The Discovery of France (2 page)

Part One describes the populations of France, their languages, beliefs and daily lives, their travels and discoveries, and the other creatures with whom they shared the land. In Part Two, the land is mapped, colonized by rulers and tourists, refashioned politically and physically, and turned into a modern state. The difference between the two parts, broadly speaking, is the difference between ethnology and history: the world that was always the same and the world that was always changing. I have tried to give a sense of the orrery of disparate, concurrent spheres, to show a land in which mule trains coincided with railway trains, and where witches and explorers were still gainfully employed when Gustave Eiffel was changing the skyline of Paris. Readers who are better acquainted with the direct route of political history may wish to take their bearings from the list of events at the back of the book.

This was supposed to be the historical guidebook I wanted to read when setting out to discover France, a book in which the inhabitants were not airlifted from the land for statistical processing, in which ‘France’ and ‘the French’ would mean something more than Paris and a few powerful individuals, and in which the past was not a refuge from the present but a means of understanding and enjoying it. It can be read as a social and geographical history, as a collection of tales and
tableaux
, or as a complement to a guidebook. It offers a sample itinerary, not a definitive account. Each chapter could easily have become a separate volume, but the book is already too large to justify its inclusion in the panniers. It was an adventure to write and I hope it shows how much remains to be discovered.

PART ONE

1

The Undiscovered Continent

O
NE SUMMER IN THE EARLY
1740s, on the last day of his life, a young man from Paris became the first modern cartographer to see the mountain called Le Gerbier de Jonc. This weird volcanic cone juts out of an empty landscape of pastures and ravines, blasted by a freezing wind called the
burle
. Three hundred and fifty miles south of Paris, at a point on the map diametrically opposed to the capital, it stands on the watershed that divides the Atlantic from the Mediterranean. On its western slope, at a wooden trough where animals once came to drink, the river Loire begins its six-hundred-and- forty-mile journey, flowing north then west in a wide arc through the mudflats of Touraine to the borders of Brittany and the Atlantic Ocean. Thirty miles to the east, the busy river Rhône carried passengers and cargo down to the Mediterranean ports, but it would have taken more than three days to reach it across a sparsely populated chaos of ancient lava-flows and gorges.

If the traveller had scaled the peak of phonolithic rock – so called because of the xylophonic sound the stones make as they slide away under a climber’s feet – he would have seen a magnificent panorama: to the east, the long white curtain of the Alps, from the Mont Blanc massif to the bulk of Mont Ventoux looking down over the plains of Provence; to the north, the wooded ridges of the Forez and the mists descending from the Jura to the plains beyond Lyon; to the west, the wild Cévennes, the Cantal plateau and the whole volcanic range of the upper Auvergne. It was a geometer’s dream – almost one-thirteenth of the land surface of France spread out like a map.

From the summit, he could take in at a glance several small regions
whose inhabitants barely knew of each other’s existence. To walk in any direction for a day was to become incomprehensible, for the Mézenc range to which the mountain belonged was also a watershed of languages. The people who saw the sun set behind the Gerbier de Jonc spoke one group of dialects; the people on the evening side spoke another. Forty miles to the north, the wine growers and silkweavers of the Lyonnais spoke a different language altogether, which had yet to be identified and named by scholars. Yet another language was spoken in the region the traveller had left the day before, and though his own mother tongue, French, was a dialect of that language, he would have found it hard to understand the peasants who saw him pass.

The traveller in question (his name has not survived) belonged to an expedition that was to lay the groundwork for the first complete and reliable map of France. A team of young geometers had been assembled by the astronomer Jacques Cassini, instructed in the new science of cartography and equipped with specially made portable instruments. Cassini’s father had studied the rings of Saturn and measured the size of the solar system. His map of the Moon was more precise than many maps of France, which still contained several uncharted regions. Now, for the first time, France would be revealed in all its detail as if from a great height above the Earth.

One part of the expedition had followed the river Loire as far as it could go. Roads and byways came and went with the seasons and often passed through forests where no sightings could be taken, and so the river was the only certain guide to the interior. But south of Roanne, the Loire was a truculent stream that ran through narrow gorges. In parts, it could hardly be followed, let alone used for transport. The vast plateau of the Massif Central was still the fortress it had been when the Arverni tribes held out against the Romans. Its rivers were unnavigable and its links to the rest of France practically non-existent. The mail coach from Paris stopped at Clermont. A branch service struggled on as far as Le Puy, two days to the southeast. After Le Puy, there was nothing but mule-tracks and open country. Asking for directions was a waste of time. Even a century later, few people could walk far from their place of birth without getting lost.

By the time the geometer reached the foot of the Mézenc range, he was two days from the nearest road. The only noticeable settlement for miles around was a village of black lava-stone hovels. According to one map, Les Estables should have been several miles to the south-west. In fact, it lay on a track that led towards the summit of the Mézenc. A small tower would make observations easy if the weather stayed fine, and there might be a French-speaking priest to identify remote hamlets and to give the names of woods and rivers. In any case, there was nowhere else to spend the night.

The appearance of a stranger in the landscape was a notable event. To isolated villagers, a man in foreign clothes who pointed inexplicable instruments at barren rocks was up to no good. It had been noticed that after the appearance of one of these sorcerers, life became harder. Crops withered; animals went lame or died of disease; sheep were found on hillsides, torn apart by something more savage than a wolf; and, for reasons that remained obscure, taxes increased.

Even a century later, this was still a remote and dangerous part of France. A nineteenth-century geographer recommended viewing the Mézenc region from a balloon, but ‘only if the aeronaut can remain out of range of a rifle’. In 1854, Murray’s
Handbook for Travellers in France
warned tourists and amateur geologists who left the coach at Pradelles and struck out across country in search of ‘wild and singular views’ not to expect a warm welcome. ‘There is scarcely any accommodation on this route, which can hardly be performed in a day; and the people are rude and forbidding.’ The handbook, perhaps deliberately, said nothing of Les Estables, which lay on the route, nor did it mention the only occasion on which the village earned itself a place in history – a summer’s day in the early 1740s when a young geometer on the Cassini expedition was hacked to death by the natives.

*

A
S FAR AS WE KNOW
, the villagers of Les Estables were never punished for the murder of Cassini’s geometer. To judge by similar incidents elsewhere in France, his death was the result of a collective decision taken by people who lived by their own unwritten laws. Outside interference of any kind was perceived as an evil intrusion. In many parts of France, even in the early twentieth century, a
common prayer asked for deliverance from Satan, sorcerers, rabid dogs and ‘Justice’.

The people of the Mézenc, like the inhabitants of many others towns and villages in France, would not have considered themselves ‘French’ in any case. Few would have been able to say exactly what the word meant. They knew what they had to know to survive from one season to the next. Some of them travelled south in search of work. They traded with their neighbours and leased their land to shepherds who brought huge, three-mile-long flocks of sheep to graze on their pastures in summer. But these movements were regulated by tradition and confined to ancient routes that never varied. When the writer George Sand ventured into the region in 1859, she was amazed to discover that ‘the locals are no more familiar with the area than strangers’. Her native guide was unable to tell her the name of the mountain (the Mézenc) ‘which has been staring him in the face since the day he was born’.

Revelling in the ignorance of peasants was a favourite pastime of the tiny, educated elite, before and after the Revolution of 1789. Reports of half-human savages and grovelling troglodytes lurking in thickets and holes in the ground gave the civilized minority a sense of its own sophistication. But the ignorance was mutual. Forty years after the young geometer’s death, the few people who could afford the Cassini charts or who saw them in a private collection might have imagined that the hills and gorges of the Mézenc region were no longer
terra incognita
. They could locate Les Estables near the southeastern edge of the ancient plateau where most of the major river systems rise, on a line from Bordeaux in the west to a mountain in the foothills of the Alps which the charts called ‘Mont Inaccessible’. But the little cottages and turrets that represented human settlements on the map were deceptively precise. Many of these places had only been glimpsed by the map-makers from the tops of trees and towers.

