The Discovery of France (39 page)

Vauban’s angular citadel-towns – Gravelines, Maubeuge, Neuf- Brisach, Belfort, etc. – were generally loathed as much as 1960s highrise housing estates are today, but with its cheap cob houses and faceless public buildings girdled by a treeless boulevard, Napoléonville set a new standard in urban ugliness. When Napoleon returned in 1808, he discovered ‘the most repulsive spectacle of disorder and filth’. Ducks and geese were puttering about in open drains. The civic monuments consisted of a rain-soaked wooden
arc de triomphe
and a pathetic obelisk. More than a century passed before La Roche-sur- Yon reached its target population. The six main roads that were designed to allow troops to fan out in all directions were the vessels of a lifeless body until the railway arrived in 1866.

These brutal acts of colonization were important events in political and administrative history but tiny specks on the physical map of France. The most dramatic act of colonization in the west – the uprooting and flattening of the bocage – was ecological vandalism on a grand scale, but just a hint of things to come. The towering banks and interminable green tunnels of the bocage survive today only in a few parts of western France, not because of military recolonization, but because the population and its patchwork fields were commandeered and regimented by large-scale farming. By the mid-nineteenth century, the cosy but inconvenient hedgerows were giving way to a fertile desert of wheat. Winter had become a season of work. Old people sadly remembered the days when they had stayed up to talk into the night instead of going to bed at a reasonable hour.

*

E
LSEWHERE IN
F
RANCE
, the land was colonized by urban development, but at a rate that can be measured more easily in centuries than in years. Of the one hundred and forty-one towns that saw their population increase more than threefold between 1810 and 1910, forty-eight were satellites of Paris. Another thirty-seven belonged to the industrial zones of the Nord and the Pas-de-Calais, Alsace and Lorraine, and the mining and manufacturing centres of Lyon and Saint-Étienne. In 1851, almost one-tenth of the population lived in Paris and its suburbs. By 1911, the rest of the country was occupied by only four-fifths of the population.

Many towns remained within their ancient walls. The mass internal migration that drained the countryside of people was not just a rural phenomenon. Canals and railways enabled some remote settlements to thrive, but they could also suck the life from established towns. Aix-en-Provence demolished its old ramparts and brought in a supply of fresh water (a dam and a new canal were designed by François Zola, the novelist’s father). But while its neighbour Marseille doubled in size in less than half a century, spreading along the coast and into the hot, dry hills, Aix retained its size and shape like a preserved fruit. Its population, as demographers say, stagnated: twenty-four thousand in 1807; twenty-five thousand in 1920. Despite campaigning by local businessmen, Aix was ignored by the railway until 1870, when a branch line of the Gap–Avignon railway reconnected it to the Alps and the Rhône. Until 1877, its only link with Marseille was the road that passed through barren hills where the scent of thyme was neutralized by the noxious vapours of soda factories.

The most spectacular example of the railways’ power to drain the population of a town was Beaucaire on the Rhône. Since the early Middle Ages, Beaucaire’s enormous international fair (21–28 July) had been France’s main commercial link with Turkey, Greece and the Middle East. The fair was said to make as much money in a week as the port of Marseille did in a year. By the mid-nineteenth century, this capital of the commercial Mediterranean was in decline. The railway connected it to Lyon, Paris, Marseille and the silk-producing Cévennes and leached away its trade. Beaucaire suffered the paradoxical fate of the twenty other large towns whose population stagnated or shrank during the nineteenth century: eleven of those towns were
joined to the railway in the 1850s and all but three had stations before the mid-1860s. The Beaucaire fair was still held every July, but the huge encampment of traders, buyers and entertainers, who had once numbered a hundred thousand, grew noticeably smaller by the year. Soon, the fair was more picturesque than profitable. The broad, brown Rhône itself seemed to become narrower and more sluggish. In
Lou Pouèmo dóu Rose
(
The Poem of the Rhône
, 1896), the poet Mistral looked back a generation as though to ancient times and compared the grooves cut by the barges’ cables on the stone embankments to the ruts of chariot wheels on Roman roads. The fairgrounds of Beaucaire are now a long, flat riverbank of weeds and rubbish haunted by dog-walkers and bored teenagers.

