The Discovery of France

by Graham Robb

The favourite was the thirty-four-year-old professional cyclist Charles Terront, riding on state-of-the-art, detachable Michelin tyres. He reached Brest on 7 September at 5 p.m. (Paris time), an hour behind the leader, swallowed a pear and some soup and left five minutes later. At Guingamp, he overtook the leader, who was sleeping at the inn, and recrossed the Breton border at noon the next day. At Mortagne, people from all over the pays had come to see the riders pass. When Terront hurtled into town after dark he was greeted with thunderous applause and a firework display, and set off again bedecked with flowers. A few miles down the road, he crashed into a fallen branch. Sobbing with exhaustion, he walked to the nearest blacksmith, who repaired his pedal crank and sent him on his way. At five thirty the following morning, ten thousand people saw Terront in the middle of a flotilla of local cyclists cross the line on the Boulevard Maillot with his arm raised in triumph. He had been riding his Humber bicycle for seventy-one hours thirty-seven minutes, averaging 10 1/2 mph for seven hundred and forty-eight miles. He ate four meals, slept for twenty-six hours and then proved his resilience once again by attending eighteen consecutive banquets held in his honour.

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  THESE LONG-DISTANCE exploits were described in Homeric tones by newspaper reporters and are still an inspiration to competitive amateurs, but they give a slightly warped view of common experience. The man who saw George Pilkington Mills flash past on the hill near Thivars was a teacher from Chartres who spent a happy two-week holiday riding sixty-five hilly miles a day (‘a distance one should not exceed if one wishes to see and retain something of the journey’) from his home to the Pyrenees and back through the Auvergne. He cycled over the mighty Col du Tourmalet (6,939 feet) fifteen years before the self-mythologizing Tour de France made such a meal of it in 1910. Hundreds of other men and women had already pedalled happily over the Pyrenees, but the Tour de France has promoted its own epic history so effectively that it is now generally believed that the first person to cross the Tourmalet on a bicycle was the leader in the 1910 Tour de France who reached the summit covered in sweat and dust, and shouted at the organizers, ‘Assassins! ’

  The effect of the bicycle on daily life is now drastically underestimated by many historians, who tend to see it as an instrument of self-inflicted torture. Simple truths have been forgotten. As almost everyone knew a hundred years ago, the secret of riding a bicycle as an adult is to pedal just hard enough to keep the machine upright, then to increase the speed very gradually, but without becoming too breathless to hold a conversation or to hum a tune. In this way, with a regular intake of water and food, an uncompetitive, moderately fit person can cycle up an Alp, with luggage, on a stern but steady gradient engineered for an eighteenth-century mule. Descending is more difficult but statistically much safer, to all concerned, than in a car.

  To generations unspoiled by automation, hundred-mile bike rides were quite routine. When the teacher from Chartres set off on his thousand-mile holiday in 1895, boneshakers were already a distant memory. His machine was identical in most respects to the modern bicycle. It had ball-bearings and pneumatic tyres. Many velocipedes were lighter and more reliable than the energy-sapping machines that can be seen on city streets today. There were bicycles that folded up into a suitcase and bicycles that pumped up their own tyres. The derailleur, which made it possible to change gear without removing the back wheel, was introduced in 1912. Brakes, however, were still in their infancy. Many cyclists recommended tying a heavy branch to the seat-post before beginning a descent, but only ‘in the absence of dust, mud, sudden turns and especially forest guards who may refuse to believe that one has brought one’s own branch from Paris’ (Jean Bertot, La France en bicyclette: étapes d’un touriste, 1894).

  As soon as second-hand bicycles and cheap imitations of the well-known models became available, millions of people were liberated from their close horizons by a mechanical horse that could be given fresh limbs and reincarnated by the local blacksmith. A boy with a bicycle could leave his pays in search of a job or a bride and be back in time for dinner, which is why the bicycle has been credited with increasing the average height of the French population by reducing the number of marriages between blood relations. It was used by farm workers, urban commuters, postmen, village priests, gendarmes and the French army, which, like many other European armies, had several battalions of cycling cavalry.

