The Discovery of France

by Graham Robb

  When the new Napoleon conducted his coup d’état in December 1851, many towns and villages, especially in the south-east, rose up against the dictator. The savage repression of the uprising and the paranoia of a police state whose spies travel by train and record ‘subversive’ remarks made by drunken peasants give an appearance of political sophistication to these local conflicts. But to the returning native, the old state of affairs is still obvious despite the socialist slogans and the imperial propaganda. When he registers his presence in the commune at the town hall, he finds the eldest son of the wealthiest local farmer sitting in a whitewashed room between a photograph of the emperor and a wardrobe that contains the municipal archives. Democracy – or the semblance of it – has created its own dynastic rulers. Some mayors remain in the post for more than thirty years. Joseph Pic, who presided over the Pyrenean village of Audressein for thirty-six years (1884–1919), and whose hydraulic threshing machine is still its main attraction, was a farmer, a cabinetmaker, a factory owner and a stock-breeder. In the circumstances, corruption is hard to distinguish from tribal honour. The vaudevillist Eugène Labiche defined the maire as ‘the inhabitant of the commune whose dwelling is surrounded by the best maintained roads’, and since, for eleven years, Labiche himself was Mayor of Souvigny-en-Sologne, where he owned 2,200 acres or one-fifth of the commune, he was talking from personal experience.

  In the provinces, politics is not yet the ‘heartless science’ of ideologues and careerists. The right to vote is the right to strike a blow at the old enemy: meddlesome outsiders, families who grew rich in the Revolution, the neighbouring village, the cagots and the Jews, and even the forces of evil. In the Corrèze, a certain doctor had been revered as a benevolent wizard. Peasants cut splinters from his carriage and the benches in his waiting room to use as talismans. The son was believed to hold the secret of healing from his father and was duly elected to the Conseil Général. In the eyes of voters, political parties are not always what they seem to be in histories of France. In Nîmes, political loyalties were divided into Catholic and Protestant and could be traced back to the Reformation. In the west of France, the old division between the republican ‘blues’ and the royalist ‘whites’ lasted well into the twentieth century.

  Despite the signs of regeneration, the returning native is unlikely to stay. A few people are employed at the station, the level crossing is controlled by a local woman and another woman runs the post office, but young people are leaving for the cities, where they find better jobs and where the streets are lit at night. In towns and villages all over France, the population is declining and will not begin to recover until the 1960s. By the end of the nineteenth century, two out of every ten French citizens will no longer be living in their native département. Even the people who stay behind are beginning to feel like foreigners in their own land.

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  THE ARMIES OF BOURGEOIS travellers who raced across the country in railway trains had set their watches by the station clock. From their point of view, the people of provincial France were relics of the past rather than citizens of a new world.

  This class and its culture were overwhelmingly Parisian, whether or not they actually came from Paris. Much of what came to be seen as French was peculiar to Paris or an imitation of something Parisian. A simple analysis of the places of birth and death of five hundred and twenty artists, architects, writers and composers from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries shows that the creators of ‘French’ culture not only tended to work in Paris and to spend most of their lives there (often retiring to holiday satellites of the capital such as the Normandy coast or the Côte d’Azur), they also tended to be Parisian by birth (more than one third of the total).37 Those who came from the provinces left behind only their grey ghosts in the form of statues erected by the local council.

  Many provincial cities had lively publishing industries (the bibliography of this book contains titles published in seventy-six different French towns and cities), yet very few prominent writers were ever published outside the capital. Becoming Parisian or making contacts in Paris was a vital step in any career, even for the self-styled ‘peasant’ Arthur Rimbaud, who moved to Paris just after his seventeenth birthday and tried hard to lose his northern accent. Émile Zola left Aix-en-Provence at the age of eighteen and shed his provincial trappings as soon as he set foot in Paris. In his first letters to his boyhood friend Paul Cézanne, he was already writing as a Parisian, with a condescending view of ‘the land of bouillabaisse and aïoli’, the postcard realm of ‘pine trees waving in the breeze’ and ‘arid gorges’. From the heights of Paris, Aix-en-Provence was ‘small, monotonous and paltry’.

