by Graham Robb
An ironical postcard that can be bought elsewhere in the region shows these three monuments above the caption ‘LES 3 CENTRES DE LA FRANCE’. In fact, there are now too many centres of France to fit on a single postcard. Methods of calculation vary, and so does the definition of France. Some include Corsica and the islands of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Some of the earlier calculations were made before Nice and Savoy became part of France in 1860, and others still when the loss of Alsace and Lorraine in 1870 had erased the top-right corner of the hexagon. No one seems to have given the matter much thought until the mid-nineteenth century, when the idea of France as a measurable whole was becoming more familiar. In 1855, during the Crimean War, the Duc de Mortemart built a tall octagonal tower on a hill outside Saint-Amand-Montrond called the Belvédère. His intention was to commemorate the ‘immortal glory’ of the French army at the Battle of Sebastopol, but the view from the tower was so glorious, and the tower itself so close to the presumed heart of the country, that it was generally agreed to be the centre of France.
Anyone who sets out today to find that semi-mythical place, the centre of France, is in for a long and convoluted journey. The elusive centre is marked in various spots by pointing wooden hands, concrete posts, little flags and a carved silhouette of the country. As coastlines change and islands disappear, the centre of France will continue to dance about the woods and hedges of the Berry and the Bourbonnais.
Meanwhile, the three traditional centres of France have declared a truce. In order to promote the cultural heritage of the region, all are united in homage to their most famous son, Alain-Fournier. The house and classroom that were the model for the school in Le Grand Meaulnes are now a museum. A signposted ‘Route du Grand Meaulnes’ is planned. Alain-Fournier and his novel have come to represent that increasingly nostalgic concept, the pays, though the novel itself sites the lost domain in the imagination, not in space. Its coordinates are memories and desires. Its triangulation points are the eminence of age and the distant lights of childhood. The lost domain cannot be discovered with a map. It appears only through the total darkness of the countryside, when the hero’s horse has wandered off and he finds himself completely lost, a few miles from home.
*
THE LATEST CENTRE of France, calculated by the National Geographical Institute, happens to lie in a field a few hundred feet from the ‘Grand Meaulnes’ rest area on the southbound carriageway of the A71 autoroute.
No one could possibly get lost on the A71, which, since the completion of the Millau Viaduct, joins Paris and the north of France to the Mediterranean. In contrast to the homemade signs that mark the nearby centres of France, gigantic illuminated panels obliterate the landscape and connect the users of the autoroute to the data-stream of traffic information and weather reports. When Alain-Fournier published his novel in 1913, few people had ever known that sense of being a moving part in the national machine. Until 1 August 1914, no piece of news had ever reached the entire population on the same day.
That afternoon, in the Limousin, people heard the alarm bells that usually signified a hailstorm and looked up into a clear blue sky. In villages from Brittany to the Alps, firemen rushed out at the sound of clanging bells, looking for the fire. In the little town of Montjoux in the arrondissement of Montélimar, a car screeched to a halt in front of the mairie. A gendarme jumped out and delivered a package. A few moments later, people in the fields were intrigued to see cyclists whizzing past carrying bundles of posters. Near Sigottier, a man called Albert R . . . met a young lad heading for his village. The boy claimed to be on his way to announce the outbreak of war and round up all the men of the village. On hearing this, Albert R . . . collapsed in tears of laughter and wished him luck with his practical joke.
In places where newspapers were scarce and the main source of news was the weekly market, war came as a complete surprise. According to a survey conducted in 1915 by the rector of Grenoble University, people were ‘thunderstruck’ and ‘stupefied’. The first inkling they had at Motte-de-Galaure, two miles from the busy Rhône corridor, was the order given on 31 July to have all the horses ready to be requisitioned. Some men sang the ‘Marseillaise’ and looked forward to coming home a few weeks later with tales of glory, but most were silent and dismayed. There was talk of hiding in the woods. At Plan in Isère, ‘the men of our peaceful locality who were mobilized did not leave with the same enthusiasm as their comrades from the cities. Rather, they were resigned and went out of patriotic duty.’