  Before the First World War, at least four million bicycles were owned in France, which represents one bicycle for every ten people: 3,552,000 were declared for tax, but many more ‘feedless horses’ must have been hidden in stables. It was now possible to travel long distances at an invigorating speed, with the sort of panoramic view over the hedgerows previously enjoyed only by travellers perched on the roof of the diligence. Bicycles could be hired in most towns and taken on trains for less than a franc. The railway companies accepted responsibility for any damage. The Touring Club de France, founded in 1890 on the model of the British Cyclists’ Touring Club, had a hundred and ten thousand members by 1911. There were special maps for cyclists, showing steep hills, danger spots, paved and tar-macked sections and separate bicycle paths in towns. In her European Travel for Women (1900), Mary Cadwalader Jones recommended the bicycle as a means of discovering France. Her only word of caution concerned the law on keeping to the right: ‘You cannot always be sure: there are right- and left-handed cities and districts, so you must always keep your eyes open if you are bicycling’.

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  THIS OPENING-UP of the domestic frontier was beautifully embodied by the greatest bicycle race of all. The Tour de France was devised as a publicity stunt by a journalist, Géo Lefèvre, and his boss, Henri Desgrange, champion cyclist and editor of the sports newspaper L’Auto. The first Tour (1903) covered 1,518 miles and was divided into six stages, each lasting more than twenty-four hours: Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Nantes, Paris. This was the low-altitude route typically followed by apprentices on their Tour de France: it was perfect for the early Tours, when the stewards’ cars were unable to cope with the mountains. Sixty riders started and twenty-one shattered survivors were welcomed back to Paris by a hundred thousand people.

  From the very beginning, the Tour de France was a national celebration, the joyful beating of the bounds that millions of people with no interest in sport still enjoy every summer. For those who followed the Tour in newspapers and saw the murky photographs of mud-spattered heroes on the roads of France, from the black grime of the north to the white dust of the south, the ‘sacred soil’ of France became the setting of an annual adventure story told in the cartoon-epic prose of Henri Desgrange.

  As a liberal republican, Desgrange was delighted with the first winner of the Tour de France. Maurice Garin was an Italian by birth. He came from the other side of Mont Blanc in the Aosta Valley. Like thousands of his compatriots, he had left home as a boy and walked all the way to Belgium, where he earned his living as a chimney sweep. Garin had since become a French citizen and settled in Lens in the Pas-de-Calais. ‘The Little Chimney Sweep’ was as much a symbol of national unity as the French-born Algerian Kabyle, Zinédine Zidane, who captained the World Cup-winning national football team in 1998. Attacks on Italian immigrant workers had been increasing. Poor Italians were employed to do the filthy jobs that no one else wanted and were blamed for driving wages down. But the violence had as much to do with xenophobia as with industrial relations. In 1893, fifty Italians were shot and bludgeoned to death by a mob at the salt works in Aigues-Mortes. The murderous man-hunt went on for three days. The perpetrators were arrested, tried and acquitted. In a country that was still divided by the Dreyfus Affair, national unity seemed a distant dream. Desgrange imagined that his Tour de France would help to heal the wounds and restore national morale. The brawny editorial that he published in L’Auto on the first day of the race was almost a peaceful call to arms:

  With the broad and powerful gesture that Zola gave his ploughman in La Terre, L’Auto, a newspaper of ideas and action, t
oday sends out to all corners of France those unwitting and hardy sowers of energy, the great professional riders.

  Unfortunately, the Tour was more catalyst than balm. As a Parisian, Desgrange himself was amazed by what he saw in darkest France: wild faces drawn like moths to the checkpoint’s acetylene flares; ‘raucous housewives’ in a suburb of Moulins, ‘who haven’t even the decorum to wear a bonnet’: ‘Just how much further could we be from Paris?’ On the second stage of the 1904 Tour, at three o’clock in the morning, ‘the Little Chimney Sweep’, ‘the Butcher of Sens’ (Lucien Pothier), ‘the Red Devil’ (Giovanni Gerbi) and a rider known only by his real name (Antoine Faure) reached the summit of the Col de la République near the industrial town of Saint-Étienne. A mob was waiting in the forest. Faure, the local boy, was cheered on his way while the others were beaten up. The Italian Gerbi later retired from the race with broken fingers. On the next stage, at Nîmes, a riot broke out because the local favourite, Ferdinand Payan, had been disqualified for riding in the slipstream of a car. All along the route, nails and broken bottles were strewn on the road, drinks were spiked, frames were sawn through and hubs quietly unscrewed at night.