Fortunately, economic development is not the only measure of urban health. Now that many large cities are surrounded by Stygian fields of concrete tedium, urban sprawl looks like an obnoxious side effect of prosperity and decline. The oceanic awfulness of northern Paris and the disheartening suburbs of Marseille exact a heavy toll from travellers who come in search of aesthetic pleasure. Yet until the mid-nineteenth century, the suburbs of Marseille were one of the great sights of southern France. The hills that form an amphitheatre behind the city were covered with tiny houses known as
bastidous
or
cabanons
. ‘Wherever one looks’, said Stendhal, ‘one sees a little house of dazzling white that stands out against the pale green of the olive trees’. The low walls that enclosed each property formed a labyrinth as large as a city. There were more than six thousand
cabanons
by the end of the seventeenth century, many of them owned (but not declared for tax) by people who had only a single, sunless room in the city. A Prussian traveller in 1738 counted more than twenty thousand, which was certainly inaccurate but a good indication of the visual effect.

It was fear that first led the Marseillais to discover and colonize their hinterland, just as their ancestors had fled from pirates to hamlet-fortresses above the coast. If a ship suspected of carrying the plague entered the harbour, the population took to the hills. But the terrible epidemic of 1720 had spread far beyond the city and the seven-foot-tall Plague Wall that was built across several miles of the Vaucluse. The main purpose of the
cabanons
was to make life
more enjoyable. This was colonization for pleasure, not for gain, and it characterized the urban development of a large part of southern and central France.

The family of Paul Cézanne and their fellow Aixois enjoyed their undeveloped countryside as the Roman founders of Aix had done. Stone cottages, studios and open-air restaurants dotted the landscape around the Montagne Sainte-Victoire. Nîmes had its conurbation of
mazets
, Sète and Béziers their belts of
baraquettes
, Hyères and Toulon their
villas
,
bastidons
and
bastidettes
. Each little house had a table and some chairs and a patch of ground with an olive, fig or almond tree and a few vines for grapes and decoration. Not much else was needed: a musical instrument, a set of
boules
and a gun for shooting birds. During the week, the white walls shone from the hillside like tiny beacons. On Saturday or Sunday, the people of Marseille would leave their stinking port – made more putrid still by the sewage that flowed from the house-covered hills – and walk to the
cabanon
with a donkey carrying food and children in its panniers and an old person on its back.

The same cheerful exodus could be seen along the Rhône, in the Lyonnais hills and in the Auvergne, where traders and shopkeepers from Clermont-Ferrand and Thiers often bought a small vineyard and a one-storey house (called a
tonne
or
tonnelle
). Here, they would celebrate the harvest and spend the profits on a feast for friends and neighbours. According to the Auvergne expert in
The French Portrayed By Themselves
(1840–42), the supposedly stingy Auvergnats were simply saving up for those few glorious days of extravagance: ‘The host is never satisfied unless, at the end of the meal, on rising from the table, the locomotive faculties of his guests are seriously impaired’.

*

F
URTHER NORTH
, the colder climate dictated a different pattern of suburban development. Weekends away from the city were a bourgeois privilege until the late nineteenth century but still a normal part of life for thousands of people. Popular journals published advice on creating a ‘
maison de campagne
’ – a term that was applied to cottages as well as to mansions: how to keep chickens, how to grow
chrysanthemums, how to stave off boredom in the countryside. The ‘Grand Départ’, the mass summer exodus of entomological proportions that creates hundred-mile traffic jams on roads from Paris, has a long history. According to one estimate in the mid-1850s, thirty thousand Parisians left the city every summer.

Before the railways, the spread of summer homes retraced prehistoric paths of settlement, along rivers with high banks and limestone caves. The once deserted banks of the Seine were filling up with villas before the Revolution. The south-facing slopes of the Loire and its tributaries were decorated with luxury cottages, equipped with kitchens and servants’ rooms to satisfy the hordes of English tourists who paid a thousand francs for six months’ rent and more if they wanted the fruit. By the end of the nineteenth century, the cliff-dwellings of the despised troglodytes were being converted into holiday homes. A cave near Tours was said to contain a suite of rooms in the Empire style with plaster mouldings and period sculptures.

In all this suburban and satellite development, there was little sign of the anxiety that British Victorians felt when they saw towns and cities staining the countryside. Anyone who had reached Paris or left it via the Champagne, the Brie, the Beauce, the Sologne or the fields of northern France had a sense of spaciousness that was not easily forgotten. It was partly because they knew what a depopulated land looked like that so many French people were alarmed at the slow growth of the population. In a land of ‘wastes’, colonization was a heartening development. When the future Napoleon I I I devised a plan for ‘the extinction of poverty’ that would have covered the land with model factories and farms, he cheerfully imagined those ‘colonies’ taking up all the available space in France and being forced to expand into Algeria and America.

Until the late nineteenth century, there are few equivalents in French literature of the sentiment expressed by William Wordsworth: ‘wheresoe’er the traveller turns his steps, / He sees the barren wilderness erased, / Or disappearing’ (1814). ‘Is then no nook of English ground secure / From rash assault?’ (1844). The best-known French elegy on the theme of changing landscape is Victor Hugo’s ‘Tristesse d’Olympio’ (1837). It refers to the gatekeeper’s cottage near Bie`vres, eight miles south-west of Paris, in which Hugo had
rented a room for his mistress. To an English poet, the changes described by Hugo would have seemed barely worth a mention. The steep and sandy road where the beloved left her footprint has been paved, and the milestone on which she sat and waited for her lover has been scuffed by cart wheels. A wall has been built around a spring. But other parts are returning to the wild: ‘Here, the forest is missing, and there, it has grown.’ ‘Our leafy chambers now are thickets.’ There is no sign that Bie`vres would one day be the home of an industrial bakery, the Burospace technology park, the ‘RAID’ division of the riot police and the Victor Hugo car park.

*

I
NDUSTRIAL COLONIZATION
, too, left relatively few traces in French art and literature. Paris was already being deindustrialized in the 1830s as workshops moved out and property speculators moved in. Until quite late in the nineteenth century, mill chimneys and plumes of smoke drifting across the sky were described as interesting novelties. Wizened tribes of factory workers were seen as hellish exceptions rather than the face of the future.

The valley of the Gier, between Lyon and Saint-É tienne, was once a ribbon of black debris dotted with flat, smoky hovels. From Andrézieux, on the other side of Saint-Étienne, horses pulled mining trucks on a railway line that, instead of cutting through the hills, followed every curve of the landscape like a mountain road. (This was France’s first railway, inaugurated in 1828 and opened to passengers in 1832.) However, as a well-travelled French tourist observed in 1858, this ‘little desolation’ was nothing compared to smog-bound Britain and the mining and manufacturing zones of Flanders and the Ardennes. There were more trees than chimneys, more grass than coal dust, and ‘the sky is perfectly visible’. Lyon itself, with its sixty thousand chattering looms and its ‘rivers of coal-smoke rising into the firmament’ (Baudelaire), was constrained by its setting, squeezed
up against the last folds of the Massif Central and the edge of the Dombes plateau, and still largely dependent on family workshops scattered through the countryside.

The great exception was the industrial north, which was practically a separate country straddling the Belgian border (the zone that was sectioned off during the Occupation and directly administered by the Third Reich). The textile towns of Lille, Tourcoing and Roubaix already had a long history of industrial development. They were operating as a single conurbation more than two centuries before they were unified in 1968 under the fetching name of CUDL (Communauté Urbaine de Lille). Thatched houses and unsurfaced roads were already rarities in Roubaix in the early eighteenth century. A dense network of canals joined these tentacular towns to the rest of Flanders, which had the agricultural resources to support a large population of factory workers, almost half of whom were Belgian.

In the rest of the country, industry followed a pattern reminiscent of today’s out-of-town
zones industrielles
. Factories were built close to the forests, rivers and coal seams that fuelled them, rather than in long-established towns and cities, which explains why some of the great industrial towns of the nineteenth century are practically unknown in any other context: Le Creusot, Decazeville, Montceaules- Mines, Rive-de-Gier, etc. On the Cassini maps of the late eighteenth century, most of these places are almost imperceptible, like the first photographs of distant comets. In Alsace, the capitals of the Upper and Lower Rhine
départements
– Strasbourg and Colmar – were quite innocent of manufacturing industry, which settled in the deep folds of the Vosges mountains and benefited from the clan traditions of its rural labour force.