  In lively cities such as Angers, Nantes, Nancy, Strasbourg, Dijon, Lyon, Toulouse, Montpellier and Marseille, the growth of civic pride coincided with a creeping sense of inferiority. A great deal of provincial literature was devoted to assertions of local worthiness and thereby underlined the prestige of Paris. Government policy ensured that the best paintings and artefacts went to the Louvre while provincial museums were left with portraits of local personages and moth-eaten cabinets containing samples of local arts and crafts. Napoleon looted Italy; later governments pillaged the provinces. Provincial literature was represented in the capital by collections of folk songs and legends, tidied up and prettified for the Parisian market by writers who forgot what life was like beyond the outer boulevards. Returning from Paris to ‘the land of granite and oaks’ he had left as a boy, the Breton poet Auguste Brizeux bought a special ‘folkloric costume’ in an attempt to fit in. George Sand sponsored some provincial poets but, in order to preserve their provinciality, she purged their work of highfalutin language, fancy images and, in one case, correct spelling. The provinces (which is to say, in 1880, 99.9 per cent of the land and 94 per cent of the population)38 came to stand for the homely virtues of simplicity, modesty and authenticity at a time when the most highly prized literary virtues were complexity, arrogance and deliberate artificiality.

  Since so much of what was written about France was published in Paris and written for Parisians – or for urban bourgeois who looked to Paris as a model – the state of cultural civil war was never as obvious in books as it was in daily life. A cyclist on holiday in the Vende´e in 1892 found that a few disobliging remarks about Parisians ensured cooperation and courtesy from the local peasants, who had ‘an instinctive antipathy’ to the capital. The word ‘Parisien’ is still uttered as an insult in many parts of France, and any visitor with derogatory things to say about Paris is always likely to be treated sympathetically, even by bureaucrats.

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  THE BATTLEFIELDS on which these two cultures clashed no longer look like scenes of social strife. Most spas and seaside resorts are now such pleasant places to visit that it is surprising that more historians and anthropologists have not been inspired to write about them. Spa towns in particular tend to be quiet, picturesque places full of grand, museumy hotels softened by neglect. Their rates are usually reasonable, thanks to the continued patronage of a health service that values the therapeutic effects of spring water. In the smaller spas, the healing properties of the water are immediately obvious. At Lamalou-les-Bains, which specializes in traumatology, crutch-wielding car-crash victims dodge the traffic. At Eugénie-les-Bains, the sturdy seasonal population braves the apparent irony of signs at either end of the main street proclaiming the spa to be ‘France’s foremost slimming village’.

  The speciality of each spa used to be even more obvious. When the railway network connected the Auvergne and the Pyrenees to Paris and other European capitals, small towns that had seen a trickle of curistes since the days of the Roman Empire were suddenly inundated with people who all suffered from the same disease. Barèges, which was famous throughout Europe for its treatment of cripples, lay at an altitude of 4,000 feet in a depressing gorge beneath the Tourmalet, ‘which nothing but the hope of recovering health would render endurable beyond an hour or two’. Mutilated soldiers sat i
n a sunken hall around a basin, smoking their pipes in the sulphurous fumes while their wounds were dressed by local women. Lower down, Bagnères-de-Bigorre was like an infirmary founded by a sadistic joker: half its visitors were suicidal melancholics, the other half were hypochondriacs. Then there was Aulus-les-Bains, a cul-desac in the valley of the dancing bears, frequented by ‘invalids of love’ or ‘young people with shameful illnesses’ because a syphilitic lieutenant had found some relief in its reddish waters in 1822. (The water seems to have counteracted the effects of the mercury that was administered to syphilis patients.) The lieutenant’s regiment spread the word, and by 1849, Aulus had three hotels, a new bridge and an avenue of acacia trees. It survived the discovery of a cure for syphilis and now promotes itself as ‘The Cholesterol Spa’.