A modern historian who leaves behind the quiet towns and almost deserted main roads of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France has more to learn from George Sand’s illiterate guide than from the famous tourist herself. In many respects, the more accurate the map, the more misleading the impression. Most official, political defini
tions of the country are quite useless for describing the world of its inhabitants. For someone who sets out across the country, they serve mainly as distant landmarks, and create the comforting impression of knowing where the road is supposed to lead.

Provisionally, then, pre-Revolutionary France can be described as a nation composed of several feudal provinces or ‘
généralités
’. Some of these provinces, known as ‘
pays d’état
’, had their own regional parliaments and imposed their own taxes. Others, known as ‘
pays d’élection
’, were taxed directly by the state. Many of them have been a part of France for less than four hundred years (see Chronology, p. 359). To historians who tried to describe the entire kingdom, the chaotic effects of the division of Charlemagne’s empire in 843, and even the tribal divisions described by Julius Caesar, were still apparent in the maze of internal customs barriers and legal discrepancies.

This jumble of old fiefdoms was, however, controlled by an ambitious and increasingly powerful monarchy. Roman Gaul had looked to the Mediterranean. Now, economic and political power was firmly centred in the north. In 1682, Louis XIV moved his court to the edge of a hunting forest twelve miles south-west of Paris. The avenues of Versailles and the boulevards of Paris were gradually extended across a kingdom that seemed to educated people to be the work of divine providence. Nearly all the frontiers of France were natural: the Atlantic Ocean to the west; the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean to the south; the Alps, the Jura and the Rhine to the east; the English Channel to the north. Only the flat north-eastern frontier was open, but it was consolidated by the conquest of Artois and Flanders. Later, the annexation of Lorraine would give the kingdom its satisfying, providential shape. A guide for foreign and domestic travellers published in 1687 painted a familiar, reassuring picture of a nation ‘joined and united in all its parts and provinces’, ‘seated in the middle of Europe’, ‘almost round and like an oval’.

The seventeenth-century guidebook went on to describe France as a densely populated nation with barely an acre of uncultivated land, a high-speed transport system and an extensive network of comfortable, moderately priced hotels. This was the sort of glorious mirage that might have appeared in summer skies above the manicured forest of
Versailles. It will be our last sight for some time to come of an ordered and comprehensible country.

*

A
HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS
had passed since Louis XIV’s chief minister, Colbert, had dreamt of a road system that would unite and energize the kingdom, yet, in June 1837, when Henri Beyle – later known as Stendhal – stepped out of the public coach to stretch his legs at a tiny staging-post called Rousselan, thirteen miles from the city of Bourges, he was struck by a sense of ‘
complete isolation
’. (This was a man who had trudged across the endless Russian steppes with Napoleon’s retreating army.) Apart from the post-house itself and the towers of Bourges cathedral on the edge of the wooded plain, there were no signs of human life. A few hours later, beyond a marshy belt of cabbage fields, in Bourges itself, the only faces to be seen were those of a group of soldiers and a sleepy servant in the hotel.

The city at the geographical centre of France seemed to be quite dead. And in the town Stendhal had left that morning, La Charité-sur-Loire, there was so little traffic that everyone had known where he was going and why he was forced to stop there (a broken axle) before he had spoken to a soul. Ahead of him lay an eight-hour journey on the overnight diligence to Châteauroux, forty miles to the west. He left Bourges at 9 p.m. At midnight he was in Issoudun, a proudly somnolent town which had won a battle to maintain its economic and social stagnation by forcing the Paris–Toulouse road to be built twelve miles to the west. Napoleon had paid it the compliment of using it as a place of internal exile. Five hours later, Stendhal’s coach rattled into Châteauroux, the capital of the Indre
département
and the biggest town in the former province of Berry.