by Graham Robb
THE MINISTER OF THE INTERIOR TO THE PREFECT OF THE RHÔNE. THE ------- HAS JUST BEEN MURDERED . . . IF PUBLIC ORDER MIGHT BE COMPROMISED IN LYON USE THE ------- WITH FIRMNESS AND SAGACITY.
Unfortunately for the Duchess, the April weather was fine. By the time she woke up next morning in a shepherd’s hut somewhere north of the coast, people all over France were discussing the interesting news over breakfast.
The Duchesse de Berry reached the Vendée in May and sent out a proclamation to ‘the inhabitants of the loyal provinces of the west’:
I did not fear to cross France in the midst of perils, in order to keep a sacred promise . . . At last I am come among this race of heroes. . . . I appoint myself your leader, and with such men I shall surely prevail.
In the event, the civil war in the Vendée consisted of a few desperate attacks on army posts. Small bands of peasants led by old, nostalgic officers, armed only with antique muskets and wishful thinking, were easily shot down by the occupying troops. A few more martyrs were created and a large part of western France was placed under martial law. The Duchess left the lanes and hedges of the bocage and headed for Nantes, dressed as a peasant. The soldiers, she thought, would never look for her in a prosperous modern city of a hundred thousand inhabitants who had no interest in overthrowing the government in Paris. It was market day and people were flowing into the city from all directions. No one noticed the bogus peasant woman, except perhaps when she removed her painful clodhoppers and rough woollen stockings and revealed a pair of perfectly white feet. She quickly rubbed them with black earth and found her way to the home of two royalist ladies in the centre of Nantes.
For five months, she hid in the house at number 3, rue Haute-du-Château, which overlooked the castle gardens and the meadows by the Loire.
One day at the end of autumn, the building was searched. The Duchess had been betrayed by a double agent. The soldiers failed to find her, but two gendarmes stayed behind to guard the house. They lit a fire in the attic room where the Duchess was wedged into a priest-hole behind the hearth. When the peat burned low, they threw on some old copies of La Quotidienne, the royalist daily paper. The Duchess’s dress caught fire and she tumbled out.
A few moments later, a telegraph message was heading north from Nantes to Mont-Saint-Michel, then east across Normandy to Montmartre, from where it was relayed to the telegraph station on the roof of the Louvre and transcribed for the Minister of the Interior:
THE DUCHESSE DE BERRY HAS JUST BEEN ARRESTED.
SHE IS AT THE CHATEAU OF NANTES.
Later that year, when the Duchess was moved south to the prisonfortress of Blaye on the Gironde estuary, she was found to be pregnant. During her time in Italy, she had secretly married an obscure Italian count. This effectively ended her claim to be the living incarnation of the Bourbons and made a mockery of the Vendée rebellion. This time, no one attributed the birth of her child to a miracle.
*
FROM ONE POINT OF VIEW, the Duchesse de Berry was a lone heroine trying to save a vanquished people from its oppressors; from another, she was the deluded representative of a feudal dynasty that was prepared to sacrifice thousands of lives to satisfy its thirst for power. In the damp depths of the bocage, it was hard to gain an overall view of the situation, but as the government re-established control over the Vendée in the following months, it became clear that the Duchess belonged to the same Parisian system of power that quashed her attempted coup.
The effect of her invasion was to complete the pacification and colonization of the west of France. The troubles in the Vendée rreminded the government that a region with few towns and poor connections with the capital was a political threat. A huge road-building programme was launched: thirty-eight ‘strategic roads’ with a total length of over nine hundred miles were built. They criss-crossed the region from Poitiers to Nantes and from La Rochelle to Saumur. Forests were felled and the deep lanes filled in. Almost every trace of the Vendée war was expunged within a decade. The only comparable road-building scheme in French history was the web of military routes built along the ridges of the Cévennes in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. These beautifully engineered war paths, some of which have since been restored as tourist routes, made it possible for artillery regiments to penetrate the chestnut forests and bombard the remote hamlets where the Protestant ‘fanatics’ hid from their persecutors. Raiding parties could then descend on the hamlets to massacre what remained of the population. Like the military occupation of the royalist Vendée, this was not a religious crusade but a security operation designed to reinforce the central power.
On 6 June 1832, newspaper readers might have noticed a significant conjunction of events. The biggest skirmish in the Vendée uprising, at the village of Le Chêne, had just ended with the defeat of four hundred peasants by a full battalion. That night, in the centre of Paris, eight hundred rioters were massacred by troops in the narrow streets around the church of Saint-Merry. (This was the popular revolt that forms the climax of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables.) The government that was supposed to defend the liberal principles of the 1830 Revolution had shown itself to be as ruthless as the former monarchy. The third piece of news concerned the colony of Algiers, which had been conquered in 1830 in the last days of the reign of the Duchesse de Berry’s father-in-law, Charles X. On 4 June, battalions of African Light Infantry were formed. All the recruits of the ‘Bat’ d’Af’ had been convicted of serious crimes by civil and military courts. They proved to be brutally effective in stamping out the nationalist revolt of Algerian tribes.
A historian interpreting the broader significance of these events is in the position of a passer-by on a lane in Montmartre, looking up at the twitching arms of the telegraph as it transmits the coded news to the city below. Should they be construed as acts of state violence perpetrated against colonial populations that might otherwise have lived in peace? Or were they a political expression of deep divisions in the population? Were the provinces of France unable to coexist without domestic enemies? Citizens of modern France who have suffered official persecution may find it significant that, after the Vendée uprising, both sides agreed that the true villain was the converted Jew who betrayed the Duchesse de Berry.
Perhaps it was simply that the centralization of power made the nation vulnerable to invasion. France was repeatedly reconquered by French forces. French governments crushed revolutions in 1832, 1848, 1871 and 1968. They conducted coups d’état or, euphemistically, enacted emergency legislation, in 1851 and 1940. The Duchesse de Berry’s small invasion was not unique. It seemed ridiculous only because it failed. Eight years later, in August 1840, Napoleon’s nephew also made himself a laughing-stock by chartering a pleasure boat in London and sailing to Boulogne-sur-Mer with sixty men and a caged vulture masquerading as an imperial eagle. He proclaimed himself the new head of state, was arrested after accidentally shooting a man in the face and sent to prison at Ham, in the swampy part of the Somme. Yet two years after escaping from prison disguised as a labourer with a plank of wood to hide his face, Louis-Napoléon was elected President of France. Three years after that, he conducted a coup d’état and, as Emperor Napoleon III, founded the Second Empire, thus proving, according to Baudelaire, that ‘the first person to come along can, by seizing control of the telegraph and the national printing works, govern a great nation’.
At certain moments, the Duchesse de Berry herself might have glimpsed a pattern of events that stretched far beyond the field of politics and personal ambition. She had slept in the thyme deserts of Provence and hidden in the ditches of the Vendée.She had rubbed the earth of the Loire estuary on her bare feet and seen the weather appear to collude with her plan or to conspire with her enemies. On the scale that was marked by standing stones and transhumance trails as well as cathedrals and highways, the twists and turns of political history were a tiny track in a vast, changing landscape.
*
THE PACIFICATION of the west of France was
part of a much longer process of colonization, both in the political sense and in the original sense of the word (from the Latin colere, to till or cultivate). The unruliness of a population was not, on its own, an insoluble problem. Combined with the intractability of the land, it was an obstacle to development that only economics would overcome. Outposts of French power had been set up in the west of France and had fallen prey to climate, terrain and irreversible natural changes. Brouage, on the edge of the Poitevin marshes, had been redesigned by Richelieu in the 1620s to give France a major naval port on the Atlantic and a base from which to besiege the Protestant town of La Rochelle. From its ramparts, Mazarin’s niece had surveyed the fleet of warships and the lonely coast, thinking of her sweetheart, the young Louis XIV, who was being forced to marry the Spanish Infanta.
Protestant La Rochelle and its English supporters were defeated and the fortifications were razed to the ground. But all along, a more persistent and devious enemy had been attacking the coast of France, undermining the cliffs of Normandy, blockading the Mediterranean ports and redrawing the map of the Atlantic frontier. The port of Brouage silted up and the salt trade moved away. The citadel from which ships had sailed to Louisiana and Quebec became an island of low white houses in a marshy moor. Later, Brouage was used as a prison. When François Marlin saw Brouage in 1772, the ocean had retreated two miles to the west and left behind a plain of rotting vegetation and a dwindling colony of soldiers who had been bribed to go and live there. According to the local priest, who had banished himself to this Atlantic Siberia for his sins, the inhabitants were old and decrepit by the age of forty, sapped by the pestilential miasma that rose from the mudflats into which the battlements were slowly sinking.
Even Napoleon Bonaparte struggled to make a lasting impression on the west. In 1804, he ordered the capital of the Vendée département to be moved from the town of Fontenay-le-Peuple (the revolutionary name of Fontenay-le-Comte) to the paltry settlement of La Roche-sur-Yon, most of which had been eradicated in the Vendée war. A new town called Napoléon or Napoléonville34 was laid out and a fresh population of soldiers and civil servants brought in. The idea was that the new, imported ruling class would be unconstrained by any personal loyalty to the region. For the next four years, ‘the dullest town in France’ (Murray’s guide, 1854) slowly rose from the vacant site. Napoléonville was designed to accommodate fifteen thousand people, but the land imposed its own conditions and the population of the bocage refused to coalesce.
Vauban’s angular citadel-towns – Gravelines, Maubeuge, Neuf- Brisach, Belfort, etc. – were generally loathed as much as 1960s highrise housing estates are today, but with its cheap cob houses and faceless public buildings girdled by a treeless boulevard, Napoléonville set a new standard in urban ugliness. When Napoleon returned in 1808, he discovered ‘the most repulsive spectacle of disorder and filth’. Ducks and geese were puttering about in open drains. The civic monuments consisted of a rain-soaked wooden arc de triomphe and a pathetic obelisk. More than a century passed before La Roche-sur- Yon reached its target population. The six main roads that were designed to allow troops to fan out in all directions were the vessels of a lifeless body until the railway arrived in 1866.
These brutal acts of colonization were important events in political and administrative history but tiny specks on the physical map of France. The most dramatic act of colonization in the west – the uprooting and flattening of the bocage – was ecological vandalism on a grand scale, but just a hint of things to come. The towering banks and interminable green tunnels of the bocage survive today only in a few parts of western France, not because of military recolonization, but because the population and its patchwork fields were commandeered and regimented by large-scale farming. By the mid-nineteenth century, the cosy but inconvenient hedgerows were giving way to a fertile desert of wheat. Winter had become a season of work. Old people sadly remembered the days when they had stayed up to talk into the night instead of going to bed at a reasonable hour.
*
ELSEWHERE IN FRANCE, the land was colonized by urban development, but at a rate that can be measured more easily in centuries than in years. Of the one hundred and forty-one towns that saw their population increase more than threefold between 1810 and 1910, forty-eight were satellites of Paris. Another thirty-seven belonged to the industrial zones of the Nord and the Pas-de-Calais, Alsace and Lorraine, and the mining and manufacturing centres of Lyon and Saint-Étienne. In 1851, almost one-tenth of the population lived in Paris and its suburbs. By 1911, the rest of the country was occupied by only four-fifths of the population.
Many towns remained within their ancient walls. The mass internal migration that drained the countryside of people was not just a rural phenomenon. Canals and railways enabled some remote settlements to thrive, but they could also suck the life from established towns. Aix-en-Provence demolished its old ramparts and brought in a supply of fresh water (a dam and a new canal were designed by François Zola, the novelist’s father). But while its neighbour Marseille doubled in size in less than half a century, spreading along the coast and into the hot, dry hills, Aix retained its size and shape like a preserved fruit. Its population, as demographers say, stagnated: twenty-four thousand in 1807; twenty-five thousand in 1920. Despite campaigning by local businessmen, Aix was ignored by the railway until 1870, when a branch line of the Gap–Avignon railway reconnected it to the Alps and the Rhône. Until 1877, its only link with Marseille was the road that passed through barren hills where the scent of thyme was neutralized by the noxious vapours of soda factories.
The most spectacular example of the railways’ power to drain the population of a town was Beaucaire on the Rhône. Since the early Middle Ages, Beaucaire’s enormous international fair (21–28 July) had been France’s main commercial link with Turkey, Greece and the Middle East. The fair was said to make as much money in a week as the port of Marseille did in a year. By the mid-nineteenth century, this capital of the commercial Mediterranean was in decline. The railway connected it to Lyon, Paris, Marseille and the silk-producing Cévennes and leached away its trade. Beaucaire suffered the paradoxical fate of the twenty other large towns whose population stagnated or shrank during the nineteenth century: eleven of those towns were joined to the railway in the 1850s and all but three had stations before the mid-1860s. The Beaucaire fair was still held every July, but the huge encampment of traders, buyers and entertainers, who had once numbered a hundred thousand, grew noticeably smaller by the year. Soon, the fair was more picturesque than profitable. The broad, brown Rhône itself seemed to become narrower and more sluggish. In Lou Pouèmo dóu Rose (The Poem of the Rhône, 1896), the poet Mistral looked back a generation as though to ancient times and compared the grooves cut by the barges’ cables on the stone embankments to the ruts of chariot wheels on Roman roads. The fairgrounds of Beaucaire are now a long, flat riverbank of weeds and rubbish haunted by dog-walkers and bored teenagers.
Fortunately, economic development is not the only measure of urban health. Now that many large cities are surrounded by Stygian fields of concrete tedium, urban sprawl looks like an obnoxious side effect of prosperity and decline. The oceanic awfulness of northern Paris and the disheartening suburbs of Marseille exact a heavy toll from travellers who come in search of aesthetic pleasure. Yet until the mid-nineteenth century, the suburbs of Marseille were one of the great sights of southern France. The hills that form an amphitheatre behind the city were covered with tiny houses known as bastidous or cabanons. ‘Wherever one looks’, said Stendhal, ‘one sees a little house of dazzling white that stands out against the pale green of the olive trees’. The low walls that enclosed each property formed a labyrinth as large as a city. There were more than six thousand cabanons by the end of the seventeenth century, many of them owned (but not declared for tax) by people who had only a single, sunless room in the city. A Prussian traveller in 1738 counted more than twenty thousand, which was certainly inaccurate but a good indication of the visual
effect.
It was fear that first led the Marseillais to discover and colonize their hinterland, just as their ancestors had fled from pirates to hamlet-fortresses above the coast. If a ship suspected of carrying the plague entered the harbour, the population took to the hills. But the terrible epidemic of 1720 had spread far beyond the city and the seven-foot-tall Plague Wall that was built across several miles of the Vaucluse. The main purpose of the cabanons was to make life more enjoyable. This was colonization for pleasure, not for gain, and it characterized the urban development of a large part of southern and central France.
The family of Paul Cézanne and their fellow Aixois enjoyed their undeveloped countryside as the Roman founders of Aix had done. Stone cottages, studios and open-air restaurants dotted the landscape around the Montagne Sainte-Victoire. Nîmes had its conurbation of mazets, Sète and Béziers their belts of baraquettes, Hyères and Toulon their villas, bastidons and bastidettes. Each little house had a table and some chairs and a patch of ground with an olive, fig or almond tree and a few vines for grapes and decoration. Not much else was needed: a musical instrument, a set of boules and a gun for shooting birds. During the week, the white walls shone from the hillside like tiny beacons. On Saturday or Sunday, the people of Marseille would leave their stinking port – made more putrid still by the sewage that flowed from the house-covered hills – and walk to the cabanon with a donkey carrying food and children in its panniers and an old person on its back.