  Under Napoleon I I I, the vertiginous highway known as the Route Thermale was completed. It coils across the Pyrenees from west to east, joining up the spas that Napoleon’s empress Eugénie made fashionable by visiting them on her trips home to Spain. A few Pyrenean towns had witnessed a small-scale gold rush, but nothing like the mineral-water bonanza. Once it was joined to the outside world by the Route Thermale or the railway, a typical spa town with an ambitious mayor would concoct a tale about its popularity in Roman times and petition for ‘les Bains’ to be added to its name. A local doctor would have himself appointed official Inspector of the Waters and publish a suspiciously enthusiastic pamphlet in which he proved that the spring, whose origins are lost in the mists of time, is the only reliable cure for the injury or disease in which he happens to specialize.

  The day on which the waters are pronounced medically sound is the greatest day in the town’s history. The new stone fountain in the square is a monument to progress and future prosperity. Instead of bearing a cheerful motto in Latin or French, it is engraved with the results of a chemical analysis conducted by the municipal laboratory: ‘The water possesses remarkable organoleptic qualities. It is fresh, light and very pure from the organic and bacteriological point of view . . . Tests for pathogenic germs: Negative . . . Approved by the Minister of Health’.

  Before the sick and dying can be received, wolves and bears are shot or placed in a menagerie, pigs and sheep are barred from the main street, unsightly paupers and lunatics are removed to the municipal hospice. An old coaching inn is refurbished and some houses are knocked together for extra accommodation. If an entrepreneur can be found, a small park with trees and benches will be created and a local woman who speaks some French will be given a white uniform and installed in a booth to collect the money. The baths themselves are a model of the social hierarchy. Titled eminences and industrialists whose names will appear in subsequent editions of the doctor’s pamphlet receive their goblets of water and their douches écossaises (hot showers alternating with cold) in a marble hall. Lower down the hill, petits bourgeois and soldiers on a state pension bathe in water that has already rinsed the rich.

  Soon, carriages are ferrying invalids from the railway station to the hotel and every morning a silent procession makes its way to the marble hall. Saucer-eyed tuberculosis sufferers peer out from sedan chairs carried by mountain people. Those who failed to seek the advice of the spa doctor, who also advises on accommodation, will have to wait their turn. Before long, the walks laid out around the town are dotted with the gravestones of curistes who came too late and local people who helped to build the road. Almost everywhere, the population increases by the year: Eaux-Bonnes, the Paris street wedged into a Pyrenean gorge, had three hundred invalids in 1830 and six thousand four hundred in 1856. In the same year, Cauterets, on the road south from Lourdes, had sixteen thousand visitors – almost two hundred for every permanent inhabitant.

  Beyond the Pyrenees, new spa cities with theatres and boulevards sprang up almost overnight like the towns and citadels that were said to have been created in a day by the fairy Mélusine. Vichy’s population grew almost as fast as that of Paris. Aix-les-Bains, on the banks of the Lac du Bourget, received two hundred and sixty foreign visitors in 1784, and almost ten thousand in 1884, including three thousand Britons and two thousand Americans. Hotel orchestras played ‘God Save the Queen’ and July 4th was a day of celebration. The key to the success of Aix-les-Bains was the casino, where local people were allowed to work but not gamble. Some doctors noted these developments with dismay. People were taking the waters, not because they were sick but because they liked the spa and its attractions. The doctor who wrote as ‘Dr Speleus’ was fighting a losing battle when he warned those healthy invalids of the consequences of forsaking showers and mineral water for the giddy round of social events:

  There is a continual mêlée of dressing, spending, follies, conceit, vanity, smugness, trickery and lies. Everyone wants to surpass his neighbour and to eclipse him in body and intellect, birth and fortune, and in this way, each one digs a grave in which he finds disappointment, ruin and regret.

  A SIMILAR EPIDEMIC of frivolity broke out along the coasts of France. In travellers’ accounts, the sea appears to have been stormy and destructive until the early nineteenth century, when the sun came out and sea air was found to have healing properties. The seashore became a civilized refuge from the evils of civilization. Dieppe, which had a regular cross-Channel service to Brighton from 1824, was the first seaside resort to attract large numbers of visitors. Then came Boulogne, Trouville and other more or less fashionable resorts where the pioneering British demonstrated the pleasures and benefits of sea bathing. Many of the scenes painted by the first Impressionists on the Normandy coast were as modern as their paintings of factories and railway stations: parasols and striped awnings on the beach, well-dressed families sitting on straw chairs and playing with fishing nets, the casino flag flapping in the breeze and white mansions which, unlike earlier sea-front properties, faced the sea and had facades as rich and ornate as the patisseries in the shops.

  The effect of all this on the local population is easy to imagine but hard to determine. The arrival of mass tourism in a previously unspoilt area – or in an area spoilt only by small-scale activities – was certainly traumatic. In resorts along the Channel coast, land was expropriated, people were displaced and the price of everything went up. Building workers erected their own temporary villages with their own supply of food. Sometimes, while the resort was being built, the only jobs for local people were rubbish collection and toilet cleaning. As in the old days, there were battles between the natives and the migrant workers who despised the peasants and the ‘filthy Bretons’. Just as new plants and flowers from other parts of France and Europe were sprouting along the coast and the railway lines, prostitution spread syphilis along the tourist trails.

  Some towns were building sites for the best part of a century and were still quite fresh when they were flattened again in the Second World War. Cabourg-les-Bains, founded in 1855, was a cement-and-asphalt wasteland for several years before it acquired its crescent of elegant villas and its gas-lit promenade. New towns such as Berck, Berneval, Deauville and Le Touquet-Paris Plage were developed by speculators, advertised by shareholding journalists and prepared as if for a mass evacuation organized according to social rank. Conty’s guide to the Normandy coast (1889) was careful to define the clientele of each resort to avoid embarrassment: Mers was ‘an informal bathing-place’ for petits bourgeois and their families; Agon-Coutainville was for well-to-do shopkeepers and tradesmen (its beach was called ‘the booksellers’ beach’, where ‘booksellers come to forget that they are booksellers’); Landemer-Gréville was for ‘artists’ and Étretat for ‘famous artists’; Houlgate was the resort of ‘aristocratic families’, its ‘soft, fine sand’ being ‘worthy of the most elegant and delicate feet’; while Arromanches was ‘recommended to bathers who like to live in patriarchal simplicity’ (i.e. who don’t have much money). Some unfashionable resorts, not mentioned in the guide, received the children of paupers sent to sanatoriums by the Assistance Publique.

  Nothing of this magnitude had happened to t
he coast of Normandy since the Viking invasions and the Hundred Years War. Of all the places mentioned in the previous paragraph, only one – the ‘fishing village’ of E´ tretat with its rocky road and its cheap little inn – had appeared in Murray’s comprehensive guide of 1854.

  When the building crews had gone, the native population found itself in a new world full of strange surprises. Bourgeois families walked into cottages uninvited and poked their noses into the upturned boats in which, they supposed, the fisher folk lived all year round. The model ships and crude paintings that were hung in chapels to thank the Virgin were examined as quaint curios by tourists who treated the chapel as an ethnological museum.

  From Brittany to Provence, people who had seen their pays modernized and urbanized, who worked in canning factories and understood the tidal effects on their industry of distant markets, were suddenly asked to play the role of primitive stereotypes. No trip to the seaside was complete without a first-hand account of wreckers parading lanterns on the oxen’s horns to imitate the lights of ships, luring vessels onto the reef and pulling rings from the fingers of the drowned. Hardy travellers visited the hulks at Brest and Rochefort to watch the convicts being thrashed. Decent families were content with tales of terrible hardship. On a walking tour of Brittany in 1847, the young Gustave Flaubert attended the funeral of a drowned fisherman at Carnac and observed the candlelit features of the widow, ‘her cretinous, contracted mouth, shivering with despair, and all her poor face weeping like a storm’. There are dozens of similar accounts of picturesque suffering. In 1837, on the shores of the Arcachon Basin, which is the only sheltered sea along the razor edge of the Atlantic coast, a town councillor on holiday found the recent shipwreck a source of inspiration and edification:

  We questioned those noble debris of a disaster which covered these solitary shores in mourning crêpe and brought grief to the surrounding hamlets. They pointed to the immense gulf which not long ago devoured seventy-eight of their unfortunate companions . . . We should have liked to stay among them to study their customs and to hear tales of their perilous adventures. It would have completed the emotional tableau of our journey.