  The Tour de France gave millions of people their first true sense of the shape and size of France, but it also proved beyond doubt that the land of a thousand little pays was still alive.

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  THE TOUR DE FRANCE may have failed to unify the country but it did help to conjure away the feeling that there was nothing left to be discovered. No one could now publish a guide like Charles Delattre’s Voyages en France (1842), in which the author wrestled with a bear, fled from Spanish smugglers, was sucked into a bog in the Landes and nearly drowned in the mascaret tidal wave on the Dordogne.

  None of this was true, but at least, in those days, he could expect to be believed. British tourists were already searching for ‘undiscovered’ places where no other British people would be found. The Magasin pittoresque had once bemoaned the ‘wasteland’ that covered much of the country. Now it bemoaned the cultivation of every little corner. Nature was beginning to look like the Forest of Fontainebleau, with its signposts and log-cabin souvenir shops. The road from Bayonne to Biarritz was filled with traffic and the smell of cheap restaurants. Cliff faces all over the Pyrenees were papered with hotel advertisements.

  The mountains described in Desgrange’s Tour reports as malevolent giants seemed to be getting lower by the year. A road across the ridge of the Vosges had been completed in 1860. The magnificent Route des Grandes Alpes was opened to civilian traffic before the First World War and made it possible to drive, in summer, all the way from Lake Geneva to Nice. The Côte d’Azur itself was turning into the vast burglar-alarmed suburb that now stretches from Saint-Tropez to the glass-strewn highways of Monaco and into the once-deserted hills where mudslides and the smell of sewage are constant reminders of over-development. Native vegetation was eradicated by Australian mimosa and English shrubs and lawns. A hundred years before, Nice had been a quiet haven for a few travellers waiting for the wind to change before sailing for Genoa. In 1897, Augustus Hare visited Nice and found ‘a great, ugly, modern town, with Parisian shops and a glaring esplanade along the sea’.

  Despite the rarity of cars compared to bicycles (five thousand cars in 1901, ninety-one thousand in 1913), the destruction they caused was already outweighing the benefits to a small number of people. In 1901, the Dauphiné Automobile Club decided that its race, the Course de Côte de Laffrey, would have to be run in early spring because the road would be ‘blocked by the numerous cars that run along it continuously in the summer’. Twenty-five years later, Rudyard Kipling, driving from Cannes to Monte Carlo, found the road clogged with other people’s cars: it was ‘all solid traffic’: ‘The motor car has made the Riviera an Hell – and a noisy smelly one.’

  The country that had once seemed so vast was seen to be teeming with life like a fish pond when the water drains away. In this shrinking world, a few remote places and their tiny populations came to play a disproportionate role in the nation’s image of itself: the Breton islands of Houat and Hoedic, the almost deserted, waterless Causses, and Saint-Véran, the highest village in Europe, which now has eight hotels and two museums of daily life.

  The rapid disappearance of undiscovered France, and the desire to believe that it still existed, contributed to one of the great literary successes of 1913: Alain-Fournier’s novel Le Grand Meaulnes (translated as The Lost Domain and The End of Youth). His tale of boyhood longings, set in the rural Bourbonnais, gave a tantalizing sense of la France profonde as a distant but familiar place, a little world full of simple things that spoke of another age: the stove in the freezing classroom, the clog-wearing pupils who smelled of hay, the gendarme and the poachers, the beaten-earth floor of the general store, the silence of the countryside. The only strangers who ever appeared in the classroom were gypsies from a travelling circus, ‘boatmen caught in the ice on the canal, journeymen and travellers trapped by the snow’.

