by Graham Robb
The same cheerful exodus could be seen along the Rhône, in the Lyonnais hills and in the Auvergne, where traders and shopkeepers from Clermont-Ferrand and Thiers often bought a small vineyard and a one-storey house (called a tonne or tonnelle). Here, they would celebrate the harvest and spend the profits on a feast for friends and neighbours. According to the Auvergne expert in The French Portrayed By Themselves (1840–42), the supposedly stingy Auvergnats were simply saving up for those few glorious days of extravagance: ‘The host is never satisfied unless, at the end of the meal, on rising from the table, the locomotive faculties of his guests are seriously impaired’.
*
FURTHER NORTH, the colder climate dictated a different pattern of suburban development. Weekends away from the city were a bourgeois privilege until the late nineteenth century but still a normal part of life for thousands of people. Popular journals published advice on creating a ‘maison de campagne’ – a term that was applied to cottages as well as to mansions: how to keep chickens, how to grow chrysanthemums, how to stave off boredom in the countryside. The ‘Grand Départ’, the mass summer exodus of entomological proportions that creates hundred-mile traffic jams on roads from Paris, has a long history. According to one estimate in the mid-1850s, thirty thousand Parisians left the city every summer.
Before the railways, the spread of summer homes retraced prehistoric paths of settlement, along rivers with high banks and limestone caves. The once deserted banks of the Seine were filling up with villas before the Revolution. The south-facing slopes of the Loire and its tributaries were decorated with luxury cottages, equipped with kitchens and servants’ rooms to satisfy the hordes of English tourists who paid a thousand francs for six months’ rent and more if they wanted the fruit. By the end of the nineteenth century, the cliff-dwellings of the despised troglodytes were being converted into holiday homes. A cave near Tours was said to contain a suite of rooms in the Empire style with plaster mouldings and period sculptures.
In all this suburban and satellite development, there was little sign of the anxiety that British Victorians felt when they saw towns and cities staining the countryside. Anyone who had reached Paris or left it via the Champagne, the Brie, the Beauce, the Sologne or the fields of northern France had a sense of spaciousness that was not easily forgotten. It was partly because they knew what a depopulated land looked like that so many French people were alarmed at the slow growth of the population. In a land of ‘wastes’, colonization was a heartening development. When the future Napoleon I I I devised a plan for ‘the extinction of poverty’ that would have covered the land with model factories and farms, he cheerfully imagined those ‘colonies’ taking up all the available space in France and being forced to expand into Algeria and America.
Until the late nineteenth century, there are few equivalents in French literature of the sentiment expressed by William Wordsworth: ‘wheresoe’er the traveller turns his steps, / He sees the barren wilderness erased, / Or disappearing’ (1814). ‘Is then no nook of English ground secure / From rash assault?’ (1844). The best-known French elegy on the theme of changing landscape is Victor Hugo’s ‘Tristesse d’Olympio’ (1837). It refers to the gatekeeper’s cottage near Bie`vres, eight miles south-west of Paris, in which Hugo had rented a room for his mistress. To an English poet, the changes described by Hugo would have seemed barely worth a mention. The steep and sandy road where the beloved left her footprint has been paved, and the milestone on which she sat and waited for her lover has been scuffed by cart wheels. A wall has been built around a spring. But other parts are returning to the wild: ‘Here, the forest is missing, and there, it has grown.’ ‘Our leafy chambers now are thickets.’ There is no sign that Bie`vres would one day be the home of an industrial bakery, the Burospace technology park, the ‘RAID’ division of the riot police and the Victor Hugo car park.
D’autres auront nos champs, nos sentiers, nos retraites.
Ton bois, ma bien-aimée, est à des inconnus.35
*
INDUSTRIAL COLONIZATION, too, left relatively few traces in French art and literature. Paris was already being deindustrialized in the 1830s as workshops moved out and property speculators moved in. Until quite late in the nineteenth century, mill chimneys and plumes of smoke drifting across the sky were described as interesting novelties. Wizened tribes of factory workers were seen as hellish exceptions rather than the face of the future.
The valley of the Gier, between Lyon and Saint-É tienne, was once a ribbon of black debris dotted with flat, smoky hovels. From Andrézieux, on the other side of Saint-Étienne, horses pulled mining trucks on a railway line that, instead of cutting through the hills, followed every curve of the landscape like a mountain road. (This was France’s first railway, inaugurated in 1828 and opened to passengers in 1832.) However, as a well-travelled French tourist observed in 1858, this ‘little desolation’ was nothing compared to smog-bound Britain and the mining and manufacturing zones of Flanders and the Ardennes. There were more trees than chimneys, more grass than coal dust, and ‘the sky is perfectly visible’. Lyon itself, with its sixty thousand chattering looms and its ‘rivers of coal-smoke rising into the firmament’ (Baudelaire), was constrained by its setting, squeezed up against the last folds of the Massif Central and the edge of the Dombes plateau, and still largely dependent on family workshops scattered through the countryside.
The great exception was the industrial north, which was practically a separate country straddling the Belgian border (the zone that was sectioned off during the Occupation and directly administered by the Third Reich). The textile towns of Lille, Tourcoing and Roubaix already had a long history of industrial development. They were operating as a single conurbation more than two centuries before they were unified in 1968 under the fetching name of CUDL (Communauté Urbaine de Lille). Thatched houses and unsurfaced roads were already rarities in Roubaix in the early eighteenth century. A dense network of canals joined these tentacular towns to the rest of Flanders, which had the agricultural resources to support a large population of factory workers, almost half of whom were Belgian.
In the rest of the country, industry followed a pattern reminiscent of today’s out-of-town zones industrielles. Factories were built close to the forests, rivers and coal seams that fuelled them, rather than in long-established towns and cities, which explains why some of the great industrial towns of the nineteenth century are practically unknown in any other context: Le Creusot, Decazeville, Montceaules- Mines, Rive-de-Gier, etc. On the Cassini maps of the late eighteenth century, most of these places are almost imperceptible, like the first photographs of distant comets. In Alsace, the capitals of the Upper and Lower Rhine départements – Strasbourg and Colmar – were quite innocent of manufacturing industry, which settled in the deep folds of the Vosges mountains and benefited from the clan traditions of its rural labour force.
These factories should not be imagined suddenly implanting themselves on a pristine landscape. The thumping cotton mills of Sotteville and Saint-Sever on the outskirts of Rouen and the blast furnaces and silhouette-black villages along the Belgian river Meuse concentrated earlier scatterings of local industries. The countryside in many parts of France became ‘unspoilt’ only as a result of government- funded conservation projects in the twentieth century. A typical pre-industrial landscape in Picardy or the Ardennes was a mess of smoky forges, stinky black fields where the hemp was laid out to dry and slum colonies of wobbly windmills, compared to which modern wind turbines that seem to cartwheel across the hilltops are an exhilarating sight. Workers in these traditional industries were more likely to die young. For various reasons, it was unusual to find elderly people in the following trades: hemp-carding (stagnant, freezing water), weaving (damp cellars, smoky lamps and long hours), threshing and winnowing (dust), woodcutting (accidents and sweating in the cold) and charcoal-burning (malnutrition and lack of light).
The full horror of industry was hidden away in remote rural areas, where no town had ever
existed and which few outsiders ever discovered. In the eighteenth century, the village of Aubin was a row of hovels in the chestnut forest of the Aveyron. Two miles to the north, above the valley of the Lot, was one of the natural wonders of southern France: the Burning Mountain of Fontaygnes. At night, a person peering down into one of the little craters that pocked the mountain would see the glow of a great fire. Coal deposits burned continuously, filling the cellars of the nearest hamlets with smoke. Under its black cloud, Aubin was like an industrial town with no industry. The air stank of sulphur, and the houses, people and pigs were soiled with soot; but the abundance of coal meant that the villagers could stay up after dark without counting the cost, spinning, singing and telling tales of the English invaders who, according to local legend, had set fire to the mountain many years before, or the soldiers who, one day in the 1780s, had come to claim the coal deposits for the King but been driven away by the wine growers and charcoal burners, ‘armed only with their ire’.
In 1826, the Duc Decazes, a former Minister of Police, Prime Minister and Ambassador to Britain, bought a mining concession near the hamlet of La Caze, two miles north of Aubin. The river Lot was unnavigable for much of the year and there was no railway, but Decazes had realized that the coal could be used to smelt the iron ore that was also found in the region. Modern industry succeeded where the King’s soldiers had failed. Within five years, a workers’ town sprouted in the valley. It was named Decazeville, though Decazes himself showed little interest in town planning. Several years passed before Decazeville had ‘free schools’ (funded by a tax on the workers’ wages) and another half a century before it had a hospital.
The miners of Decazeville worked in a maze of collapsing tunnels and burning coal seams. After day-long shifts, they emerged into a landscape of blast furnaces and rolling mills where birdsong and the wind were drowned out by the screech of trucks on iron rails and the incessant pounding of steam hammers. The miners and foundry workers were paid in company tokens stamped with the image of a brick chimney half-obliterating a landscape of hills. With no one to farm the land, stale, overpriced food was imported from distant places. Aubin began to merge along the black valley road with its neighbour Cransac. By the middle of the nineteenth century, there were pawnshops and garish cafes selling beetroot brandy and absinthe to bleary, black-eyed miners and women who were better dressed and worse behaved than their peasant mothers.
In 1865, the company collapsed and Decazeville discovered the modern scourge of unemployment. A new company was founded in 1868 by the Schneider family, which owned the iron foundries of Le Creusot. Its three thousand workers could apparently ‘find at Decazeville all the resources that might be necessary from a material, moral and religious point of view’ – a phrase which efficiently evokes the misery of a population provided with everything a meeting of shareholders had identified as ‘necessary’. In 1869, a strike at Aubin showed that the factories had also been forging a new breed of worker. Fourteen strikers, including one child, were shot dead by troops.
*
THE NEW AGE of industrial slavery and proletarian solidarity has its conspicuous monuments in the giant crater of the ‘Découverte’ open-cast mine at Decazeville (closed in 1965), the slag heaps of the Pas-de-Calais and the abandoned collieries of Flanders and Lorraine. Some of these industrial monsters have been preserved by eco-museums and will probably have a retirement much longer than their working life. But the other great industrial transformation of France is now almost indistinguishable from the landscape.
The mulberry trees that brighten the countryside all over Provence, the Cévennes and Corsica are picturesque memorials of the agricultural gold rush of the mid-nineteenth century when better communications and the availability of credit made it possible for a peasant to grow a single crop for cash instead of a variety of plants for food and fertilizer. The mulberry trees were stripped of their shiny green leaves every spring to feed the silkworms; the second, tougher growth was fed to goats. The effect, apparently, was hideous: acres of leafless trees that looked like shaggy brooms stuck in the ground. Apart from the overgrown, collapsing terraces that were cut into the hillsides and the almost windowless tenements where the heated silkworms munched the leaves and made the sound of heavy rain, there is nothing in the verdant scenery on either side of the Rhône to show that life in the land of industrial vegetation was just as hard and unpredictable as it was in the foundries and coalfields.
In 1852, a disease called pébrine began to spread among the silkworms. By the time Louis Pasteur discovered the cause and a cure in 1869, the industry had collapsed, the Suez Canal had opened and cheaper silk was being imported from the East. A worm had brought prosperity and a micro-organism took it away. At about the same time, the vines that smallholders had rushed to plant on their plots of rye and wheat were attacked by a peppery mildew called oidium. American vines were imported to replace the diseased stock. Then, in 1863, some wine growers in the Gard noticed the leaves and roots of the new vines turning brown and black. The phylloxera aphid eventually destroyed more than six million acres of vineyard from Nice to Burgundy and from Narbonne to the Loire. For many peasants, it confirmed their belief that they should never have abandoned the old ways. This imported parasite did more than anything else to speed up the French colonization of Algeria. Thousands of people left the country or threw themselves on the mercy of northern industry, leaving behind a stony land that was greener and more pleasant to the eye than ever before.
*
CONCRETE, LEGIBLE EVIDENCE of political and economic change is not hard to find. Many nineteenth-century factories are still in use, and almost every town and village has at least one war memorial, a street named after a general or a battle, and a building bearing the insignia of one of the two empires and five republics.
Far more momentous changes to the face of France occurred in the nineteenth century, but on such a large scale that it is quite possible to travel from one end of the country to the other without noticing them, and without realizing that many of the landscapes that seem typically and eternally French are younger than the Eiffel Tower. Everyone knows that the nineteenth century was an age of change, but for many people of the time, roads, railways, education and sanitation were trivial innovations compared to the complete and irreversible transformation of their physical world. The only obvious points of comparison are the eradication of the Argonne forest in the First World War, the levelling of Normandy in the Second World War and the annual destruction by fire of large parts of the Mediterranean and Atlantic forests. But even these catastrophes belong to a different category of change. Perhaps the people whose experience was closest to that of the nineteenth-century inhabitants of France were the Stone Age people who saw their mountains being remoulded by the volcanoes of the Massif Central.
The transformation had begun with tiny, individual acts of conquest over briar patches and mires. It continued with the creation of monastic domains and royal estates and then the gigantic projects funded by entrepreneurs and the state. By the mid-nineteenth century, huge tracts of land were being reclaimed at a rate of several thousand acres a day. Half the moorland in Brittany disappeared in half a century, dug and fertilized by nomadic gangs of labourers and by colonies of orphans and abandoned children employed by big landowners. To northerners who were used to seeing symmetrical fields crammed with crops and plumbed into the supply lines of cities, a trackless heath dotted with a few mangy sheep looked like a waste of space rather than the shared resource of a pastoral economy. Soon, only a few people would remember that the moorlands themselves had been agonizingly reclaimed from swamps and thickets.
The national obsession with ‘wasteland’ was reflected in government policy and private initiatives. Watery wastes were drained and arid deserts were irrigated. For thousands of people, the quality of life improved. The Dombes in mid-eastern France was once ‘a damp hospital hidden in the fog’ where four-fifths of the population suffered from malaria. Twenty years a
fter the draining and forest planting began in the 1850s, average life expectancy had increased from twenty-five to thirty-five years. The sandy Sologne was dredged, drained and forested by big landowners, including Napoleon I I I. By the early twentieth century, the Solognots, who had once considered themselves healthy if they only had swamp fever, were living longer lives and stood several inches taller than their parents. In the Double, an agricultural black hole of bracken and swamp between the wine-growing Libournais and the pastures of Charente, missionary Trappist monks settled on a hill near the fever-stricken village of Échourgnac in 1868. They drained the land and planted trees. Today, the old Double can only be imagined from the dusty white earth, the well-tended fish ponds and the road subsidence.
Large parts of Mediterranean France were transformed within a generation. The fields of artichokes and strawberries in the Carpentras Plain survive under the summer sun because the old canals of Craponne and Pierrelatte were extended in the mid-nineteenth century, and because there is still a plentiful supply of cheap immigrant labour. It now takes a long, hot ride south to see the original stony desert of the Crau, though a boot scraped across the soil almost anywhere will reveal the underlying steppe, the ‘untilled and arid Crau, stony and immense’ (Frédéric Mistral). In the Roussillon plain, where medieval irrigation canals were renovated and artesian wells were drilled, the land seems ready to return to its desiccated state within days of the humans’ departure. Below the Peira Dreita col, where the Corbières hills drop down to the Mediterranean, clouds of dust sweep across the plain, obscuring Perpignan and the snow-capped Canigou. On the plain itself, in the noise-storm of jet planes and mining trucks, the Catalan Death Valley is still apparent among the ruined barracks of the Rivesaltes military zone where twenty thousand Spanish Republicans, gypsies, Jews and their children were interned by the French authorities in 1941 and spent the last months of their lives helping to fertilize the desert.