion. The swamp dwellers of the Marais Poitevin got about their watery world using fifteen-foot ash-wood poles with webbed feet that allowed them to vault across a canal twenty-six feet wide. The shepherds of the Landes spent whole days on stilts, using a stick to form a tripod when they wanted to rest. Perched ten feet in the air, they knitted woollen garments and scanned the horizon for stray sheep. People who saw them in the distance compared them to tiny steeples and giant spiders. They could cover up to seventy-five miles a day at 8 mph. When Napoleon’s empress Marie-Louise travelled through the Landes to Bayonne, her carriage was escorted for several miles by shepherds on stilts who could easily have overtaken the horses. It was such an efficient mode of transport that letters in the Landes were still being delivered by postmen on stilts in the 1930s.

  In many parts of France, the usual scale of speeds was turned on its head. In difficult terrain, a horse and carriage were slower than a mule, which was slower than a human being. Tourists on horseback were often accompanied by guides on foot. In the Alps, snow-shoes were used in regions that would never be reached by road or rail. (Skis were not introduced until 1891.) A party of four or five would walk in a little caravan, taking turns at the front to share the effort. Crampons attached to plates of wood and to horses’ hooves made it possible to ford glaciers and to farm almost vertical meadows.

  In hills and mountains, gravity-assisted forms of transport were vital to the economy. In the forests of the Vosges, strange screeching sounds could be heard up to great distances. Until the 1940s, walkers in the woods occasionally caught sight of a pale-faced forest-dweller running stiffly through the trees, braced against a towering 2½-ton pile of logs. The sledges on which the logs were piled were known as raftons in Lorraine and schlitte in Alsace. The schlitteurs’ sledges ran on wooden railways in trains of up to ten. They raced on greased ash soles over wooden viaducts that groaned under the weight, descending by long, gentle slopes that looped across the mountainside until they reached the tributaries of the Rhine, which took the logs on to Strasbourg and Colmar. The schlitteurs’ legs were the only brakes. Wooden crosses at the side of the railways marked the site of fatal accidents.

  Now that brakes are a normal feature of most vehicles, these forms of transport seem more dangerous than efficient, but they were widely used and even enjoyed. Mountain people sat on grassy slopes and turned themselves into human sledges to rocket down to the valley. A botanist visiting the Pyrenees just before the Revolution was persuaded to join one of these gravitational express trains. His only regret was that the botanical specimens flashed past too quickly to be identified:

  We felt as though we were swimming along the even course of a majestic river. At times, we were carried into grass so tall that we lost sight of one another and kept calling out lest we be separated as we tried to avoid the bushes and granite boulders and unforeseen obstacles. We seemed to be sailing among reefs and perils on a stormy sea, and by this means, in a state bordering on delirium, we negotiated at inconceivable speed and quite safely the most precipitous slopes.

  Before there were bicycles and skis, these were probably the highest speeds attained by unmotorized human bodies. An estimate of the normal speed can be deduced from an account of the postpilgrimage descent of the north face of Mont Ventoux. Every year on 14 September, pilgrims climbed ‘the Giant of Provence’ to visit the chapel on the summit where a hermit had been appointed by the Bishop of Carpentras to guard some fragments of the Cross. It took most of the day to climb the mountain, but the return journey was breathtakingly short:

  They simply slid back down, squatting on a double plank, three spans long and three spans wide. When they were going too fast or approaching a precipice, they stopped abruptly by stabbing a stick into the ground in front of them. In this way, they descended in less than half an hour. (Frédéric Mistral)

  Descending over five thousand feet in thirteen miles at an average speed of over 26 mph, a plank-borne pilgrim would have come in only about eight minutes down on a cyclist in the modern Tour de France

  *

  WITH PROPERLY ADJUSTED historical speedometer, the streamlined view of the age of progress looks as dubious as a nineteenthcentury timetable. By the 1830s, Paris was supposed to be only twenty-five hours from the port of Calais and thirty-six hours from London. But these figures are misleading. They were speed records rather than accurate times. Coach-company timetables were designed to attract passengers, not to serve as historical documents. They always assumed perfect conditions, and they excluded the hours spent waiting for horses to be changed and meals to be served. They also referred to the fastest routes. In reality, journey times varied wildly from one part of the country to the next. A map of France that matched time from Paris to distance on the map would show the country contracted to the north and north-east, and pulled up towards Paris along the Rhône Valley, but there would be a gigantic peninsula to the west (Brittany) and a huge, bulging sub-continent in the centre and the south. Large parts of Languedoc and the Mediterranean coast would stretch far away into the ocean. London would be closer than most of the Loire Valley.

