The Discovery of France
Page 56
20. Saint-Pierre de Montmartre, the oldest church in Paris, as part of the world’s first telecommunications system. Saint-Pierre was built in 1133 on the site of a temple to Mars. It escaped demolition in the Revolution as a ‘Temple of Reason’ and as a plinth for the telegraph tower. It was the first relay station on the first line (1794), which ran from the roof of the Louvre to Saint Catherine’s church in Lille.
21. Carcassonne, c. 1859, at the start of Viollet-le-Duc’s restoration. ‘The process of converting the place from an irresponsible old town into a conscious “specimen” has of course been attended with eliminations; the population has, as a general thing, been restored away’ (Henry James, 1884). There were complaints that Viollet-le-Duc’s steep, blue-slate roofs turned the southern citadel into a northern château. The red, Roman tiles and gentler slopes of the local roofs are more typical of the south. The ‘chemin creux’ (hollow way) is a road fashioned by nature, historical accident and centuries of use. Similar road-ravines were found in Picardy and the west of France. 20. Saint-Pierre de Montmartre, the oldest church in Paris, as part of the world’s first telecommunications system. Saint-Pierre was built in 1133 on the site of a temple to Mars. It escaped demolition in the Revolution as a ‘Temple of Reason’ and as a plinth for the telegraph tower. It was the first relay station on the first line (1794), which ran from the roof of the Louvre to Saint Catherine’s church in Lille.
22. The castle of Pierrefonds, built by Louis d’Orléans (equestrian statue) in the fifteenth century, sold as a ruin after the Revolution, rebuilt by Viollet-le-Duc in the 1860s as a fairy-tale palace. Compiègne (town hall, top left) lay on the other side of the forest, which was landscaped and signposted for Napoleon III’s empress, Eugénie. This poster (c. 1895) advertised the Northern railway company’s high-speed link from the Gare du Nord in Paris.
23. Gravity-powered transport: a schlitteur in the Vosges, on a poster for the Eastern railway company, c. 1895, by which time many schlitteurs were carrying tourists instead of logs.
24. The first railway in France, which ran from the coal port of Andrézieux on the Loire, to Lyon, via the manufacturing town of Saint-Étienne. It was opened to passengers in 1832. Horses were replaced by steam in 1844.
25. Strasbourg, capital of the ‘lost province’ of Alsace, after the defeat by Prussia in 1870. From Marie de Grandmaison’s Le Tour de France (1893), in which two brothers discover France on bicycles. Young Alsatian migrants are saying goodbye to their sisters and girlfriends: ‘They are returning to French soil . . . so as to serve one day under the colours of the valiant fatherland.’ The picture is a compendium of Alsatian emblems: the girls’ black bows, red skirts and large aprons, the tall steeple, the gabled houses and the beer-drinkers. The flower is Alsatian madder, which produced a red dye used for military uniforms.
First published 2007 by Picador
First published in paperback 2008 by Picador
This electronic edition published 2010 by Picador
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Copyright © Graham Robb 2007
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