The Discovery of France

by Graham Robb

  The biggest intentional change was the creation of a new geographical zone in the south-west. Less than two centuries ago, most of the Landes was a two-million-acre heath, five days long and three days wide. Almost nothing grew there but gorse, broom, heather, moor grass, helianthemums and lichens. On a clear, dry day, the white line of the Pyrenees could be seen a hundred miles away. In winter, the reflections of clouds sailed over vast stagnant pools of rainwater. With its impermeable layer of sandstone, the Landes was like a flower-pot without a hole, tilted very slightly towards the great barrier of dunes on the Atlantic coast. It took about ten sheep on thirty acres of lande to fertilize a single acre of oily black soil. With a hundred sheep, a family of ten could live like castaways in their low wooden houses.

  Not a single patch of the original Landes remains. The beautifully preserved village of Marquèze, which stands at the end of a small railway line near Sabres, is an exact, reverse image of the original settlement. Once, it was an oasis of trees in a boundless moor; now, the village is a clearing in the largest artificial forest in Europe. In 1857, a law on ‘the Purification and Cultivation of the Landes of Gascony’ accelerated the draining and tree-planting that had been carried out in a desultory fashion since prehistory. The bill was championed by Napoleon III, who bought twenty thousand acres of the Landes and created an experimental farming community called Solférino, in honour of his victory over the Austrians. A hundred and sixty-two communes in the Landes and Gironde départements were forced to turn their common land into pine plantations or, failing that, to sell it to developers. Thousands of acres were sold at auction. All but 7 per cent of the Landes is still in private hands. In the time that it takes for a seed to become a sapling, the agro-pastoral way of life was dealt a fatal blow. Iron foundries, refineries and paper factories sprang up in the forest. The ancient art of collecting resin from pine trees with an hapchot (a little axe) and a ceramic cup became a lucrative industry. Rosin, pitch and turpentine flowed from the forest and returned in the form of money, which destroyed the intricate hierarchy of farmers, tenants and labourers.

  In 1889, a traveller arriving in Biarritz on the train from Bordeaux was asked by an old man if it was true that the Landes had changed since he last saw them forty years before:

  You ask how I found the Landes? . . . Well, I didn’t. Shortly after leaving Bordeaux, the train entered an interminable forest of pine and oak with an occasional cultivated clearing grazed by some remarkably fine animals. Yet I knew that I hadn’t forgotten my geography:

  The Landes: a vast plateau of barren sand, waterlogged in winter and scorched by the sun in summer. Wretched population, debilitated by fevers and pellagra (a disease peculiar to this region). Breeding of a small race of sheep.

  The empty landscapes of the Landes are now known only through the photographs of Félix Arnaudin, a shy ethnologist who gave up a career in the Highways and Bridges to walk and cycle through the Grande Lande (the area north and west of Mont-de-Marsan) from the 1870s to 1921 with his heavy German camera, recording a disappearing way of life. He paid local people, who thought him insane, to recreate the scenes he remembered from his childhood in Labouheyre. ‘The forest that blocks the view, narrows the mind’, he wrote, as though the Landes was being plunged into the darkness of a fading memory.

  Arnaudin’s photographs put paid to the myth of a stunted, yellowskinned tribe of woolly savages that spent all its time on stilts. But nostalgia always has its own tale to tell. Arnaudin was a solitary man with an independent income who chose to remain in his native Landes. He was an explorer in his own land, not a typical Landais. As wealth spread to the countryside, many people moved to the towns or left the region altogether. The largest towns in the Landes more than doubled in size while the population of the whole département fell. It continued to fall until after the Second World War. Most Landais were happy not to be stranded with their parents and to be able to choose a wife or husband. They were glad to be able to buy furniture and clothes from Paris, to visit a doctor instead of a faithhealer, to put a new picture on the wall, to take the train to Capbreton or Mimizan on the coast. They preferred to work for an employer in Bayonne or Bordeaux than to be perpetually dependent on the digestive system of a sheep.

  The urban Landais has nothing whatsoever in common with the halfwild creature of the Landes: he is a man like any other. He reads Le Siècle and La Presse, goes to the cafe, takes an interest in the Eastern Question, and is just as rational or irrational as any town-dweller in any of the eighty-six départements.

  For the sake of picturesqueness, the author of the ‘Landais’ chapter in The French Portrayed By Themselves ignored the fact that many of those cosmopolitan citizens who talked politics in the cafes of Dax and Mont-de-Marsan were willing refugees from the interminable moor.

  *

  IN THIS WAR AND PEACE of people and the land, some battles were too large and too remote to make much impression on newspaper readers. The great ecological disaster in the south and east had developed too slowly, over too many centuries, to create a sudden panic. It left few traces in the works of artists and writers. It was not until the terrible floods of 1856, when the Rhône invaded Lyon, and the Loire and the Cher turned Tours into a port on the shores of a great lake, that the situation seized the attention of politicians. General public concern came even later, if at all.

  The Revolution seemed to have acted as a catalyst. The old aristocratic and monastic domains had fallen into the hands of a peasantry for whom land clearance was the basis of all agriculture. In regions that were already half-barren, the effects were catastrophic: fields washed away by floods, bare mountains and strange, destructive weather patterns. In the Corbières, the ecological debate took the now-familiar form: obvious individual ‘rights’ against the not-so-obvious general good. Acres of pasture in place of a lord’s hunting forest were a more powerful argument than the complaints of a city-dweller who found the skull-like mountains ugly.

  The most eloquent prophets of doom were civil servants. One was Jean-Baptiste Rougier de Labergerie, Prefect of the Yonne, who published several pamphlets on the long-term effects of deforestation. His alarming report on The Forests of France in their Relations with Climates, Temperature, and the Order of the Seasonsappeared in 1817. He was still being accused of exaggerating the problem in the 1830s when the government sold off thousands of acres of state-owned forest.

  The other voice in the man-made wilderness was Pierre-Henri Dugied, who was appointed Prefect of the Basses-Alpes départementin 1818. Dugied had heard some strange tales of his new département, including the claim that more land had vanished in the last thirty years than was ever washed away by floods. Dugied set off on a tour of inspection. All over the département, from Castellane to Digne and Barcelonnette, he found ‘naked rocks’, ‘valleys filled with stones, with just a few trickles of water running through them’, and ‘vast, blackish areas that appear to be formed of vegetable matter but which are simply the result of broken slate being continually eroded by the weather’. The box and broom that grew in cracks in the rock were ripped out for fertilizer. Transhumant flocks were still arriving every year to tug at what remained of the vegetation, exposing the brittle rocks to ice and sun and trampling on the debris. Clouds passed over the treeless summits and when the rain came, it came in storms. It rocketed off the steep slopes, carried the soil away to the Drac and the Durance, flushed it into the Rhoˆ ne and silted up the Camargue delta.

  Like Rougier de Labergerie, Dugied realized that these remote zones were not separate realms but vital organs of the nation. He believed that the deforestation of the Alps had caused the droughts, the late frosts and ‘the unknown winds’ that had been decimating the olive groves of Provence and the vineyards of Burgundy. Unless the government acted immediately, it would be too late ‘to restore the climates’.

  The government did not act immediately. Awareness of the ecocidal propensities of the rural population coincided with the first reckless surge of
modern industry. In fact, the idea that axe-wielding, pyromaniac peasants erased their own environment because a primeval instinct told them to do so was dangerously simplistic. It was later used to justify the expropriation of land in Algeria: native farmers were blamed for creating the Sahara Desert. Yet the state itself had encouraged land clearance in France by demanding taxes and a steady supply of food for the cities. Industry accelerated the destruction. Glass, paper and porcelain factories, tileworks, limekilns and cloth mills shovelled entire forests into their forges. Picardy and Flanders were losing their woods long before they were turned to muddy plains by the Western Front. In the Pyrenees, eighteenth-century shipbuilders had carved wide tracks through the forests to haul the trees down to the rivers and the coast. Now, the people of the higher valleys lived in semi-permanent disaster zones, talking in whispers when the snow on the peaks began to thicken, removing the bells from their flocks, listening out for the shockwave that would flatten a town before the avalanche itself, unchecked by trees, arrived at the speed of an express train.

  The scale of the disaster is obvious in photographs taken by the Restoration of Mountain Terrains service of the Forestry Department between 1885 and the First World War. Many of these photographs are unrecognizable as scenes of Provence. Mountains that had once marked the frontiers of France as though the frontiers would never change seem to have been smashed to pieces by a million road-menders. The bleached, lunar summit of Mont Ventoux and the sharp black stones that trickle down from the summit of the Bonette Pass on Europe’s highest road are just tiny remnants of the desert that once covered much of south-eastern France. The tidy little pyramids of northern coalfields are picturesque monuments compared to the titanic slag heaps of the Alps and their foothills.

  This ecological disaster drifted into general consciousness only at the end of the nineteenth century, when popular geographers, writing for readers who had studied geography at school, could instil a sense of loss by appealing to national pride: ‘The French Alps would be a match for Switzerland and the Tyrol were it not for the fact that their forests have bitten the dust’ (Onésime Reclus). Even if the cause was unrecognized, the effects were felt in the rest of the country. People, too, were washed away towards the plains and cities. They flooded the industrial suburbs and left the mountains more sparsely populated than ever.

  Some, however, clung to their diminishing plots with amazing tenacity, well into the 1880s and 90s, by which time the people of the Alps had a new collective name for their mountains: ‘the ruins’.

  *

  SOME OF THE MOST tenacious inhabitants of ‘the ruins’ lived in the heart of the Dévoluy massif. Two cols west of the 4,000-foot Col Bayard on the road from Gap to Grenoble, where Napoleon had passed on his return from Elba, the village of Chaudun was home to more than a hundred people. It had a fifteenth-century church, a small school and a few over-farmed acres of pasture and beech wood. In 1860, when the state had decided to ‘restore’ the mountains, the Forestry Department offered to buy the badly eroded territory of Chaudun, but the people refused. They stayed on in the shadeless village of their ancestors, watching the face of the mountains age and their soil turn to stone.

  One day, they found themselves without a furrow. The fields of oats and rye had been carried off by torrents; most of the forest had gone; a few potatoes grew in earth that had been lugged up from the valleys. When they saw their birthright reduced to rubble, they wrote to the government, begging it to buy their useless acres. The deed of sale was signed in August 1895 and the people of Chaudun left their last, inadequate harvest to the weather. According to the last surviving inhabitant, ‘when the people left the village, they all cried. At that moment, they understood the act of betrayal they had just committed’.

  Perhaps this was the inevitable end of several millennia of human occupation. But not long after the people had left, the stubble of a new forest began to appear. Millions of seeds sprouted on slopes that had been stabilized by dykes, terraces and drainage tunnels. This time, the colonizing power was the French state and the plants and animals it protected. The homes of the previous occupants fell before the advance of the larches planted by the Forestry Department. Something resembling a virgin forest, complete with deer and mouflons, covered the Cirque de Chaudun. The area is now a ZNIEFF (Zone Naturelle d’Intérêt Écologique, Faunistique et Floristique). To walkers who follow the marked trail, it seems a long way from the polluted Alpine valleys where thousands of visitors in cars and camper vans come to see the shrinking glaciers of the National Parks. If the former inhabitants of Chaudun could return to their ruins, they might think that disaster had been averted. The abandoned village now has a forest lodge, less than two hours’ walk from the parking area at the Col de Gleize. The demand for access to the ‘cultural heritage’ of the region has led to ‘the controlled reintroduction of human beings’ to the De´voluy massif. The next invasion has already begun.

  14

  The Wonders of France

  WHILE THE PEOPLE OF the highlands were discovering the plains and valleys, a new migratory type of human had been heading for the mountains. The first individuals had been sighted in the mid-eighteenth century. By the time the village of Chaudun gave up the ghost, they had spread to the rest of the country. In France, they were known as ‘touristes’. The word was borrowed from English to refer to travellers on the Grand Tour, most of whom were bound for Florence, Venice, Rome and Naples.

  In the early days, touristes were almost exclusively British and were found mainly in the Alps and Pyrenees and at various overnight stops on the three routes south from Paris to Lyon and Italy. In apparent defiance of common sense and physical possibility, the touristetravelled for pleasure, edification or health. Unlike explorers, they were not interested in mere discovery. Instead of simply observing and recording, they transformed the objects of their curiosity. They recreated the past, dressed the natives in colours that matched their prejudices and, eventually, constructed their own towns and landscapes.

  Almost as soon as it appeared, the new breed of traveller began to proliferate and diversify, growing weaker in the individual and mightier in the mass. However, the original type of touriste was still quite prevalent when the philosopher and historian Hippolyte Taine defined it in 1858:

  Long legs, thin body, head bent forward, broad feet, strong hands, excellently suited to snatching and gripping. It has sticks, umbrellas, cloaks and rubber overcoats. . . . It covers the ground in an admirable fashion. . . . At Eaux-Bonnes, one of them dropped its journal. I picked it up. The title was My Impressions:

  3rd August. Crossed the glacier. Tore right shoe. Reached summit of Maladetta. Saw 3 bottles left by earlier tourists. . . . On return, am fêted by the guides. In the evening, cornemuses [bagpipes] at my door, large bouquet with ribbon. Total: 168 francs.

  15th August. Leave Pyrenees. 391 leagues in 1 month, by foot, horse and carriage; 11 ascents, 18 excursions. Wore out 2 walking-sticks, 1 overcoat, 3 pairs trousers, 5 pairs shoes. A good year.

  P.S. Sublime country; my mind is buckling under the weight of great emotions.

  The mock-heroic tale of French tourism had begun a century before, just over the border in Savoy, on 21 June 1741. That afternoon, the prior and villagers of Chamonix were surprised to hear the sound of gunfire and the cracking of whips echoing around their mountains. A few hours later, they noticed an odd procession stumbling inexplicably up the valley of the Arve. Eight English gentlemen and five heavily armed servants were negotiating the torrent with some very tired horses, some of whom had lost their shoes.

  The leader of the expedition, William ‘Boxing’ Windham, had been living in Geneva and was intrigued by the distant white mountains where vast ice-fields known as glaciers were said to lie. Not surprisingly, he had been unable to find anyone rash enough to join him in an expedition to the so-called Montagnes Maudites (Cursed Mountains). But then the explorer Richard Pococke had arrived in town on his way home from Egypt and the Levant. With
six other gentlemen who were idling in Geneva, they set off on 19 June. It took them three days to reach Chamonix at the foot of the Montenvers glacier.

  Until then, the only visitors to Chamonix had been intrepid tax collectors, touring bishops and the map-makers of the Dukes of Savoy. However, the villagers themselves were well travelled. They sold chamois hides, crystals and honey in Geneva; their shepherds were in demand all over the region as cheese-makers. As travelling salesmen, many of them had walked to Paris by way of Dijon and Langres, from where they claimed to be able to see their mountains on the horizon. At any time, about a third of all Chamoniards lived in Paris.

  The band of Englishmen refused the hospitality that was offered and set up camp outside the village. Guards were posted and fires burned all night long. Decades later, old people in Chamonix were still regaling visitors with tales of the English gentlemen who were prepared to defend themselves against stray sheep and inquisitive children. The Chamoniards were excellent impersonators and no doubt exaggerated the precautions of Windham’s party. But Windham himself exaggerated the ignorance of his hosts. ‘Primitive’ people were an essential part of the wildness he had come to see. In the morning, he asked the local people about the glaciers and was gratified but not surprised to hear ‘ridiculous’ tales of witches holding sabbaths on the ice.