  Personal accounts of journeys never match the timetables. The following incident took place in 1736, but it could have occurred at any time until the mid-nineteenth century. One day that summer, in the centre of Strasbourg, a young artist-engraver from Germany was waiting to board the express coach for Paris, where he hoped to make his fortune. Johann Georg Wille and a friend had walked a hundred and sixty miles from Usingen on the other side of Frankfurt. They had arrived in Strasbourg with just enough time to register Wille’s suitcase at the coach office and to climb the spire of Strasbourg Minster, which was the tallest building in the world. From the top of the spire, they saw the whole Alsace plain and the Vosges mountains where the coach would soon be speeding towards Paris.

  The sightseeing and the farewell breakfast went on too long. When they arrived on the square, the coach had gone and was already well on its way to the first staging post at Saverne, twenty-five miles to the north-west.

  What was I to do? The only solution was to run after it. It had been raining and there were still occasional showers. The cobbles were slippery and the only support I had was my feeble sword. Strasbourg is seven leagues from Saverne. I covered the distance, as far as possible, without stopping to eat or drink, and did not catch up with the coach until it was entering the courtyard of the inn at Saverne where it was to spend the night.

  In this case, the tortoise was the coach and the hare was the human being. According to a railway engineer who made the journey more than thirty times between 1830 and 1852, the diligence from Lyon to Paris usually took three days and three nights, or four days in bad weather. The mail coach took only forty-two hours and ‘one met a better sort of person’, but it was twice as expensive and had room for only four passengers. The true average speed of the Paris–Lyon diligence in the mid-nineteenth century, including stops, was therefore less than 4 mph – twice as slow as the speed of Roman emperors travelling in Gaul and just over twice as fast as Stevenson and his donkey.

  *

  IN 1843, A FRANTIC TRAVELLER who was prepared to spend any amount of money, who was helped at almost every stage by sympathetic people and who was able to take the latest high-speed link to Paris on the final stage, could still suffer terrible delays. On 9 September Victor Hugo was on holiday with his mistress Juliette Drouet. They had sailed from the Île d’Oléron to Rochefort, a busy port on the Atlantic. In a cafe, he picked up a newspaper and learned that five days before, his newly married daughter Léopoldine had drowned in a boating accident on the Seine at Villequier.

  For the only time in his life, Hugo was unable to write. However, Juliette Drouet kept an account of the three-hundred-and-fifty-mile journey. According to the 1843 Annuaire des postes, the journey should have taken forty hours.

  At 6 p.m., Hugo and his mistress left for La Rochelle, where they spent the night. Next day (Sunday
), as they boarded the diligence for Saumur, the driver slammed the carriage door, shattering the window pane. At Niort, the carriage crashed into the customs gate because the horses and the driver had fallen asleep. On Monday morning, before crossing the Loire at Saumur, two of the four horses were unhitched and ambled across the bridge in front of the coach. (This was to avoid paying the tax on four-horse carriages.)

  They left Saumur at 10 p.m. At Blois, a breakfast of strawberries, melons and half-grilled andouillettes was served just as the driver was calling the passengers to reboard. Juliette Drouet suspected a swindle. (Innkeepers often shared the profit on uneaten meals with coach drivers.) At 3 o’clock on Tuesday afternoon, they arrived at Orléans railway station, which had been opened in May:

  At 4 o’clock, we are in the hoists that raise the diligence onto a kind of wheeled floor. The diligence is firmly attached to this floor by chains and iron clamps. . . . We pass through several stations without stopping at most of them. . . . The biggest stations have canteens which are very well stocked and very appetizing.

  They reached Paris at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, seventy-four hours after leaving Rochefort, but six days after Hugo’s daughter had been buried in the cemetery overlooking the Seine at Villequier.

  The last stage – in the body of a diligence strapped to a railway truck moving at 18 mph – was a journey between two ages of travel. Soon, the railways would empty the roads and ruin the roadside inns. They would close off large parts of the country whilst giving passengers the illusion that France was now open to discovery.

  Hugo had already witnessed the gradual disappearance of France. He had replayed long journeys in his mind and seen only the horse’s rump, the postilion’s whip, the arms of a windmill overhead and the uniform of a soldier asking to see his passport. With Juliette Drouet, he had travelled south on the diligence to Bordeaux with its seventeen-arch bridge, its riverside Place Royale and the forest of masts and rigging that seemed to show that economic life began only when France was looking away from itself. ‘A hundred and fifty leagues in thirty-six hours and what have I seen? I’ve seen Étampes, Orléans, Blois, Tours, Poitiers and Angoulême.’

  But those inland cities had been reduced to images flashed onto the magic lantern of the diligence window. Orléans was a candle on a table and a thin girl serving thin soup; Blois was a bridge; Tours was a dial marking nine in the morning; Poitiers was a dinner of duck and turnips; Angoulême was a gas lamp and a theatre bill. ‘That’s what France is when you see it from the mail coach. What will it be like when it’s seen from the railway?’

  The contraction of space and the gravitational pull of Paris were not just physical and political realities. Writers who set out to discover the country in the age of convenience would have to unravel landscapes that had been wound up tightly in the springs of a clock. In the late 1840s, Gérard de Nerval set off from Paris to visit his friend Alexandre Dumas in Brussels. He spent two hundred francs and eight days travelling along the old Paris–Flanders road. The railway had driven coach companies out of business and left a shattered maze of infrequent, short-distance omnibuses. Once, the journey had taken three days by diligence. Now that the railway had arrived, travel had never been so slow.

  Hugo himself had discovered his favourite form of transport in 1821, when he travelled from Paris to Dreux to see the girl he hoped to marry. On the day after arriving, he wrote to Alfred de Vigny to tell him about the vehicle that opened up new vistas and revolutionized his view of the world:

  So here I’ve been since yesterday, visiting Dreux and getting ready to set out on the road to Nonancourt. I walked all the way here under a burning sun, on roads without a shadow of shade. I am exhausted but very proud of having covered twenty leagues on my legs. I cast a pitying glance at every carriage that I saw. If you had been with me, you would never have seen such an insolent biped. When I think that Alexandre Soumet has to take a taxi to go from the Luxembourg to the Chaussée d’Antin, I am tempted to believe myself a superior form of animal. This experiment has proved to me that it is possible to use one’s feet for walking.

  13

  Colonization

  THE NEW ROADS AND RAILWAYS that reached into the heart of nineteenth-century France were not magical paths to a timeless world. People who came from monumental cities, where historical events were marked like the dates on a calendar, found it easy to imagine, when they visited small, lonely places they would never see again, that they were discovering a past that had been miraculously preserved. But the land, too, like Baudelaire’s Paris, was changing ‘more quickly than a human heart’.

  The tourists who seem to have explored France in all its secret corners over the last three centuries (Chapters 15 to 17) saw only part of the land’s long history. They ‘discovered’ the provinces and ‘conquered’ the Alps by following a few well-established routes. They observed the advantages and inconveniences of political regimes that came and went like weather systems. Foreign tourists talked in general terms about France and ‘the French’, and forgot how thin a path they had traced across the country. They saw battlefields and fortresses but not the endless war that people waged with their environment.

  The physical transformation of France and the stormy relationship of people, the state and the land are barely discernible in the background of the tourists’ albums and postcards, but, like today’s tourists, they were part of an ancient process of creation and destruction that began before France or Gaul existed. Before their adventures fill the picture, that background should be seen without its frames and smiling faces.

  *

  ON THE NIGHT of 29 April 1832, a chartered steamboat dropped anchor off the deserted coast of the Estaque hills, fifteen miles across the bay from Marseille. A woman wrapped in a man’s cape was rowed ashore. She stood shivering in the sea breeze, waiting for day to break and for a messenger to bring the news from Marseille. When he came riding out of the dawn, she expected to hear that her landing had sparked a royalist uprising that would spread through the south of France and, by means that she could imagine but not describe, restore a Bourbon monarch to the throne.

  For the last decade, the Duchesse de Berry, the young mother of the Bourbon heir, had travelled all over France, opening charitable institutions, charming people of every political hue and setting the tone for high society. She had caused an invasion of small fishing ports on the English Channel by taking holidays at the new ocean-bathing establishment at Dieppe. Thanks to the Duchess, other resorts were already springing up along the coast. She bestowed on the places she deigned to visit the glamour of French history: in 1820, at the age of twenty-two, she had seen a fanatic with a knife assassinate her husband on the steps of the Paris Opera. Seven months later, she gave birth to the boy who was dubbed by royalists ‘L’Enfant du Miracle’, the last of the Bourbons, ‘the tender flower that rises from a tomb’, ‘the shoot that shall become a stem’ (V. Hugo).

  Since then, her country had behaved as though it was blind to its divine destiny. Ignoring the Revolution and the reign of the Corsican usurper, Napoleon Bonaparte, France had been ruled since 1774 by three brothers: Louis XVI, who was guillotined in 1793, Louis XVII I, who dated his reign from 1795, when the little Dauphin had died in prison, and Charles X, the Duchess’s father-in-law, who had been forced into exile by a three-day riot of intellectuals and workers. The 1830 Revolution had created a constitutional monarch, Louis-Philippe, who, in the eyes of royalists, was little more than a glorified civil servant. Censorship and the hereditary peerage were abolished, and there were tentative electoral reforms that had increased the electorate to almost 3 per cent of the male population over the age of twenty-one. The Duchess had followed Charles X into exile.

  That morning on the cold Mediterranean coast, the news was conveyed to the leader of the royalist invasion in tactful euphemisms as she sheltered in an inn at the hamlet of La Folie. The promised uprising had taken the form of a feeble demonstration in the streets of Marseille. Despite this disappoint
ment, the Duchess and a small band of supporters and admirers set off into the land that she loved and seemed to know better than anyone else of her class. Four hundred miles to the north, the vast Vendée, hiding behind its natural moats and leafy fortifications, was swarming with the God-fearing, royalist peasants the Duchess had read about in romantic histories and novels. When she was a child, the Vendée had been reconquered by the Revolutionary army from the rebel Chouans after a four-year war during which whole towns were destroyed and the populations of entire pays were massacred. The ‘Vendée’, in fact, was most of the west of France: the war affected eight départements, from the Atlantic coast to the heart of the Loire Valley, and from Poitou to the English Channel. The region was still considered a political threat and was still occupied by troops.

  The Duchess had toured the Vendée in 1828. She had seen with her own eyes the scars of war and thought of romantic Ireland and the Scottish Highlands. She saw ruined buildings, squalid villages and the orphans of the ten thousand ‘martyrs’ who had attacked artillery regiments with pitchforks, secure in the belief that their suicidal mission would end in heaven. She had sailed down the Loire to Nantes in the pouring rain and seen the battlements of riverside châteaux thronged with cheering people. She was welcomed with garlands, cardboard arcs de triomphe, fleurs de lys and choirs of little children. She had met men of rank and talent who were excluded from public office because of their royalist sympathies.

  Now, as she travelled west towards Toulouse, at first on foot and then in an open carriage, spurning the advice of the royalists who gave her shelter, the Duchess must have thought of the hated Napoleon, who, seventeen years before, had landed further down the coast, near the fishing village of Cannes. Napoleon had reached Gap and perhaps Grenoble before news of his return from Elba reached Paris. In those days, the telegraph line ended at Lyon; a horseman had galloped with the news all the way from the coast. Now, the spindly arms of the telegraph could be seen in over five hundred places, gesticulating like giant insects from towers and cathedral spires. Since the operators had to distinguish the signals through telescopes, the world’s first telecommunications system was still subject to interruptions. Eight years before, because of bad weather over Burgundy, news of her own husband’s death had reached Lyon from Paris as though it was written on a torn scrap of paper: