The Discovery of France

by Graham Robb

  After recruiting guides and porters, and noting what he assumed to be the villagers’ admiration of his fearless team, Windham and company scrambled over the ‘terrible havock’ wreaked by avalanches, teetered on the brink of precipices and followed the hunters’ well-trodden path to the summit of the Montenvers. (The same route was followed sixty years later by the ex-Empress Joséphine with sixty-eight guides and her ladies-in-waiting.) At the summit, they saw ‘an indescribable sight’: ‘You must imagine your Lake [Geneva] put in Agitation by a stormy Wind, and frozen all at once.’ This Greenland scene was later named – one might almost say captioned – the Mer de Glace (Sea of Ice).

  William Windham’s great contribution to the development of tourism was not his discovery of the glaciers but his imported Romantic sensibility. His account of the expedition was passed around the salons of Geneva. When it was published in journals all over Europe in 1744, it caused a sensation. Mountains suddenly came into fashion. To most people, icy crags were about as attractive as a filthy village or a decaying Gothic church. ‘What did you think of the horrors?’ Jean Dusaulx was asked by a lady when he arrived in the Pyrenees in 1788. She was referring to what was later called the scenery. Mountains were wasteland that happened to be vertical. Until the late eighteenth century, few accounts of travelling through Provence even mention Mont Ventoux, which now seems to dominate and coordinate the landscape. Few people knew what a mountain was. In 1792, a priest fleeing from the Terror was amazed to find enormous rocky masses that could scarcely be climbed in half a day: ‘I had imagined a mountain to be a huge but isolated prominence.’

  To those who gave the matter any thought, mountains – and the people who lived there – were remnants of the primitive world. The Earth, like the human race, was creeping towards a state of perfection ‘when gradients shall be such that landslides are impossible and vegetation shall sit peacefully on the corpses of the mountains’ (Louis Ramond, Observations faites dans les Pyrénées, 1789). ‘Such uncouth rocks, and such uncomely inhabitants!’ wrote Horace Walpole after spending four days crossing the Alps and seeing his little pet spaniel abducted by a wolf in broad daylight. ‘I hope I shall never see them again.’

  After the Windham expedition, the Alps of Savoy were invaded by tourists. The Scottish doctor John Moore complained in 1779 that ‘one could hardly mention any thing curious or singular, without being told . . . Dear Sir, – that is pretty well; but, take my word for it, it is nothing to the Glaciers of Savoy.’ By the end of the century, the Mer de Glace could be reached on horseback and tourists could sleep in a mountain refuge known as ‘The Temple of Nature’. There might even have been a proper road if Napoleon had not refused the Chamoniards’ request: ‘Those people don’t understand their own interests. What tales would ladies have to tell if one could reach the Mer de Glace in a carriage?’ When the poet Shelley visited that ‘desert peopled by the storms alone’ (‘Lines written in the Vale of Chamouni’, 1816), the ‘desert’ had enough hotels to house the local population several times over. An amazing mixture of tradesmen, teachers, painters, botanists, idle lords and interesting women known as ‘adventuresses’ sat in excruciating silence around the dining table. Since more than half the tourists were English, English manners prevailed. Some of them came to see the Mer de Glace, others to ascend the mountain that had recently been identified as the highest in Europe: Mont Blanc, which was first climbed in 1786 by a local shepherd and a doctor. A century later, almost every major peak in the Alps and the Pyrenees had been conquered several times. Thanks to diplomatic guides, many people left with the happy impression that they were the first to scale their chosen peak.

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  AT THE TIME OF Windham’s expedition, in the flatter parts of France tourism was practically non-existent. There was little to enable a traveller to plan a tour of the country and plenty to encourage him to stay at home. Guidebooks had barely changed since the twelfth-century pilgrim’s guide to Santiago de Compostela. Written by a monk at Cluny, it described the main routes and holy sites, the food and accommodation, the time each stage might take and the sort of reception that a pilgrim might expect. The general message was that the further one travelled from the civilized north, the worse things became. Beyond the river Garonne, the language was incomprehensibly ‘rustic’; the Landes (‘three days on foot’) was a region of gigantic flies and sinking sand, where meat, fish, bread, wine and water were unobtainable; the people of Gascony were drunken, lustful, loquacious, sarcastic, badly dressed and – surely a mixed blessing – hospitable.

  Seven centuries later, guidebooks were still being written along similar lines. The reader was assumed to be Parisian or at least to have begun the journey in Paris, because, according to Le Nouveau voyage de France (1740), ‘in order to form one’s taste and to gain a sound knowledge of the customs and government of a Province, one should first of all study the Capital and the Court’. For obvious reasons, most books confined themselves to whatever could be seen along the post roads. Jean Ogée’s 1769 guide to Brittany was subtitled, typically: ‘including all the remarkable Objects that occur Half a League [just over a mile] to the Right and Left of the Road’. The sights themselves were not expected to be the aim of the trip. To make a long journey less boring, the guide would supply the historical details that a traveller might need to lighten the tedium and bore his fellow passengers. John Breval’s guide to ‘several parts of Europe’ (1738) was addressed to that ‘set of Readers’ who can derive pleasure from ‘the barrenest Plain or most uninhabited Village’ if they only have a date and a name.

  Since geographical information was scarce, most writers took their facts from earlier books, which had been plagiarized from even earlier works. In this way, monuments that had long since ceased to exist were described as though the writer had actually seen them. Many writers clearly never expected anyone to follow their directions and painted detailed pictures of imaginary provincial towns. Franc¸ois Marlin travelled with Robert de Hesseln’s compact Dictionnaire universel de la France (1771) because it was ‘useful to have the whole country in six volumes in the pockets of one’s carriage’. Unfortunately, Hesseln’s local informers sometimes let him down, as Marlin discovered when he reached the capital of the Lozère département in 1790. ‘M. Robert went to the trouble of placing Mende on a mountain, giving it a triangular shape and a large population. There are only three errors in this statement.’

  Even at the end of the nineteenth century, there were many guidebooks that described the ‘eternal snow’ on the summit of Mont Ventoux (the ‘snow’ is white stones). One of those books, published in 1888, also mentioned ‘thick clumps of bulrushes growing in a desolate marsh’ on the summit of the Gerbier de Jonc, which is completely arid. (Its name comes from two words meaning ‘rock’ and ‘mountain’ but, in modern French, suggests a sheaf of rushes.) Most of those authors had never strayed beyond the outer boulevards of Paris, except on a train.

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  BEFORE THE REVOLUTION, the sights of France and neighbouring regions that most people came to see could be summarized in a short list: the squares and monuments of Paris and the nearby chaˆteaux of Fontainebleau, Versailles and Chantilly; a few other cities that were handsome, at least at a distance – Bordeaux and its quays, Lyon and its riverside conurbation, Marseille and its suburbs; and the shipyards of Toulon and Rochefort. Mont-Saint-Michel was already crammed with bars and souvenir shops in the eighteenth century. The main natural attractions were the glaciers of Savoy; the natural amphitheatre of the Cirque de Gavarnie in the Pyrenees; the Perte du Rhoˆ ne, where the river disappeared underground; the resurgent spring called the Fontaine de Vaucluse; and the source

  of the Seine, which was unremarkable but conveniently close to a major post road. Modern marvels such as the Canal du Midi, the gardens and pagoda of Chanteloup, near Amboise on the Loire, and the bridge at Tours were tourist attractions in their own right. Cathedrals were remarked on much less than Roman ruins, especially the arches, amphitheatre
s and temples of Autun, Saintes, Nýˆmes, Orange and Arles, and the Pont du Gard aqueduct, though one could expect to find the Pont du Gard deserted, even in summer. Little else detained a traveller bound for the wonders of Italy. The Itinéraire des routes les plus fréquentées (1783) recommended a year’s stay in Paris followed by ‘two or three weeks in some of the principal towns, and with a little discernment, you may flatter yourself on knowing France and the French’.

  Some of the tourist sights of France had been famous since the Middle Ages and were beginning to show their age. The province of Dauphiné even had an early form of tourist trail called ‘The Seven Wonders of the Dauphiné’, of which there were fifteen. The Wonders were an assortment of structures and natural phenomena that local legend had identified as miraculous. They included the Winy Fountain, which later made a fortune for a mineral-water bottling company; the Trembling Meadow (a clump of boggy earth in the middle of a swamp); the Inaccessible Mountain (Mont Aiguille), which was known to have been climbed in 1492 on the orders of Charles VII I but was still being depicted in the mid-nineteenth century as an upside-down pyramid; the Manna of Brianc¸on (larch resin); and the Tower Without Venom, on a chilly mountain above Grenoble, where no snake was ever seen.

  The ‘Tour sans venin’, which probably owed its name to Saint Vérin,is now sadly abandoned, not only by snakes. A tour of the sites that were said to be marvellous two hundred years ago makes for a quiet and interestingly disappointing trip. Few people now visit the caves of Bétharram, the slate mines of Angers or the bottomless lake of Signy in the Ardennes. The only miraculous site in the list of the top twenty-five attractions in France in 1996 (excluding ski resorts and casinos) was the Chapel of the Miraculous Medal in the Rue du Bac in Paris, where the Virgin Mary ordered a medallion to be struck in 1830. Early tourists would be amazed at the size of modern, multi-volume guides to France and at the absence of some once-famous waterfalls, wells and grottos. For similar reasons, future generations might wonder why early twenty-first-century tourists spent their holidays in the desolate Camargue, on the fly-infested Poitevin marsh or on the sun-scorched beaches of the Côte d’Azur.

  The discovery of France was partly the process of determining what was worth discovering and how exactly to appreciate it. The tourists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries lived between the age of pilgrimage and the age of mass tourism. Apart from a few local attractions like the bogus ‘House of Petrarch and Laura’ at the Fontaine de Vaucluse, the sights they saw had not been marketed, packaged and explained with brochures and information panels. Readers of the twelfth-century Compostela guide had known exactly what to do when they visited the Roman necropolis near Arles called the Alyscamps or ‘Champs-Élysées’. They were to ‘intercede there, as is customary, for the deceased with prayers, psalms and alms’. Modern guides had no practical aims such as saving ancient souls. The Guide pittoresque, portatif et complet du voyageur en France (1842) simply recommended the Alyscamps as part of ‘a walk that is pleasing for the variety of the sites and landscapes’. Another guide saw it as an opportunity to ‘use your drawing pencils’. But most Frenchmen who visited Arles were far more zealous in seeking out signs of past glories in the famously beautiful Arlésiennes, who were thought to be descended from the Greeks.

  The new generation of travellers was unimpressed by marvels such as magic wells and sacred trees. In 1811, an Alsatian historian, George Depping, published the first comprehensive guide to the ‘natural curiosities’ of France. He devoted a special section to the Seven Wonders of the Dauphiné. He analysed them ‘so as to leave no doubt as to their inanity’. However, he also showed that weird rock formations and volcanic springs were objects of aesthetic and scientific interest. Tourists should admire their beauty, observe the processes of Nature and marvel at the credulity of their ancestors.

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  THE FIRST GUIDEBOOK published in France for the new, enlightened breed of tourist was one of the most passionate, conscientious and useless ever written. Joseph Lavallée’s Voyages dans les départements de la France began to appear in instalments in 1792. Lavallée was a born-again revolutionary who wanted to show those snooty Parisians that the provinces were just as interesting as their bloated capital. He and his collaborators set out to cover the entire country by tracing an unbroken line through all the départements without passing through the same département twice.

  Apart from its eccentric but theoretically rational itinerary, the book was unusual in several respects. First, Lavallée and his team appear to have actually undertaken the journey. (The drawing of Valenciennes shows the town at a great distance because the artist was in danger of being shot as a spy. The Loire-Inférieure chapter misses out most of the département because the roads were impassable and wind prevented the boat from landing at Quiberon.) Second, the book was to be sold all over the country, in every town that had a postmaster. Third, it redefined the sights that a patriotic tourist should want to see. Instead of gloomy old cathedrals, it praised factories, public promenades and new housing developments. The remarks on Nancy are typical:

  The barracks are magnificent, the hospital is beautiful. . . . The other buildings – the churches, for example – are contemptible. The Bishop was better lodged than the God he feigned to honour.

  Most unusual of all, the guide was complimentary about provincials, though, even here, Bretons were the exception: those benighted victims of aristocratic oppression were said to drink themselves into a state of suicidal fury, ‘and the air oftentimes reverberates with the frenzied blows of a delirious head being bashed against insentient walls’.

  Despite the delirious rhetoric, Lavallée’s Voyages helped to establish a notion that now seems almost synonymous with civilization: the belief that natural beauty and historical interest are part of a nation’s wealth. This was still a novel idea when some of the administrators posted to the new départements included picturesque sites in surveys of their département’s resources. Jean-Baptiste Mercadier’s description of the Arie`ge in 1800 is one of the first official documents to describe the economic potential of tourist attractions. He mentioned grottos crammed with stalactites, fossil beds, mineral springs and the fountain of Bélesta, which had narrowly escaped being turned into an industrial eyesore by the owner of a sawmill. He also mentioned the ruined castles that stand on the hilltops of the Ariège and in particular Montségur, ‘famous for the defeat of the Albigensians [the Cathar heretics], who were massacred there’. This is the earliest sign of the ‘Cathar tourism’ that is now a vital source of income for the region.

  Here again, the nation invariably referred to as ‘England’ played a vital role. After the fall of Napoleon, curiosity and exchange rates brought huge numbers of British tourists to France. As Morris Birkbeck explained in his Notes on a Journey through France (1815), ‘twelve years have elapsed since an authentic account has been given of the internal state of France, therefore it is, in some sort, an unknown country’. Foreign accounts were translated into French and revealed a magical world of unsuspected treasures to the people who lived in their midst. For lack of information, Walter Scott had had to invent much of the France he described in Quentin Durward (1823), but in France itself the novel created real interest in the Loire Valley. Stendhal hated Brittany but found that Scott’s descriptions made it possible for him to enjoy its poverty and ugliness. A pigsty in a swirling mist was suddenly an object of endless fascination.

  The effects of this post-war invasion are impossible to quantify but easy to imagine. Those ‘buttoned-up clergymen’ and ‘old ladies equipped with albums’ who landed at Calais and Boulogne were a strange enough sight to be noticed by everyone along their route. In the 1820s, the populations of entire villages would have seen the painter J. M. W. Turner sketching scenes along the Seine and the Loire, descending from the diligence to walk the last few miles to town. They would have seen Henry Wadsworth Longfellow striding along the banks of the Loire from Orléans to Tours, talking to peasants i
n the vineyards and appearing to exist in a different universe:

  The peasantry were still busy at their task; and the occasional bark of a dog, and the distant sound of an evening bell, gave fresh romance to the scene. The reality of many a day-dream of childhood, of many a poetic revery of youth, was before me. I stood at sunset amid the luxuriant vineyards of France!

  The first person I met was a poor old woman, a little bowed down with age, gathering grapes into a large basket. . . .

  ‘You must be a stranger, sir, in these parts.’

  ‘Yes; my home is very far from here.’

  ‘How far?’

  ‘More than a thousand leagues.’

  The old woman looked incredulous.

  ‘More than a thousand leagues!’ at length repeated she; ‘and why have you come so far from home?’

  ‘To travel; – to see how you live in this country.’

  ‘Have you no relations in your own?’

  British and American visitors not only travelled along the trade routes like salesmen with nothing to sell, they also colonized neglected regions. Calais was practically bilingual by the end of the eighteenth century. The population of Tours and the Touraine almost doubled after Waterloo. Pau had been discovered by the British during the Peninsular War. They returned in peacetime to enjoy the bracing air, the view of the Pyrenees and, eventually, their own villas, bowling greens and the first golf course on the Continent. In a country where people from neighbouring pays could still view one another as foreigners, tourists who strolled across the entire land as though it was an enormous village green were more effective than patriots like Lavallée in creating a sense of national pride.

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  UNFORTUNATELY, APPRECIATIVE FOREIGNERS were not the first to follow the trail of national treasures. They were preceded by a swarm of scrap merchants and antique dealers who profited from the sale of estates confiscated from the Church and the aristocracy. Collectively, they were known as the ‘Bande Noire’. Balzac described one of these parasitic speculators in his novel The Village Priest – a hard-working tinker called Sauviat who had once roamed the Auvergne, exchanging pots and plates for old iron: