The Discovery of France (5 page)

Now that another century has passed and the Villers-Cotterêts forest is a well-publicized excursion for Parisians, forty-five minutes from the Gare du Nord, its ‘prehistoric’ population will remain forever mysterious. As far as French anthropology is concerned, prehistory did not end until the Revolution. Before then, the state took no interest in the cultural and ethnic diversity of the masses. Statistics are scarce until Napoleon and unreliable even then. Sciences that made it possible to analyse populations according to physical and cultural traits evolved only when the tribes they hoped to study were turning into modern French citizens. But the troubling question was at least asked by inquisitive travellers: who were the inhabitants of France?

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I
N POLITICAL HISTORY
, the answer seems quite simple. The people of Dieppe, Boulogne, Goust and Saint-Véran all belonged to the same nation. They were answerable to provincial
parlements
and ultimately to the King. Most of them paid taxes – in money, labour (maintaining roads and bridges) and eventually, when systematic conscription was introduced at the end of the eighteenth century, in human life. They had locally appointed officials – an agent to collect taxes and a guard to police the community. But laws, especially those relating to inheritance, were widely ignored and direct contact with the central power was extremely limited. The state was perceived as a dangerous nuisance: its emissaries were soldiers who had to be fed and housed, bailiffs who seized property and lawyers who settled property disputes and took most of the proceeds. Being French was not a source of personal pride, let alone the basis of a common identity. Before the mid-nineteenth century, few people had seen a map of France and few had heard of Charlemagne and Joan of Arc. France was effectively a land of foreigners. According to a peasant novelist from the Bourbonnais, this was just as true in the 1840s as it was before the Revolution:

The great cathedrals of France and their numberless flock of parish churches might appear to represent a more powerful common bond. Almost 98 per cent of the population was Catholic. In fact, religious practice varied wildly. (This will become quite obvious later on.) Heavenly beings were no more cosmopolitan than their worshippers. The graven saint or Virgin Mary of one village was not considered to be the same as the saint or the Virgin down the road. Beliefs and practices centred on prehistoric stones and magic wells bore only the faintest resemblance to Christianity. The local priest might be useful as a literate man, but as a religious authority he had to prove his worth in competition with healers, fortune-tellers, exorcists and people who could apparently change the weather and resuscitate dead children. Morality and religious feeling were independent of Church dogma. The fact that the Church retained the right to impose taxes until the Revolution was of far greater significance to most people than its ineffectual ban on birth-control.

The smaller divisions of the kingdom paint a different picture of the population that turns out, however, to be just as unreliable. For a long time, the provinces of France were widely thought to be the key to understanding the national identity. The idea was that these historical, political divisions corresponded to certain human traits, like the segments of a phrenologist’s head.

There are some good examples of this geo-personal approach in the travel accounts of François Marlin, a Cherbourg merchant who treated the naval-supplies business as an excuse to explore his native land and covered more than twenty thousand miles between 1775 and 1807: ‘The people of Périgord are lively, alert and sensible. The people of Limousin are more sluggish and constricted in their movements.’ Commercial travellers supping at the tavern in Auch could easily be told apart like different breeds of dog:

However, as Marlin discovered, even if the assumptions were flattering, most people refused to be identified with such large areas. They belonged to a town, a suburb, a village or a family, not to a nation or a province. The common cultural heritage of certain regions was more obvious to outsiders than to the people themselves. Brittany would have to be subdivided several times before an area could be found that meant something to the people who lived there. Bretons in the east spoke a dialect of French called Gallo or Gallot; Bretons in the west spoke various forms of Breton. The two groups almost never intermarried. In the west, the people of Armor (‘the Land by the Sea’) had little to do with the people of Argoat (‘the Land of Forests’). And in Armor alone, there were sub-populations so diverse and antagonistic that they were assumed by various writers to have their origins far beyond the granite coast, in Semitic tribes, in ancient Greece or Phoenicia, in Persia, Mongolia, China or Tibet.

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S
INCE
F
RANCE HAD BEEN
pieced together by treaties and conquests, and since two-thirds of the territory had been French for less than three hundred and fifty years, it is not surprising that there was no deep-rooted sense of national identity. Before the Revolution, the name ‘France’ was often reserved for the small mushroom-shaped province centred on Paris. In Gascony and Provence, anyone from the north was a ‘Franchiman’ or a ‘Franciot’. Neither term was registered by the official dictionary of the Académie Française. However, there was little sense of regional identity either. The Breton, Catalan, Flemish and Provençal populations of France developed their political identities only much later, in reaction to the national
identity that was imposed on them. Only the Basques seem to have been united against the outside world, but the figures of hate in their public
masquerades
were not Frenchmen or Spaniards but gypsies, tinkers, doctors and lawyers. Inter-regional games of pelota aroused greater passions than the victories and defeats of Napoleon.

The propaganda of French national unity has been broadcast continuously since the Revolution, and it takes a while to notice that the tribal divisions of France were almost totally unrelated to administrative boundaries. There was no obvious reason why these people should have formed a single nation. As Hervé Le Bras and Emmanuel Todd wrote in 1981, referring to the extreme variety of family structures in France, ‘from an anthropological point of view, France ought not to exist’. Ethnically, its existence was just as unlikely. The Celtic and Germanic tribes who invaded ancient Gaul and the Frankish tribes who attacked the ailing Roman province had almost as many different origins as the population of modern France. The only coherent, indigenous group that a historically sound National Front party could claim to represent would be the very first wandering band of pre-human primates that occupied this section of the Western European isthmus.

The Cherbourg merchant, François Marlin, eventually found that the best answer to the question, ‘Who are the inhabitants of France?’ was no answer at all. He wanted his travel accounts to be an antidote to all the useless guidebooks written by armchair plagiarists and so tried simply to observe the physical differences that mirrored the changing landscape. If his observations were combined with those of other travellers, the result would be an unpublishable map of France divided into zones of ugliness and beauty. Basque women were ‘all clean and pretty’. ‘All the cripples, one-eyed people and hunchbacks seem to have been shut up in Orléans.’ ‘Pretty women are rare in France, and especially here in the Auvergne; but one does see a lot of robust women.’ ‘The most beautiful eyes in the provinces can be found in Brest, but the mouths are less attractive: the sea-air and a great deal of neglect in that department soon tarnish the enamel of the teeth.’

This would hardly satisfy a historical anthropologist, and it gives only the vaguest idea of the social geography of France. No one
could tell whether these physical differences were signs of ancient ancestry or simply an effect of the trades people practised and the food they ate. But at least Marlin had seen the population (or the part of the population that lived near a road) with his own eyes:

In Marlin’s mind, this was the kind of eye-witness description that could usefully be kept in the leather pockets of the diligence. The other guides, with their bogus erudition, could be left under the flapping canvas on top of the coach to be soaked by the rain and blown away by the wind.

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A
N EXPEDITION INTO
tribal France could begin almost anywhere and at almost any time. A hilltop in the Aveyron, for instance, where the limestone plateaux of the Causses turn into a crumpled map of rocks and gorges. The year is 1884. The priest of Montclar has found an exciting diversion from the monotony of life in a small town. His telescope is trained on a battlefield in the valley below. An army of men, women and children, wielding cudgels and lugging baskets of stones, is advancing on the village of Roquecezière. But scouts have been posted. Another army has already emerged from the village and is preparing to defend its territory.

On the bare rock that towers above the village, turning its back to the battle, is a colossal cast-iron statue of the Virgin Mary. The statue has been funded by public subscription – something of a miracle in this impoverished region – and has recently been placed on the rock to commemorate a successful mission.

Incensed to see the sacred effigy pointing its bottom at their village, the invaders have come to turn it around. The battle rages for hours. Several people are seriously injured. At last, the Roquecezièrain lines are breached and the statue is worked around to face the other village. To prevent a full-scale war, the Church authorities find a compromise. The Virgin is rotated ninety degrees, supposedly so
that each village can see half of her face. However, she now looks east-north-east, towards Saint-Crépin, which contributed more than half the cost of the statue, and still has her back turned to the little clutch of houses at her foot.

The Battle of Roquecezière, like thousands of other tiny conflicts, is not mentioned in any history of France. Village wars had no perceptible effect on national security and their causes were often ancient and obscure. Yet they were a normal part of life for many people well into the nineteenth century. A ‘very fat file’ in the archives of the Lot
département
describes village brawls between 1816 and 1847: ‘bloody scenes, combats, disorders, serious wounds, treaties of peace and rumours of war’. Villagers settled their differences in pitched battles rather than waste their time and money in court. Half-forgotten insults and territorial disputes culminated in raids on neighbouring villages to steal the corn or to carry off the church bells. Sometimes, champions were appointed and their battles entered local legend. Usually, a single battle was not enough. The Limousin villages of Lavignac, Flavignac and Texon were at war for more than forty years. Texon ceased to exist as a
commune
in 1806, but this bureaucratic technicality did not prevent it from behaving as an independent state.

Caesar’s famous description of Gaul as a country ‘divided into three parts’ must have struck many travellers as a breezy oversimplification. Caesar, however, went on to observe that Gaul was also subdivided into innumerable tiny regions: ‘Not only every tribe, canton, and subdivision of a canton, but almost every family is divided into rival factions.’ The basic division was the
pagus
, the area controlled by a tribe. Two thousand years after the conquest of Gaul, the
pays
(pronounced
pay-ee
) was still a recognizable reality. The word
pays
– usually translated as ‘country’ – referred, not to the abstract nation, but to the tangible, ancestral region that people thought of as their home. A
pays
was the area in which everything was familiar: the sound of the human voice, the orchestra of birds and insects, the choreography of winds and the mysterious configurations of trees, rocks and magic wells.

To someone with little experience of the world, the
pays
could be measured in fields and furrows. To a person far from home, it might
be a whole province. The term has since acquired a more precise and picturesque meaning. It was revived in the 1960s to promote local development and tourism: ‘Pays de la Loire’, ‘Pays de Caux’, ‘Pays de Bray’, etc. These geographical areas are larger versions of the ‘Petites Régions Agricoles’ which were devised in 1956 to serve as a basis for agricultural statistics. The National Institute of Statistics currently lists 712 of them. The Brie, for instance, is divided into ‘wooded’, ‘central’, ‘Champagne’ (three zones, distinguished by postcode), ‘eastern’, ‘French’ (two zones) and ‘humid’. The part of Champagne once known as ‘pouilleuse’ (flea-bitten or beggarly) no longer officially exists.

This was the puzzle of micro-provinces that General de Gaulle had in mind when he asked, ‘How can one be expected to govern a country that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?’ This famous phrase, now usually inflated to ‘one cheese for every day of the year’, has become part of an unofficial catechism of national pride. It is often recited to foreign visitors, even in regions that are dominated by a single, economically buoyant cheese. But it was a puzzle that any modern-day marketing-board official could easily solve. In earlier days, no one could have put a figure on the
pays
of France. Even in 1937, when publishing a very long list of
pays
in his nine-volume
Manual of Contemporary French Folklore
, Arnold van Gennep warned that the list was incomplete because ‘some
pays
are still unknown’. Throughout the nineteenth century, functionaries at every level complained of this fragmentation of the territory with no trace of irony. The
pays
rather than the state was the fatherland of the benighted peasant.