In some parts of the Alps, men were making hay in the high summer pastures when messengers brought the news. Some had to leave for the station in the next valley before saying farewell to their families. At the Col de l’Ange Gardien, where the roads from the Col d’Izoard and the villages of the Queyras come spiralling down to join the road to the rest of France, a monument erected after the First World War lists the names of the dead by village: Abriès, Aiguilles, Arvieux, Château-Ville-Vieille, Molines, Ristolas, Saint-Véran. It was here that men and boys from different valleys gathered like the herds returning to their winter quarters. The inscription on the monument says nothing of glory and honour. It evokes the sadness of men whose home was their village, then their pays and last of all France:
From the col that lies close to this mound,
THEY cast a final farewell glance at their homes . . .
It was here that they consented to the sacrifice . . .
*
TO JUDGE BY the records of the soldiers whose place of death is known, some of those villagers discovered a France that no living person had ever seen. The Argonne forest is one of the largest remnants of the wooded frontier zones that once divided one Gallic tribe from another. After four years as the front line, the forest had disappeared. Soldiers from all over France found themselves in a land without landmarks, with nothing to guide them but flares and enemy gunfire. They colonized the new land with gun-pits that turned into trenches and tunnels that sometimes intersected the German trenches. They camped in leaf-and-branch huts like ancient Gauls. Horses that had walked the same farm tracks all their lives carried mutilated soldiers across a grassless field. On the hill above Dombasle where Arthur Young had walked in 1789 with a local woman, soldiers trudged through heavy yellow mud towards the scarecrow remains of a church. The pays had become a ‘sector’.
One of the thousands who lost their lives in that first summer of the Great War was Lieutenant Fournier, whose novel Le Grand Meaulnes would soon be read as a prophetic farewell to the France of secret, undiscovered places. On the morning of 22 September, he led a reconnaissance patrol into the woods to the south of Verdun. The men of his platoon came from the Gers in south-western France.
They could hardly have been further from home without leaving the country altogether.
Maps of this sector changed almost every day. Even someone who had spent a lifetime in the forest would have been lost. Without knowing it, Lieutenant Fournier’s patrol passed behind enemy lines. A sergeant remembered the moment:
Suddenly, we heard the crackle of gunfire behind us. The ditch on the edge of the wood gave us some protection while we tried to work out what was going on . . . How long did we wait? A minute, maybe two. . . . The captain shouted, ‘Fix bayonets! Charge!’
As soon as I was on my feet, I saw the enemy kneeling in a ditch . . . I noticed a comrade here and there dropping his rifle and falling on his face . . . Two of my comrades came up to the beech tree I was using as cover. Both fell dead – one on my back, the other on my feet. All I could think was, they’ll get in my way. . . . The revolver that Lieutenant Fournier had been firing three metres away from me fell silent . . .
The German soldiers buried the bodies in the regulation manner: two rows of ten, head to toe, with the twenty-first laid on top.
The leaves of four autumns fell on the grave, and then the soil was churned up again in the Meuse–Argonne Offensive of 1918. After the Armistice, when old people with long-handled spades were filling in
the gun-pits and the trenches, no one knew where to look for the dead of 1914.
*
VISITORS TO THE Argonne once came to see Varennes, where Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were arrested and sent back to Paris. Now, they come to see the vestiges of the First World War. Excerpts from the diaries of French, German and American soldiers can be read on information panels. Tunnels and trenches can be explored. But the forest itself exists in several different time zones. Away from the sites of commemoration, it is not always possible to distinguish bomb craters and trenches from the dells carved out by roots and rainwater, the eighteenth-century road embankments and ditches, and the earthworks of more recent foresters who negotiate the craters and the unexploded shells with mechanical excavators and horses for the more difficult terrain.
South of Verdun, the forest is bisected by a Loch Ness Monster of a road: thirteen miles of steep descents followed almost immediately by steep climbs. It gives a cyclist the impression of fleeing, being prevented from flight by the sudden tug of leg muscles, then fleeing again. This is the Tranchée de Calonne, named after the Finance Minister of Louis XVI who built the road to connect his château to the outside world. Between 1914 and 1918, the Calonne Trench was effectively the eastern frontier of France.