  In Le Grand Meaulnes, wickedness and vulgarity were associated with the industrial suburbs of nearby Montluçon and its ‘horrible, lisping accent’. Montluçon itself had doubled in size in less than a century. ‘The Birmingham of France’ was now a sprawling eyesore of factories, railway yards and depots. In the real classroom at Épineuil-le-Fleuriel where Alain-Fournier’s father had taught, the stove, the pupils’ clogs and galoshes, their leather satchels, some of the books, the furniture and the candles, and the bricks and roof tiles of the school itself would have come from Montluçon by road, rail and canal. But the past of Le Grand Meaulnes belonged to childhood, not to history. Exploration was a form of escape. The narrator himself leaves home only to return as an adult to the enchanted land of rural France where the longest journeys were those of the ploughman from one end of the field to the other.

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  A LONG TIME AFTER the disappearance of that enchanted land, on 14 July 2000, the biggest picnic in history took place along the Paris meridian. The French government had decided that the first Bastille Day of the new millennium would commemorate the line of longitude measured by Delambre and Méchain at the end of the eighteenth century. Ten thousand trees – oaks in the north, pines in the centre, olives in the south – were to be planted along the meridian, turning the imaginary line into a verdant reality. On the day itself, sections of a traditional bistro-style red-and-white-chequered tablecloth six hundred kilometres long were laid across the territory of three hundred and thirty-seven towns and villages between the Mediterranean (Perpignan) and the Channel coast (Dunkirk).

  The sky was overcast, and that day’s stage of the Tour de France was won by a Spanish rider from Navarre, but nothing could spoil an event that invited citizens to show their patriotic pride by attending a village fête and consuming local produce. More than twelve thousand mayors sat down to a lunch provided by the Senate in the Jardin du Luxembourg. Two thousand homing pigeons followed by a cameraman in a helicopter raced south from Dunkirk and were auctioned for charity. Runners, cyclists, motorcyclists, horse riders and balloon-ists took part in a twenty-four-hour relay race that ended in the centre of France. Despite the rain, a few million people turned out to enjoy the picnic and to celebrate national unity and cultural diversity ‘in a spirit of solidarity and mutual respect’.

  Although it had long since been rejected in favour of the Greenwich meridian as the internationally recognized line of zero longitude, the old Paris meridian was felt to be the ideal focus for national celebration. It recalled the birth of the Republic without alluding to the bloodbath in which it was born. Ignoring the fact that the geometers had nearly been lynched by their fellow citizens, the meridian symbolized fraternity and equality. It joined the Flemish-speaking north to the Catalan-speaking south. Of course, Paris was the crucial point, but with a little stretching and pulling, the meridian could also be said to pass through the Gothic cathedrals of Amiens and Bourges and the walled city of Carcassonne. These were the inherited jewels
on a necklace that hung from the capital. ‘The Incredible Picnic’, as it was officially named, reinforced the impression that, despite unemployment, racial conflict and the global market, France was a single nation with a clear sense of direction.

  For the purposes of the relay race, the centre of France was defined as the village of Treignat, whose name probably means ‘place through which one passes’. On 14 July, the Secretary of State for the Patrimony and Cultural Decentralization was rushed a hundred and fifty miles south from the official Bastille Day military parade on the Champs-Élysées to the town of La Chapelle-Saint-Ursin, to be photographed with the two hundred and thirty mayors of places with ‘La Chapelle’ in their name, and from there to the village designated as the centre of France. TThe Minister reached Treignat in the late afternoon, just in time to join the Picnic of the Languages of Oc and Oïl, and to see the runners of the relay race arrive from both ends of the country, covered in the mud of central France.

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  THE MERIDIAN was a relatively uncontentious symbol, but the centre of France was a diplomatic minefield. Three small towns, not including Treignat, currently promote themselves as the exact geographical centre of France. Each of these places has a monument. Vesdun’s is an enamel mosaic map of France on a white circular base which has been unkindly compared to a Camembert cheese. Five miles up the road, Saulzais-le-Potier has a little tower of stones topped by a French flag and inscribed with a reference to ‘the calculations of the eminent mathematician and astronomer Abbé Théophile Moreux’. Fifteen miles further north, Bruère-Allichamps boasts a third-century milestone that once stood at a trivium, the meeting of three roads. In the sixth century, the milestone was converted into a sarcophagus; in 1758 it was dug out of a field, and in 1799 erected at the crossroads in the centre of town, from where it would certainly have been removed – since it stands in the middle of the route nationale to Paris – had it not been identified by the popular geographer Adolphe Joanne as the mathematical centre of France.