Near the bottom of one of the hills, a narrow track leads off into the woods. After five hundred yards, it reaches a small clearing and something that looks like a prehistoric burial protected by a glass pyramid. In the spring of 1991, after a search that lasted fourteen years, a local man who knew the woods as a hunter found some cartridge cases from a French revolver and then some cartridges that had never been fired. Scattered all around the glade was the antiquated equipment of a 1914 reserve regiment: a water bottle made in 1877, boots that were older than the men who had worn them, and the bright-red trouser material that was part of the French uniform until 1915. In a rectangular pit he discovered the bones. The lower part of one of the arms still bore the stripes of a lieutenant.
The site is now marked on the Michelin map with the small black triangle that signifies ‘curiosité´ ’. A French flag flies above the grave. Naturally, there is nothing symbolic about the location itself. The author of Le Grand Meaulnes had died close to the road that leads south to the centre of France, but a long way from the magical land of his novel. Almost three hundred miles separate the Argonne forest from the foothills of the Massif Central. But with a favourable wind, the bicycling narrator of his novel could easily have covered the distance in half a week, ‘plunging into the hollows of the landscape, discovering the distant horizons of the road that part as one approaches and burst into bloom, passing through a village in an instant and gathering it all up in a glance’. The sense of discovery and escape would have made the long journey home seem all too short.
Epilogue
Secrets
SOME TRAVELLERS NOW GO to France in search of places that lie beyond what can be discovered. The volcanic cone of the Gerbier de Jonc attracts a number of new-age travellers whose sense of mystery would have meant more to the earlier inhabitants of the region than the inexplicable activities of the map-makers. The scaly columns of the Gerbier de Jonc lie at the centre of France’s Bermuda Triangle. The magnetic rocks are said to disrupt the navigation systems of aeroplanes. More than twenty planes have crashed or disappeared in the area since 1964. Centuries before, strange crosses appeared in the sky and balls of fire were seen dancing over the grasslands. The demons have changed with the times, but their habitat is almost the same.
The Gerbier de Jonc itself has lost some of its mystique and over five hundred feet in height since the summit collapsed in 1821. A travelling market sometimes materializes at its foot to catch the trade from tourists who come to see the farm that claims to be the ‘traditional’ source of the Loire, the restaurant that claims to be the source of the Loire according to a cadastral survey and the information panels on which it is explained that, since the Gerbier de Jonc is like a sponge on a bed of granite, there is no single source of the Loire.
These days, the most popular portal to other worlds is the Pech de Bugarach in the south-western Corbières. Like the Gerbier de Jonc, Mount Bugarach is a geological personality with a strangely telephotographic presence. Even at a distance, it seems to belong to another landscape. Its Jurassic limestone reef surges out of the sparsely populated hills like the back of a gigantic dinosaur. From the air, it is thought to resemble a question mark. The Paris meridian passes within a few metres of its summit. The Ark and various transdimensional vessels are said to have landed on it, though the summit is such a slender plateau that Pierre Méchain, who spent several days in 1795 sheltering from gales in a farmhouse on its slopes, could barely find room for the buttresses that supported his triangulation signal.
Outsiders live among the small local population, searching the caves inside the mountain for traces of Cathar treasure, the Holy Grail, the last earthly home of Jesus Christ and the underground river that flows either to the Mediterranean thirty miles to the east or, according to some, to the centre of the Earth. An old woman in a miniskirt who lives by begging believes herself to be Mary Magdalene. In villages around the mountain – Rennes-les-Bains, Rennes-le-Château and Bugarach itself – new-age pilgrims and harmless neurotics, infatuated with the ghosts of logical reasoning, pore over scraps of mystical intelligence: local legends taken out of context, misconstrued Latin inscriptions, tales of a greedy priest who was rumoured to have struck a deal with Satan. The people who killed Cassini’s geometer two hundred and sixty years ago might have been similarly fascinated by the hieroglyphic calculations in his satchel. Graves in the cemetery at Rennes-le-Château have been disturbed and occasionally dynamited by people in search of ancient secrets. The mayor of the village, a retired paratrooper, has learned to live with the seekers of truth. Their money has paid for new public toilets and there are plans to extend the village down the mountainside. Undiscovered secrets are a vital economic asset.
*
AS THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY map-makers knew from painful experience, discovering is not the same as knowing. After the meridian expedition, the exotic name of Bugarach appeared on maps, precisely located on the same line as Paris and traversed by triangulation lines like a busy terminus. Yet the region itself was almost completely unknown to the outside world.
For that matter, how much was known about the other pays on the same line of longitude? A century after the Cassini expedition placed the first triangulation signal on Mount Bugarach, on the part of the meridian now occupied by the glass pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre, a dark, decaying quartier of medieval slums lay just below the level of the square. Someone who squeezed past the planks of wood that closed off the quartier would find a ruined church, some overgrown gardens and boarded-up doors, an arch from a vanished building and wasteground strewn with blocks of stone waiting to be used for the new Louvre. A few figures might appear amongst the wreckage – squatters and beggars, some of the artists and poets who lived in a small colony or the furtive customers of a homosexual brothel. Few Parisians knew anything about the Quartier du Doyenné. ‘Our descendants’, wrote Balzac in 1846, ‘will refuse to believe that such barbarity existed in the heart of Paris, in front of the palace where three dynasties received the elite of France and Europe’:
When one’s carriage passes alongside that dead remnant of a quartier and one’s eye pierces the gloom of the Allée du Doyenné, the soul turns cold. The mind begins to wonder who could possibly live there and what must go on at night, when the alley becomes a death-trap and the vices of Paris, cloaked in darkness, give themselves free rein.
Thirty years later, when the Louvre had been rebuilt and the Doyenné slums were buried under asphalt, a walk north along the meridian would lead past the Comédie Française and the Bibliothèque Nationale, across the new Boulevard Haussmann to the windmills of Montmartre and then, beyond the fortifications and the customs barriers, to a squalid, windswept perimeter of factories and shacks where
the city streets ended before the country roads began. This was the so-called ‘Zone’, where criminals and degenerates were thought to lurk, plotting the overthrow of the government. Long before the bidonvilles of modern France, the suburbs had become a dumping ground.
Most large cities had an underclass and a slum belt, but few were so aware of the ‘dangerous classes’ on the city’s horizon and so reluctant to bring them into the fold. Paris, the cultural and commercial nucleus of the nation, was full of memorials to battles, dynasties and regimes, but while some events were commemorated with blinding brilliance, many others were erased from memory. Even now, scholars of French history can be surprised by obscure catastrophes which, like the Verdon Gorges, lay hidden in a landscape that seemed to have been thoroughly mapped. Very few have heard about the rounding up of the gypsies in 1803, when thousands were separated from their children and sent to work in labour camps. Fewer still have heard of the persecution of the cagots.
Certain regions of French history have come to light only to be reburied. There is now a little Cagot Museum in the Pyrenean town of Arreau, but no one who visits the museum would guess that violent discrimination had ever been a problem in south-western France. The exhibition revives an ancient prejudice in order to equate the supposedly diminutive cagots with the ‘little people’ of the mountains who were exploited by the ‘big people’ (lords and clerics). In this view of history, the cagots were not a persecuted caste but the cute, hobbit-like inhabitants of the picturesque Pyrenees.
France has often discovered its own past like a traveller forced to cross a remote and dangerous region without a map. Decades passed before the savage extermination of Paris Communards by government troops in 1871 was recognized as historical fact. It took even longer for the state to acknowledge the fact that the Vichy regime had rounded up Jews even more enthusiastically than the Nazis demanded. While memorials to heroic Résistance members killed by ‘the Germans’ are a common sight all over France, there is nothing in Vichy to remind a visitor of the genocide.